One of the most intriguing things about the web is spotting connections between disparate sources. Every once in a while, I will find a subject or idea crop up in a bunch of different places in an oddly organic way. This very phenomenon happened a few weeks ago when I spotted a few stories discussing the problems of web aggregators. Both stories made a lot of good points that I wanted to explore and expand since I think they speak to larger trends in the media.
The first story was a blog post by Noah Brier linking to an article by Matt Thompson on Snarkmarket. Matt’s post describes coming to grips with the information overload that eventually comes from using an aggregator like Google Reader. Noah was quick to highlight the key point in Matt’s piece, “Here’s what I’ve come to realize about myself: I fully accept that there’s not a particular link in that ridiculous heap that will change my life. It’s been a while since I worried about missing a single killer post or app or XKCD or whatever; if it’s valuable enough, it’ll find me, I got it.” Like Matt I have slowly come around to accepting the inconsequential nature of missing something online. I also fully agree that if something is important enough it will eventually find you. Matt later proposes the concept of a function labelled “Compress into diamonds”, that would effectively data mine your aggregator to pick the key stories and posts.
Confronted with a similar overload of information is Grant McCracken, who only five days later also wrote about his aggregator woes. Grant rightly points out that this information overload isn’t really the fault of the aggregators but of the users themselves, or as he dubs them “data gluttons”. Hungry for the best news and information we seek to cover every corner of the web, soon finding ourselves up to our necks in data. Grant explains his own coping mechanism is to transform from a “data glutton” to a “data pauper”, choosing to turn off the aggregator. Like Matt, Grant makes some proposals for new features, but goes when step further by explaining, ‘The upshot of this conversation for me was that a market in the information space is emerging.’ I couldn’t agree more and this is where I wanted to expand the conversation by discussing some more.
After reading these two articles and seeing their link, I couldn’t help but draw a line to the plight of the newspaper industry. Grant perhaps led me a little when he points out, “We just don’t want to pay for the editing now made available to us by the market place. Again, the New York Times is a grand institution, but it doesn’t capture or treat the things I need to know about in the ways I need to know about them.” Before the web we relied on newspapers, magazines and other forms of media for our information. These outlets were each able to aggregate information pretty well and provide a fairly good view of what was important for most people. However the web both exposed and created so much more information. The few number of media outlets pre-web was manageable enough that there was little fear of missing out on something. With a growing number of web outlets combined with existing media, the playing field has grown beyond anyone’s management or control. Until now we have been using the paradigms of the past to try and keep up, but in my experience and that of others, this isn’t working.
Matt’s concept of “Compress into diamonds” comes close to what I think is needed right now, but as Grant alludes to, this problem has room for plenty more than one solution. I think one of the key considerations for this is the social dimension of information. While it is a good start to let Google work its algorithmic magic, information is social and needs to be treated as such. I want to know the reading trends of similar users, what my friends are looking at, what influential people are looking at online and how these are all connected. I have a feeling that Facebook is trying to figure some of this out (as I alluded to in my previous post Facebook Connect & Interaction Utility), but they aren’t quite there. These systems are available online in various forms from twitter to del.icio.us, but they have yet to be connected in ways that free up time and attention rather than demand more. In the end this is really what we want. It isn’t about editing and curating information for the sake of it, but doing it in a meaningful way to enrich our experiences online and off.
Photo by Stefano Corso
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