Where my scout at?

(this post was written by Kyle on January 25, 2006, and it concerns )

The hot spot to be right now for Internet ventures is in the attention market. But the concept of “attention” means a bunch of different things to a bunch of different people.

You’ve got David Sifry and Steve Gillmor working on , which is trying to be the open source standard that “helps you keep track of what you’ve read, what you’re spending time on, and what you should be paying attention to.” There seems to be a little bit of controversey about Attention.xml, but the technology seems to be a hook-up with RSS, where the software would do a bunch of filtering for you (”first chronological, then reputational filter, then throw out duplicates”) and allow you to put your attention where it needs to be.

My problem with Attention.XML is that it’s a second-order filter. It assumes that you’ve found the RSS feeds you want, and works from there. While this is great, what about finding new information? In my experience, most people with RSS feeds concentrate their attention on only a few areas: technology, politics, or what-have-you. But I’m a Gemini. I can’t concentrate on just one thing.

I want help on finding the best stories on the Internet. I don’t care what they’re about. I’m interested in everything. From philosophy to books to movies to politics to Web technology to Apple to religion to videogames to anything that is plain-old written well. At the beginning of my web surfing day, I want to know where I should go.

I guess you could say (if you were being nice) that I’m an information adventurer. And I want to know which locals to trust. Who is going to tell me where my daily adventure should begin? Where is my Internet scout?

Obviously, there are the usual suspects: Google and Yahoo!. But those aren’t very good for beginning a session of web-surfing. There, you need to provide your own direction. It’s tough to just catch a wave.

There is . On Digg.com, anybody can post a news story to the site. Then the readers vote on whether the story is interesting or not (they “digg it”). The stories that are the most interesting make it to the front page, and others get filed in their respective categories. The users get prestige for finding the best stories, and being the first to get a scoop (much like regular journalism); the site gets eyeballs for their advertising.

There’s more to it, of course. It’s a combination of a social bookmarking system (sharing links with friends and family) and news site. I can even blog one of Digg’s stories to here just by pressing a button. Aside from the community aspects, though, it’s an Internet-only form of media. Newspapers and TV can’t do what it’s doing. It’s a cool solution to the idea of “where to find the best stories” on the Net.

But again, Digg.com is mostly geek-related news. I think its goal is to be the Web 2.0 version of . I’m all for specialization (that’s how one becomes an expert), but I’m interested in a more general version of Digg.com.

There’s always the fresh and popular page on . It’s similar to Digg.com, except instead of “diggs,” it counts the number of people who have bookmarked an article; the point being that the more people who bookmark an article, the more interesting it is. It’s more laborious, however; where Digg.com just asks people to click a button to “vote” on an article, del.icio.us requires a two or three click process before a “vote” is registered. It has the benefit of generality, though. There’s nothing to stop an article from the free-range librarian from making it to the top of the list.

My problem with del.icio.us is not with the system itself, but with the way people use it. The system allows people to write a little note about the article being bookmarked, but most people don’t include the note, again, because it’s laborious. Unfortunately, that makes the whole system less valuable. The only thing a user has to go on is the title of the article being bookmarked and the number of people who have bookmarked it. But it takes at least one click (plus loading time) before the user can decide whether the article has any value that is specific to the user. The upshot is that a person may arrive at several dead-ends before they find an exciting path for traversing the web.

Two other sites I use as a starting point are the and , “the daily hub for interactive professionals.” The upside is that a user can usually find interesting articles; the downside, again, is that these sites focus on specific topics. Furthermore, unlike Digg.com and del.icio.us, these sites are controlled by editors, while the first two are controlled by the users.

I think this is the way to go. Let the network do the filtering. Get rid of the gatekeepers. As Johua Porter writes in an interesting post over on :

The answer to these questions [of attention] will come from the network, I think. Look to the new companies that are thriving: Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Netflix. These companies are harnessing their network of users to provide valuable, personalized recommendation systems that exist outside of any of the Old Media. They’re replicating our individual authority models to the point where content becomes more important than the media outlet from which it came. The amazing potential of Web 2.0 is that it distributes authority at the personal level. The next time you get a movie recommended to you from one of your friends on Netflix, think about how much more valuable that is than some review pumped through the Old Media. Did you know that roughly 2/3 of movies rented on Netflix come from recommendations?…However, even though Netflix creates a wonderful tool for modeling authority, it won’t be the authority itself. No, authority will lie in individual people whom we trust, who happen to use the same systems that we do.

That last part is the key. “NetFlix” as an entity is not an authority. I’d even contend that thinking of NetFlix as an entity at all is to misunderstand its influence. The thing about these services is that they are spaces for interaction among users.

This is not to say they are “empty” spaces. Just as the lobby of a nice hotel encourages one type of interaction and the lobby of a cheap motel allows another, the different services encourage different kinds of interaction.

I’m looking for that space on the Internet that is analogous to that space in the real world that best encourages setting out on an adventure. Think of a port in a foreign city. You get off the boat, and you’re looking for something new, something adventurous. Where do you go? Who do you trust?

Where is my Internet scout?