Futuríveis

Speaking at the CaT: Creativity and Technology conference today, Derek Gottfrid, senior software architect and product technologist at The New York Times, said the company has quit calling online readers 'readers,' instead referring to them as users. The conference is hosted by Advertising Age and Creativity.'When we think traditionally about creation [at The New York Times] it was limited to people within the Times,' he said. 'We created for readers ... [for whom] it was a passive experience. But as we moved online, we wanted to move people from readers to users.'To do so, the company has opened up its application programming interfaces, which Mr. Gottfrid described for the layperson as 'programmer building blocks.' The Times has taken content and data -- both internally created material, such as movie reviews and best-seller lists, and external data, such as campaign-finance and legislative information -- and opened up the APIs so that outside developers can create tools for its consumers.