Another Wrestling Match With New Content
Posted on August 16, 2006
Filed Under What's New, Content Co-Creation |
I’ve been corresponding with Ted Shelton CEO of personalbee, a place where my blog appears.
Ted’s philosophy for personalbee is is to bring some coherence to the media world and how we get to know things. It goes like this.
There’s something in the language people use to discuss issues that a computer can extract and use to identify the buzz, the interests and obsessions people bring to their lives. That sounds fair enough to me. A good starting point for a future media universe. Build it around people’s interests.
Ted says there’s something in human behaviour and how they seek information that leads to a kind of eco-system of knowledge. Just like birds, animals and the rest can be said to be an eco-system so we can describe the way people think and share information, views and news, as a kind of ecology. That too is a reasonable observation.
Give people the tools to aggregate information (from feeds for example) and a new media/knowledge ecology will evolve.
Personalbee provides the tools and Ted is backing it to evolve the eco-system and he’s inviting people to join in and set up their own mini-knowledge communities.
Here are some arguments against, at least arguments that might refine the service.
Right now personalbee is collating what I’d regard as conventional sources of wisdom - techcrunch, mashable, scobeliser, paidcontent. Nothing wrong with any of these sources but there is a commonality there and they do appear in plenty of other places around the web.
Second, what’s good in newspapers is that they put a limit on information. Ted’s doing that - his is one of the few web worlds that don’t just proliferate information. But already it’s growing big and that means identifying what you want becomes hard.
Personalbee is like a cross between old newspaper thinking (use humans to select information) and web 2.0 thinking, collate, collate, collate.
Why I no longer go to any particular newspaper though is that none has the personality I’m looking for or can identify with. No website has it either. Nobody is doing what the old media barons did - taking a point of view and speaking up for the world.
Not that I’m arguing for the return of an autocratic media world. Can the collate function of algorithms though provide the personality I’m looking for?
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2 Responses to “Another Wrestling Match With New Content”
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Two thoughts to add to what you wrote (other than the spelling of my last name — Shelton…):
We don’t gather “conventional” sources if that isn’t what the beekeeper wants. We gather whatever sources are desired by the person creating the Bee - that is, by the media baron…
Which leads to the second point. The Personal Bee is a tool that allows anyone to become the media baron you are looking for — to take a point of view and speak for the world (at least on the chosen topic) — choosing the voices (sources, feeds) and the articles that will be presented.
Here is an example of a Bee that does NOT contain the conventional sources:
http://www.personalbee.com/bee_reader.php?grpno=266
And it’s a great example. This is material that doesn’t see much mainstream coverage but it’s buzzy and important.
My point remains though new media companies are trying to remain morally neutral, without a point of view. You could say well, linotype never needed a point of view, they just made print presses. How do you get a strong point of view on personalbee?