Rss. Newspaper. Curating. GoogleWave. Newbiznews. Readness: A Last.fm for News. Now why hasn’t this been done before? Over the last week or so I’ve been testing a new social news service called Readness. The site installs a browser plugin that tracks (or scrobbles) what you’re reading online and instantly delivers high quality recommendations based on what you and your friends read. If you’re anything like me, you’re already excited and wondering why this hasn’t been done before. The app, built the UK based developer of popular iPhone newsreader Broadersheet, is currently in stealth mode so expect hiccups, but for a preview release it’s already slotted neatly into my list of favorite tools (must make a list of them one day).
So how does it really work. Once you’ve signed up (via Facebook) and installed the plugin (Chrome only at the moment), it will scrobble all the articles you read from a select white list of publishers. The real magic happens once you visit Readness.com again after some time browsing your favorite news sources. There’s no shortage of ideas for where Readness could go. Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering And Newsradars - The Complete Guide Part 1: Why We Need It. The time it takes to follow and go through multiple web sites and blogs takes tangible time, and since most sources publish or give coverage to more than one topic, one gets to browse and scan through lots of useless content just for the sake of finding what is relevant to his specific interest. Even in the case of power-users utilizing RSS feed readers, aggregators and filters, the amount of junk we have to sift through daily is nothing but impressive, so much so, that those who have enough time and skills to pick the gems from that ocean of tweets, social media posts and blog posts, enjoy a fast increasing reputation and visibility online.
Photo credit: dsharpie and franckreporter mashed up by Robin Good "What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don't have to pay attention to everything, but you don't miss the stuff you care about... "Ev Williams at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabsvia Stowe Boyd's blog The Problem That is the the essence. Is that sustainable? Why? Quote and Comment. iTunes models for news? What publishers can learn from mflow.
An iTunes model for news may be a phantom, but publishers wanting to make money from content online can still learn from the experiences of the music sector. The latest launch in this area is the music sharing-and-buying startup mflow – a fantastic model which I think can offer a lot of ideas to publishers. Here’s how it works: You follow other people and see what music they’re sharing (‘flowing’). You also share (‘flow’) music yourself to your followers, adding comments.If you own a track and share it, the first time a follower listens they can hear the whole thing. After that, they can only hear a 30 second sample.Here’s the USP: if someone buys a track you’ve ‘flowed’, you get a 20% commission to spend on music yourself. What’s interesting Music consumption is highly social and mflow recognises this. What publishers could learn from this: News consumption is highly social.
Any other ideas? Like this: Like Loading... Economie. News is a river is a blog… | Everything is Miscellaneous. Online - E-Media Tidbits. Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’ Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup – as well as many established Internet companies and publishers – are desperately trying to crack. A newly-founded Palo Alto startup called Hawthorne Labs is one of them. Today, the company released their first application, dubbed APOLLO, for the iPad (iTunes link – screenshots and video below). Their lofty ambition is to become the number one daily destination of top personalized news content from around the Web, build a genuine Newspaper of the Future™, and thus “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry”. Apollo is quite similar to Pandora in that it uses an algorithm (using factors such as time spent on articles, sources favorited, articles liked/not-liked as well as social elements like Twitter and Facebook mentions and similar peoples’ tastes etc.) to help users discover the best content for them in a variety of categories (Top News, Business, Tech, Sports and so on).
Crucial reading on the evolution of news, as it stands today – Invisible Inkling. I feel like this summer has been sort of a rolling watershed moment in the Present of News, if not necessarily the Future of it. (Yes, yes, the lowercase present is always becoming the lowercase future, but I’m talking about the supposed collective vision for the Future of News that, well, usually gets held up as a straw man as if every proponent of online news tools for communication believes the same thing.) There are a lot of ongoing battles right now, if I can call them that, over things like paywalls and copyright. These are more than kerfuffles here, folks; we’re talking about the future business model paths for some pretty large chunks of the mainstream media at this point, for better or worse.
So, in an effort to pull together some of what I think would be the most important footnotes in the Summer 2009 chapter of the book someone surely must be writing at this point, here are some recent favorites: What Would Fair Use Look Like in an Online Era? And you? A Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection « Pursuing the Complete Community Connection. This is a vision for transformation of our media company and of media companies in general. A vision like this needs lots of detail and I’ll provide plenty of that in related posts. But most important, it needs a simple proposition — how consumers and business customers will see us: For consumers, we will be their essential connection to community life — news, information, commerce, social life. Like many Internet users turn first to Google, whatever their need, we want Eastern Iowans to turn first to Gazette Communications, whatever their need.
For businesses, we will be their essential connection to customers, often making the sale and collecting the money. We will become the Complete Community Connection. Our company will provide an interactive, well-organized, easily searched, ever-growing, always updated wealth of community news, information and opportunities on multiple platforms. News remains essential to our mission and our identity, but cannot limit our vision. Like this: