People powered news - Done
According to Alan Gray at News Blaze the battle for the People Powered news business (ala Digg) is over. There are 5 top players and many of the rest are dead or dieing.
I'm not sure I agree or disagree with the statement. I do know, however, that aggregating a collective picture of popularity for news (whether it is done by votes like Digg, or by incoming links and meme tracking like tailrank and techmeme) is only part of the solution. An import part, but not the whole picture.
While we all want to know what the 'next big thing' is (or in Digg's case what the 'current big thing is - at least for the next 5 minutes'), we also want to know what's of most interest to the most important person of all - ourselves.
As I said in my previous post - and many times before - there is "What's popular", and then there is "What's Personally Relevant". I think they are both important problems to tackle however in the rush to create 'me too' services, "What's Personally Relevant" is being overlooked.
With Publishing 2.0 creating massive amounts of content about every imaginable topic - from my local golf club to world wide industry trends, we need to find a way to generate a view of world-wide content that is specifically tailored to our tastes and needs.
I'd like to see an RSS feed of items that I care about. Personally. Me. Not everyone else... not my social network... me.
Obviously Touchstone is making great strides in this direction. We even (optionally) syndicate the results back out to your very own RSS feed. We call it Pebbles. It's coming in the next build of Touchstone.
I'm not sure I agree or disagree with the statement. I do know, however, that aggregating a collective picture of popularity for news (whether it is done by votes like Digg, or by incoming links and meme tracking like tailrank and techmeme) is only part of the solution. An import part, but not the whole picture.
While we all want to know what the 'next big thing' is (or in Digg's case what the 'current big thing is - at least for the next 5 minutes'), we also want to know what's of most interest to the most important person of all - ourselves.
As I said in my previous post - and many times before - there is "What's popular", and then there is "What's Personally Relevant". I think they are both important problems to tackle however in the rush to create 'me too' services, "What's Personally Relevant" is being overlooked.
With Publishing 2.0 creating massive amounts of content about every imaginable topic - from my local golf club to world wide industry trends, we need to find a way to generate a view of world-wide content that is specifically tailored to our tastes and needs.
I'd like to see an RSS feed of items that I care about. Personally. Me. Not everyone else... not my social network... me.
Obviously Touchstone is making great strides in this direction. We even (optionally) syndicate the results back out to your very own RSS feed. We call it Pebbles. It's coming in the next build of Touchstone.
2 Comments:
I think Findory.com has an interesting way of personalization. It tracks your clicks on news and blog entries and future recommended links are based on your behavior (and people behaving similar to you).
Hi Walter,
I think Findory is a great example of what I'm talking about. The only thing I'd say though is that Findory (at least for now) only allows you to view personally relevant mainstream-news.
You can't quite have it include content that might come from very specific blogs that matter to you.
That's not to say they wont - but I do like the idea that my personal world view would include a combination of very personal information (like Torrent download status or corporate intranet information etc), 'life-level' content (like schools and social clubs) and 'mainstream' content which is the stuff that Findory includes at the moment.
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