We’re pretty excited about having Chris Thorpe do the media keynote for mesh 2010. Chris comes to us from The Guardian, one of Britain’s leading newspapers, where he is the Developer Advocate in charge of the paper’s Open Platform. This puts him at the forefront of one of the most fascinating frontiers in the media industry: namely, the transformation of traditional media entities such as newspapers into digital-information services that distribute their content in a variety of different ways online. And sometimes that involves experimenting too: an offhand remark during a lunch presentation by Clay Shirky, for example, recently led to the creation of a “ChatRoulette for news” called Guardian Roulette.
The Guardian’s Open Platform is based on an open API (i.e, application programming interface) similar to that provided by Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies provide, which allows developers and programmers to use The Guardian’s content in a variety of ways, and build it into third-party services at no cost. The New York Times also has an open API, but it only provides access to a small part of the text in each story, whereas The Guardian’s provides the full text of every story.
In a blog post last year, British MP Tom Watson wrote:
I’m not bowled over much these days. But Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid. Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up. (British MP Tom Watson)
Chris gave a presentation last year at the Future of Web Apps conference, which is embedded below, in which he talked about how The Guardian’s use of an open platform is “building the stacks of a mutualised newspaper.”
There’s also an interview with Chris here:
Interview with Chris Thorpe (The Guardian) from Publishr on Vimeo.
