Bringing The Noise. Bringing Less Funk.
May 19th, 2008 | by Brad King |
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I’ve helped a few students set up RSS Readers recently, which has forced me to look more closely at my own RSS consumption habits.
For me, there are elements of less is not enough with some forms of media (RSS for one) and less is way to much in other (lifestreaming such as FriendFeed and Social Thing). I mediate back and forth between what I can pay attention to — and what I can catch up on.
I bring this up because Robert Scoble, a long-time blogger and managing director at Fast Company, posted thoughts on News versus Noise.
His thesis — and I’m loathe to paraphrase someone else’s words for fear of mis-stating them — is simple: news filters information while social media allows individuals to find data and turn that into information.
As Scoble says:
I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.
Which begs another question: how can news organizations capitalize on this?
The simplest answer is for them to fully embrace open access, allow their users to create Twitter, blog and any other type of RSS feed they want — and then stream that along side news stories.
It would be interesting to use Tweetscan, a site that parses through the public stream of Twitter posts, to find any information related to stories in the paper. I’m not sure how this would work, but I’m guessing that any paper that adopted this early would receive high marks from the digerati, who may even find their way to spread the word.
One of the people who critiqued my book proposal, Cynthia, commented that she found it interesting that I posit that software agents will be the boon for the news industry — not people.
She’s right (and I’ll address that in my proposal). The origins of the Internet were based upon software parsing through a clean stream of data. That was how it was put together.
Certainly things change, but even a cursory look at how information is transmitted today argues that software agents — taken as a whole — are better at parsing data; humans are better at parsing knowledge and information.
Ultimately, I think that’s the point Scoble is heading for (and he even mentions software agents in his blog post — although he does not call them that): software agents parsing the data stream for each of us. Right now, those agents need direct actions; however, once they have done once search, collaborating filtering techniques can easily be deployed to expand the search radius, with “thumbs up-thumbs down” ratings used to hone the searching.
By encouraging the “noise” and deploying the proper agents, news organizations could add so much value to their existing stories — while allowing their writers to interact — without leaving their desks — with the audience.
