Robert Cringely offers some interesting curmudgeoning on the recent buzz around a study that showed a longer lifetime of news articles on the web than in print.  In his words: "this news stickiness is bad, very bad, because it means we read less and ultimately learn less than we did in the past."

Here's a counter argument: the longevity of news articles is greater on the web because the story gets extended, with opinion, related points, and admittedly plenty of effects due to a less consolidated delivery to audiences.

We're still a fair way from a world where the blogosphere's consumption and "digging" of news articles produces consistent additional value over the original story, but we've known how to get there for a long time.  Conklin's work, from 20 years ago, paved the way.  I and some fellow hypertextually oriented colleagues intersected this vision with the current world of the web at JoDI.  We still need better ways to faciliate sense-making across distributed blog posts and comments, but we've come a long way from the central node oriented blogosphere of the 90s.  Techmeme's isolation of related posts is a great step.

Continuing my trend of including eye-candy, here's a bit from the historical work I'm referencing:

Figure 1: The graphical IBIS (gIBIS) notation [Conklin-1988] and an example, showing how Issues, Positions and Arguments are combined to cumulatively build graphical argument spaces.

From Buckingham Shum, S. (1998). Negotiating the Construction of Organisational Memories. In U.M. Borghoff and R. Pareschi (Ed.), Information Technology for Knowledge Management (pp. 55-78). Berlin: Springer. (First published as: Negotiating the Construction and Reconstruction of Organisational Memories. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 3 (8), 1997, pp. 899-928 [http://www.iicm.edu/jucs_3_8)