College news junkies can find a little something extra on the Web from mtvU, the music television network’s college channel: a “virtual library” of information tied to any word in a news article.
Perhaps it would be better to call it a virtual dictionary. The channel has an online network of about 500 college newspapers, and readers can click on any word in any article to get a pop-up reference window. The information in the pop-up comes from Answers.com, which boasts entries on four million topics, including detailed explanations of concepts in politics, geography, and science.
Most of what readers will see, however, is a dictionary definition of one clicked-on word. If you want broader or deeper context for, say, the phrase “earth-friendly,” you’ll only get definitions for “earth” or “friendly.”
Though mtvU says the technology will work on entire phrases like this one, information on more than one word at a time turned out to be pretty elusive in a few dozen test clicks. And that’s too bad, because students probably already know the meaning of the word “friendly.” —Josh Fischman
