Requirements for my ideal feed reader

August 3rd, 2010
  1. I can consume my feeds in a single blended stream or separated by source (à la Feedly).
  2. It syncs with Google Reader.
  3. It incorporates URLs that were tweeted by members of defined twitter lists.
  4. It allows me to assign a priority score each source (Google feed reader subscriptions or individual twitterers)
  5. Items are ranked reverse chronologically or by a popularity metric that incorporates (A) how many times my sources reference that item (links, retweets), and (B) the priority score of the source.
  6. I am provided the experience via the Web, iPhone, and iPad.
  7. I can syndicate my favorite items publicly (à la Pulse).

Anything close to this already exist?

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The curation behind the curtain

July 13th, 2010

In preparation for a panel on “Real-Time Storytelling” that I’ll be participating in, I’ve been thinking a lot about content curation and what it means at its essence. I’ve been reading every article about curation that I can find; I’m struggling with the fact that curation is often described as a new phenomenon. For example, Steven Rosenbaum writes on Mashable:

Curation is now part of the content equation. It doesn’t kill anything, rather it adds a powerful new tool that will make content destinations more relevant, more robust, and more likely to attract and retain visitors.

I agree that the label “curation” points to something new that’s emerging, but something feels wrong about saying that content curation itself is new to the Web.

There are many types of curation behaviors and there is plenty room for new tools to enable these behaviors. For the sake of discussion, let’s consider one type of curation behavior that Robert Scoble mentions in his post “The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators,” the act of bundling together related items such as tweets. While new tools are indeed needed to facilitate this sort of bundling, it’s a worthwhile exercise to consider how bundling has existed previously on the Web. For example, any article that links to a set of other web pages is a bundle; the author of a web page can link that page to any other page in the world, but, in a sense, they curated the set of links that are appropriate for the page at hand.

It’s misleading to say that media companies need to embrace curation to survive in this new world of content abundance. It’s more accurate to say that media companies need to embrace letting curation stand alone — it’s not economically feasible to add commentary to every bundle of sources a journalist discovers. The Journalist’s filtering and juxtaposition in most cases will have to be enough. And maybe, in some cases readers prefer a blank canvas of raw, but credible information. In the realtime web, readers would rather access curated information now than wait for the curation and the analysis to take place. Maybe the analysis comes later maybe it doesn’t, but publishers need to come to market with curation by itself or they will be late to the game.

In sum, the new behaviors we’re seeing around “curation” are marked by a subtraction, a removal of layers around long standing processes. Inevitably, when new circumstances enable a behavior to be performed independently of other behaviors that it was previously tied to, new patterns emerge. These new patterns mark what many in the web community refer to as the rise of curation.

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A fundamental form of Curation: Network Mapping

June 5th, 2010

There are many forms of content curation. I’m experimenting with the idea that curation activities can be divided into two primary categories:

  1. Network mapping. Curating a set of sources relevant to a topic or event.
  2. Stream simplification. Filtering, organizing, ranking, summarizing a stream of information.

In this post, I’m going to focus on the network mapping mode of curation. Many avid Twitter users may forget the amount of work, thought, and skill that’s required to get value out of an ecosystem like Twitter. As Howard Rheingold describes in his article on Twitter Literacy,

“… successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow …”

For example, if one of your primary interests is digital journalism, Twitter will teach you nothing about digital journalism unless you connect to digital journalism thinkers (e.g, @hrheingold or @jayrosen_nyu). This extends beyond Twitter and is fundamental to the Web since its beginning — the Web has little utility unless you find compelling web sites, publishers, and communities to connect with. However, if you can build a network of trusted and insightful sources, you have something powerful in your hands. In the era of information networks, as George Siemens writes,

“The capacity to stay current is more important than any individual content element.”

When you have a personal learning network, you have a team of teachers and co-learners to interpret the world as it evolves and point you to relevant information as it becomes available. While there can be great value in reading a good news article, there is even more value in connecting to a new source that will feed you relevant news articles and analysis on an ongoing basis.

The importance of personal learning networks will be amplified as people become increasingly able to bring their portable identities with them wherever they go, either in the form of web sites recognizing social context or through mobile devices (see The Future of the Social Web). One can imagine that building a network of trusted information sources will become one of the chief goals of university education and it will be a chief function of the teacher to curate the networks that will make these connections possible. Graduating with (e.g.) a degree in sociology will entail that one has a connected to a highly developed network of sociology thinkers that one can rely upon for knowledge and feedback. In fact, building and establishing one’s self in this type of network may even become the explicit end of an education process.

So given the vast array of sources that one can connect to throughout the Web, a curator can bring tremendous value to society through helping people navigate and understand the expansive regions of the social graph. This role of the Curator is that of a Connector, one who can connect people to sources who will feed them information and help them understand the ever-changing world. See, for example, the New York Times, who curates a set of twitter lists that users can connect with to stay current on a variety of topics. Also, there are services that provide this form of curation in an automated fashion; e.g., Klout or Google Page Rank.

While there is a long arch to the reward of building a personal learning network, this network mapping form of curation can be invaluable in helping people interpret breaking news in realtime. A clear example of this was the Huffington Post’s live twitter coverage of the Fort Hood Shootings. Soon after news started to break, they mapped the area of the social graph that was nearest to the event, local residents and local news stations. The result was a pertinent realtime stream of information (although, the flow would likely benefit from additional stream simplification methods of curation, like filtering).

In a narrow sense, the network mapping mode of curation is a type of stream simplification — it helps people filter the noise of the Web through a trusted network of topically relevant sources. But network mapping has power beyond stream simplification; it does more than allow people to passively view a stream of information — it situates them within a community that they can learn, share, converse, and evolve with.

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The deeper side of “skimming”

June 2nd, 2010

Nicholas Carr writes in his book The Shallows:

There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.

What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting.

It’s clear that constant interaction with the Web alters one’s ability to acquire knowledge in its classic sense, but I think there is a deeper issue. As George Siemens has thoroughly documented in his book Knowing Knowledge (pdf),  the Web has fundamentally changed the forms of knowledge that are needed for success in our society. Siemens writes:

Once flow becomes too rapid and complex, we need a model that allows individuals to learn and function in spite of the pace and flow. A network model of learning (an attribute of connectivism) offloads some of the processing and interpreting functions of knowledge flow to nodes within a learning network. Instead of the individual having to evaluate and process every piece of information, she/he creates a personal network of trusted nodes: people and content, enhanced by technology. The learner aggregates relevant nodes…and relies on each individual node to provide needed knowledge. The act of knowing is offloaded onto the network itself. This view of learning scales well with continued complexity and pace of knowledge development.

So perhaps the goal of an advanced web browser should not be to retain the contents of a web page; instead, it is to situate that web page within their personal network of knowledge that can be precisely and efficiently called upon later (e.g., through book marking, tagging, following, etc..). While digesting a web page in this fashion may look like “skimming” on the surface, it requires a sophisticated mode of thought that I believe does justice to the beauty of the human mind.

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An animated Powerpoint slide

May 21st, 2010

I created an animated Powerpoint slide where words fade in and out. Here is what it looks like in edit mode:

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Capitalism will suck people into the social graph

May 10th, 2010

I believe it is inevitable that people will ultimately choose to make their purchasing behaviors and preferences available to brands who can tailor product designs and offerings to meet their needs. People will band together with like-minded consumers to exert more influence over brands. With this, traditional brand marketing will disappear. Companies will no longer have to conduct market research to circumscribe a target audience for a product. Instead, their audience will be self-declared as a community. When a consumer community emerges, companies will cluster to serve the needs of that community in the same way that businesses move into prospering neighborhoods. See The Future of the Social Web: in Five Eras by Jeremiah Owyang for more of the reasoning behind this.

With visibility into consumers’ portable identities, companies will be able to consciously choose which consumers they serve. Naturally, a company will choose to provide a service to the influential consumer over those who are isolated in the social graph. The influential consumer will serve as a valuable long term connection for the company, bringing future business down the road. To create brand-advocates, companies will likely give well-connected consumers discounts of free product offererings.

The result of this is that people who are not well connected in the web’s public social graph will be at a disadvantage in the market place. They will find that companies are less enthusiastic to serve them. Lack of visible connections in the social graph may lead someone to pay higher prices or be refused service all together. They will be perceived by brands as a dead-end.

So, while the social web may democratize product development, it brings consumerism to a deeper place on our lives. People will be forced to join social networks, expose their identities, and build influence out of economic necessity. Building influence will be taught in school as a way to survive.

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DRAFT #1: The iPad illuminates the depths of the Web

April 17th, 2010

I am someone who believes in the capacity of the Web to bring deep progress to society, yet, after spending time experiencing the Web via my laptop, the feeling often builds that my mind is stagnating. While my awareness of new developments in the world may have increased, I feel like I haven’t exercised the important muscles of deep, focused thought. I may know of more things that matter, but possibly my ability to interpret these things isn’t accelerating as it could. The answer, it has seemed, is to force my attention away from the Web, to read books. Reading books, physical books, appeared to be the only feasible way to bring healthy mental balance to my life. Most of the time, I failed, remained transfixed by the Web, and dissatisfied with my mental growth.

After experiencing the Web through my iPad, I’ve realized the problem I was facing was more with my laptop than with the Web. While experiencing the Web through a laptop, there is always the option to type. With the option to type comes the option to change web pages and change activities; change from reading, to browsing, to producing, to watching. Maybe you can call me weak-willed, but I normally find these options irresistible. When reading the Web on my laptop, I skim, as to quickly get on to the next thing. Right now, for example, I’m pushing myself to finish writing this blog post and resist the craving to check my email or Twitter. I almost sent out a single tweet summarizing the sentiment of this post instead of sitting down to write this. When I find myself confronted with a “long” web page that I know I should read, I usually have to print out a hard copy and carve out some time to “settle in” to reading it. Sometimes I even have to leave my home and go to a place where my computer isn’t an option.

You might think that it would take months of mental rehabilitation to rebuild one’s capacity to read long-form content, but the iPad seems like a silver bullet. As soon as you’ve opened a web page on your iPad, all you have in your hands is the web page — the interface of the computer largely vanishes. When you’re holding an interesting web page in your hand, the natural thing to do is read it, read all of it, and you do.

I believe the iPad will bring increased attention to long-form web pages, and consequently new life to the human mind. The web and focused thought are less in direct opposition. This doesn’t mean I still shouldn’t force myself to read more books (“book” almost needs to be defined at this point) — with the neglect of reading books in favor of the Web comes disproportionate attention towards recent thought. But at least I can now enjoy the Web without feeling my mind is getting hollowed.

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Black Box: A game of reverse engineering

February 28th, 2010

Deducing the inner-workings of a system through observing how it reacts to various stimulus is an important skill for success in the digital age. Developing this skill allows one to create a deeper mastery of the tools one works with. It allows one to understand the capabilities, limits, and possible evolutions of the tool. In my job as a product manager, this skill is especially important. I may not be able to read the code underlying the platforms I manage, but I must be extremely knowledgeable about their logical composition.

Black Box elegantly draws out this skill of reverse engineering. I played the Black Box board game as a kid, but have recently reengaged with it through the BlackBox Maniak iPhone game, developed by Alex Minard, the developer of Net Maniak. It’s another a example of a game that I recommend playing regularly for sharpening strategic modes of thought.

Black Box is a game of "hide and seek" which simulates shooting lasers into a black box to deduce the locations of balls hidden inside.

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“Photoshop for ideas and the relation between ideas”

February 27th, 2010

In Howard Rheingold’s series on thinking tools, Jerry Michalski demos his Personal Brain.

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Net Maniak: a simple game of innovating and thinking

February 23rd, 2010

One might argue that innovating is the act of connecting things together. If that’s the case, netwalk, elegantly embodied as Net Maniak for the iPhone, is a game for innovators. I believe that playing Net Maniak regularly builds the core of one’s analytic capacity; the game mirrors thought in its most abstract sense.

"In this game, you are a network administrator, and someone has scrambled your network. Your job is to rotate all the pieces so that every computer is connected to the server by pipes and there are no lose ends in your network."

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