VOEvent "Breaking News"?

[Joshua Bloom]

I suppose the biggest hurdle is not the technology but the authority factor. CNN is the most trusted name in news. Or so it goes. So if they spam you, you might not like what they say but there's implicit trust in what they say matters to some. Accumulating authority on interesting Events will take considerable time. There is the chance that trusted names/groups might have a pretty lousy stream of transients. Likewise, more obscure group could have a bunch of golden events but not be hooked up the VOEventNet. 

My bet is that by having a "third party" aggregator that isn't in the transients discovery business, and thus would have not much of a bias in promulgating certain events, is the way forward. NOAO (the most trust trusted name in optical photons) seems like a good place of issuance.

Josh

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Joshua Bloom
Associate Professor
UC Berkeley, Astronomy
510-643-4621 (Lab)
510-643-3839 (Office)
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On Jan 30, 2010, at 9:00 AM, Rob Seaman wrote:

> Somehow or other I receive CNN breaking news items via email.  They keep the flux of messages low enough that it is rarely annoying.  The content of such a message is often a single declarative sentence, eg, "Senator Blowhard (AZ, Whig) has been convicted of accepting bribes in Federal District Court."
> 
> This is often the first I hear of certain types of stories.  Or the only time I hear of others - Serena Williams just won the Australian Open, for example.  The implication isn't that everybody cares passionately, but that many people will.
> 
> Is there a category of VOEvents that corresponds to this?  It could be implemented as a moderated "breaking news" VOEventStream.  This would complement a "Celestial Transient Alert of the Day", like the astronomy picture of the day, tending to occur at the other end of the event workflow after follow-up observations, classification and characterization.
> 
> Such messages likely share certain characteristics:  human readability, brevity, a reference linking to "the rest of the story" (cf Paul Harvey), maybe a picture - as well as that little extra VOEvent DNA to permit such alerts to connect to autonomous follow-up and VOEvent-enabled tools.
> 
> By contrast we have focused a lot of attention on the paradigm of user-specific filtering to separate KBO people from SNe people from GRB people.  Breaking News would be one way to address the factors bringing us together into a single community, while reaching out to the public (astronomy's ultimate customers) - and to "space domain" astronomers with a more static worldview.
> 
> Rob
>