Mar

29

Go and find some news yourself - because it is not always going to find you

March 29, 2008 |

<rant> I’ve been reading a number of blog posts lately about how the news that is important to you is magically going to find you.

Is it really?

Let’s think about that for a second. You stop subscribing to most of your RSS feeds, hoping that the information that is important to you is going to float to the top on services like Friendfeed, Techmeme and others instead.

That sounds great - but in practice that is never really what happens. To find news relevant to you on friendfeed, for example, you first have to invest some time and energy in establishing a set of friends on the service whose recommendations you trust - and you better hope they aren’t just there to see what news floats to the top themselves. And once you have done that and made this your primary source of news, all you have done is lock yourself into a virtual echo chamber.

Oh - but there is too much news and I just can’t handle it. Of course you can’t  -unless you are Robert Scoble - but do you only want to read the news items that your friends find interesting? Are you going to stop reading the NYTimes (online or offline) because you hope that somebody is going to email you the most interesting articles?

Sure, you will find a lot of interesting stuff to read by looking through people’s Shared Feed on Google Reader, for example, and I’m not saying any of this is a bad thing. Hell, I do it every day.

But even then, the news isn’t going to plop into your lap automagically - you still have to go and find your sources - and hope that they are good sources.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you start depending on your network for your news too much you will a) lock yourself into an echo chamber, b) miss out on stuff that is outside of your regular realm and might challenge your assumptions and c) in the end, sometimes there are just too many news items that might be really important to you, but that your friends couldn’t care less about…

It’s great to have your friends as a filter - and I rely on that filter every day - but ultimately, they only become one other source of news and will (or should?) not replace your portfolio of other news sources. </rant>


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2 Comments so far

  1. Mathew Ingram on March 30, 2008 6:05 am

    I think that’s a fair point, Frederic.

  2. From the Pipeline - 3.30.08 | WinExtra on March 30, 2008 8:42 pm

    […] Go and find some news yourself - because it is not always going to find you :: The Last Podcast - Frederic has a few thoughts on this whole "the news will find you" meme that has been going on for the last few days. […]

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