Personalized News & Technorati
The November 2003 issue of Discover has an article asking what happens when people pick their own news stories versus an editor selecting the content for a news organization. The author focuses on the way Technorati, a blog search engine and discovery tool, ranks its news stories based on what news bloggers write about. The author’s approach indicates that a people without an editorial background won’t do as good of a job as an editor selecting stories for them. The author seems a little surprised at what news gets ranked high by bloggers.
Two notable quotes:
“On the whole, Technorati-and the legions of bloggers it tracks-have a remarkable knack for picking up on stories that make great cocktail party conversation.”
“No, Technorati’s Breaking News isn’t a replacement for the traditional front pages or nightly news broadcasts. But neither does it create the narrowing perspective of the Daily Me.”
When I first began reading the article, I thought the author was going to focus on individuals personalizing their own news content and examining whether editors do a better job than someone selecting her own content. People do not necessarily pay attention to all the news items that are available to them. Just because an editor selects certain stories for the front page of a Web site doesn’t mean everyone will read them. I usually don’t read two sections of the daily newspaper I subscribe to because I’m not interested in those news stories. I also frequently turn the news off after watching the weather report because none of the following stories interest me. I even turn the radio’s news off during certain stories–usually local theatre reviews–because I’m not interested. Isn’t that just like setting up a “my” page?
As a librarian, I’m bothered by the idea that selective dissemination of information (SDI) might be a bad thing. A big part of my job is letting people know about news articles that are relevant to their work. Aren’t I just a flesh-and-blood “my” page for those people? Am I causing them to miss something by giving them selected articles from a publication instead of handing them the entire work?
November 10th, 2003 at 3:17 pm
you wrote: “Am I causing them to miss something by giving them selected articles from a publication instead of handing them the entire work”? … (nice link, by the way ..)
i reply: not at all… information overload is a proverbial problem ( you probably saw the “How Much Information” study and how much on average we would need to consume to keep up…) News aggregators can only do so much, and in many ways they compound the problem – there’s so many sources…Filtering these things, taking your users to what might be immediately relevant, is an excellent service. We all filter … That’s why librarians always check more than one source …. Keep up the good work.