Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
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Incidentally, this is why I read news.YC also, it's fascinating to read what smart people have to say after they have been exposed to the same stimulus like you. With traditional media, this discussion was in the pubs or the workplace the day after.
Traditional media is not necessarily dying because the stories are not interesting, well that's the symptom, but the cause is maybe that the group is not one that you feel you belong to anymore, and the content is taylored to the mean of that group anyway.
A word to aspiring news startups: journalism is old and sophisticated - try learning something about it instead of pretending it is a data clustering or personalization problem.
Perhaps, but most of the reason for the success of traditional tv, radio, and newspapers is that, until the last five years or so, there weren't really any viable alternatives. Only recently has content distribution become a non-issue; previously, it was a bottleneck.
I'm usually on the "cutting edge" when it comes to things online, new technology, apps, and so forth, but no "personalized news" service has ever stuck with me. It "feels" wrong and I can't put my finger on why. I prefer to just subscribe to a handful of trusted sources and let a human (or many humans, in the case of HN or Reddit) curate what I'll be seeing.
I believe, however, that better querying is going to become a big deal and could become a good way to have "personalized" news but without all of the AI and guessing games that seem to take place with clever new personalized news services.
And whilst the current solutions (eg: everyone sees the same content on BBC) aren't perfect they're good enough and this is a tough product to justify to users.
Additionally, changing habits is really really hard. People habitually load nytimes.com every lunch time to see what is happening in the world - and you expect to shift that habit - for a marginal improvement in life? The brand loyalty with publications is ridiculously strong, not only do I trust The Financial Times, I hate the alternatives. "You just called me a Daily Mail reader? I am literally offended."
A lot of people insist that RSS Readers are too complex, and juggling multiple sources without an RSS Reader is too hard. That's true, but in reality most people don't care. If you think about it - people use different destinations for just about everything, so it's tough to imagine why this should be consolidated.
Another small problem with this market is that algorithm aggregators become over tuned. You read six articles about BP and suddenly your newspaper is less of the brilliant news paper and more of a BP quarterly earnings report. So then you down vote a few articles and then you miss the next BP scandal a few months later.
Also with this product - I'm expected to "thumb up" interesting news articles, this hurts emotionally if I'm "thumb up-ing" a news article about six 21 year old american soldiers being limbless in Iraq. "Show me more like this?" I think not.
I think there is significant value in topic communities and curation, an example of this is the Reddit Subreddits, if you want to stay informed in Venture Capital, in Golf, or in MotoGP it's quite hard to scratch that itch and always find cool new content (eg: a few articles a day)
Ask yourself: How would you find up to date content about Fashion? Or Coeliac Disease? Or Graphic Design.
I think news needs a fundamental shift towards social consumption, I think Google Reader, Twitter and Facebook have incrementally shifted this towards a social experience - which is exactly what news is about, it isn't about "being informed" per se, it's about "being informed amongst your friends" people want to look like they are in tap with what is happening in the world, and do not like having to ask their friends what they missed.
1) subscribe to a feed you like (so you like this web page? click the rss button in the url bar.)
2) Read their feeds, which basically consists of just scrolling down a page full of articles.
Sure, there are lots of other things you can do with RSS, but when it comes down to it, the system is incredibly simple. Far simpler than visiting a every site to find updated articles...
1. I have maybe 20 or so sites I like to follow. 2. Adding all these into Google reader takes me 20-25 minutes or so. It's annoying. 3. Once I add them in, Google reader starts filling itself up with all their posts. 4. Suddenly I'm faced with two things:
a. A rapidly growing number of unread posts I'm supposed to deal with.
b. A generic, plain, boring interface in which Gizmodo articles, Slate articles, NYTimes articles....all look exactly the same, as if they'd been published by...Google.
I can't stand RSS readers.
However, the most important reason why I like using rss is for blogs that I stumble across that I like, but that I don't have the memory to keep all the urls in my head, or the time to spend flipping through all of them to see if they've updated. Let me give you an example: I subscribed a few months ago to a blog that was effectively dead. The author hadn't posted for about a year. Just yesterday in my blog feed, I saw that he had made a new post. I would have completely missed his post if not for the fact that I had his feed in my rss reader.
I completely understand your point about google stripping the formatting out of posts, and it annoys me sometimes too, but for the most part I tend to value content over nice css.
EDIT: I'd like to head off any comments I get about the "memorizing urls" comment I made. I find myself on a lot of different computers, and "bookmarking" a site through adding its rss feed to google reader is a lot easier for me than it is to deal with syncing bookmarks. Not to mention that my bookmarks have become an untamed jungle over time. I only venture into them when I am not looking for anything in particular. For most everything I use the autocompletion on the url bar.
I've often felt that something like the "River of News"[1] notion that Dave Winer likes to talk about would work really well, I wonder if there are any public services that behave in that manner.
The basic idea is:
1) No read/unread counts. 2) No bold-ing/un-bolding of stuff I have or have not read. 3) No emphasis on grouping by site - should work out of the box as a single stream of posts to any of the sites I am interested in. 4) Subscribe via single-click bookmarklet, ala Instapaper's Read Later bookmarklet.
Digital newspapers already exist. They are fed by RSS/Atom and do a variety of exciting things. Adding a top layer of formatting driven by a computer to make Google Reader (or your favorite RSS/Atom consumer) look like a old-style paper newspaper is a waste of time, and even worse, a waste of valuable screen space. Especially if you're going to try to write an algorithm to automatically figure out what the "top story" is, which will never be as good as a human. (And as in the first paragraph, there's also a variety of other things, like Slashdot, Reddit, HN, and all kinds of further digital elaborations on the fundamental newspaper template as modified by what digital makes easy and/or possible.)
Trying to replicate the old analog way of doing things is just silly.
And I don’t think Canon or Nikon did anything wrong. I think that it was probably correct to understand digital photography as analog photography – only on computers – first and look which places you can go only after you executed that perfectly.
(Which isn't to say the digital experience is all pros and no cons; photography has held on to some "pros" longer than many other fields.)
And that led the Flickr and Photoblogs & Tumblr. Not the same thing if you ask me.
Tim Berners-Lee mentioned "General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc." as the first area for intended uses of hypertext, see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Uses.html He also mentioned collaborative authoring. The innovation of Wikipedia is public editing which made sense when the general population came online.
I bet Ward Cunningham did ~ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ward_Cunningh... It's reported he even toyed with patenting the idea behind the Wiki in '96 ~ http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3648131
Language like this generally makes me more skeptical that they'll accomplish this
It is one thing to blog or to aggregate "news", it is another to actually investigate and report the news. I don't know if they realize this, when they talk about delivering the "final blow to the newspaper industry"
>>The first 100 TechCrunch readers to retweet this article and add the hashtag #freeapollo (ha ha, retweet bots!) are getting a promotion code for the app on iTunes.
Their 1.0 version launched today. Apple only gives you 50 promo codes for an app version. I wonder whether they really have some way to hand out 100 promo codes today or whether this is just going to be their first case of over-promising and under-delivering.
I will never understand so many technical folks' glee in watching the decline of investigative reporting, media companies, publishing houses, and so on--especially when so many applications like this simply exploit the work of others, add a layer of abstraction on top. ("Exploit" being non-pejorative, simply descriptive.)
In other words, the pendulum will swing back and forth as fickle humans change their mind, just like in politics and most other things in human history.
(Yes, I get a newspaper delivered every day, and love reading it).
I get the majority of my news from BBC/other TV, news paper etc. For funny, biased news, rumors, hyperbole, mob rule etc I go to the internet.
Current media gives us certain facts and certain angles, but there is too much left unsaid, untouched, analyzed, due to their corporate policies and the nature of the establishment. The relationship between politics, industry, media corporations and the government has become much too overlapping and incestuous for my comfort.
>modal dialog: "Are you sure you wanted to push that button? No / Yes"
/pushes yes.
/pushes another button
>modal dialog: "You pushed that button you pushed!"
/pushes ok.
Yep, I'm really seeing the Bing/Microsoft side of the application's design. I wonder if it asks if you want to launch the application when you launch the application?
I find it particularly ironic that the yes/no dialog comes up on the button with the greatest amount of error-room, while the one that just says "yaay!" has essentially the least. Apparently they're not a fan of Fitts' Law or its ramifications; they just put the double-check cost on the hardest button to miss, and the "congrats" on the one easiest to miss.
For example I may not wish to ever see stories about say Britnney Spears but I guarantee if she dies from an overdose tomorrow I will want to know it.
Haven't spent time finding out it this exists already, but would love to have sometime which lets me follow a news item over a time period, like a story unfolding everyday and I could track it from its beginning and analyse like a detective :P
Yes, that's definitely going to kill newspapers. Good luck with that one.
Looks like I've got one more line to add to all my robots.txt files.
Instead of including the GA-JS in one master template, it's probably being included in one of the templates that gets rendered multiple times.
Newspapers = day old news printed on paper.