Curators, Centralization & Freedom From Choice
Some of my favorite bloggers are discussing Techmeme today and the shift towards herd mentality in blogging. Fred Wilson kicked things off with a great post about how several blogs are writing about the same topics these days in an effort to game Techmeme. Dave Winer responded with the argument that Techmeme is “doomed” due to the fact that they centralize information, thereby encouraging gaming and the echo chamber that is increasingly prevalent in blogging. While I agree that the quality and usefulness of Techmeme has fallen considerably over the last few months, I’m of a different opinion than Dave. I find sites and services that centralize information to be extremely useful - the “curators”, as Fred calls them - and I don’t see them going away anytime soon. Significant value will be created by smart aggregators. The curators just need to adapt and improve.
The musician Peter Gabriel recently said, “The first wave of the digital revolution was about the freedom of choice, trying to make everything accessible to anyone, anyplace, anytime. I think the second wave will in some ways be about freedom from choice. It will be able to filter and focus so that you get more of what you want, what excites, entertains and surprises you.” Blogs allow anyone to share their thoughts and opinions with the world. For blog readers, this represents freedom of choice. Whatever it is that you’re into, there’s bound to be a blog, or for that matter, hundreds or thousands of blogs on that topic. Choice is good. However, blogs and the decentralization of content and ideas does not address the need to filter that glut of information down to what is personally relevant and interesting to an individual. It is extremely difficult to discover interesting content on the web today. Search helps in the cases where you know what you are looking for. What interests me, though, is the discovery of content I didn’t know was out there. Curators help me efficiently uncover that information.
Before Techmeme came onto the scene, I would spend countless hours trying to find interesting tech news. I love to consume information, but I don’t have the patience to weed through hundreds of posts to find that one nugget of interesting content. Techmeme, while not perfect, dramatically increased the efficiency of that process. If I only had a few minutes to spare before heading off to a meeting, I could scan Techmeme and quickly discover the interesting news of the day. I trusted and relied on Techmeme to curate geek news. Most of the sites that I find myself using everyday are some form of centralized curator. Flickr curates photos from people I care about. Last.fm helps me discover new music. I subscribe to certain keywords in del.icio.us to learn what the community determines to be popular on that topic overtime. It’s the centralization of knowledge that makes these services valuable. Elements of the services are decentralized through widgets, APIs, and other distribution and publishing tools. Nevertheless, the database is centralized for the betterment of the participants in the system.
Curators are here to stay, but the one-size-fits-all approach that Techmeme offers today needs to change. There shouldn’t be one Techmeme Leaderboard. We should each have our own. Dave’s Leaderboard might skew towards individual bloggers and the more technical writers. Fred’s might be a mix of small and large blogs that discuss a range of topics including social media, music, and Manhattan. Content producers will try to influence their rankings in the system, but since each reader has her own personalized version, the economics will work themselves out. To a large extent, this happens today on sites like Last.fm. Radiohead dominates the overall popularity charts this month. There will always be bands who try to own the top ranking board. But since I’m not a huge fan of Radiohead, they don’t show up on my recommended music page. There is a large enough group of people who are interested in other types of music to create incentives for bands to focus on interests in both the head and the tail. Most importantly, Last.fm, as an aggregator of music preferences, connects those bands with their respective audiences in an efficient manner that wouldn’t be possible without some centralized knowledge base.
Centralized, distributed, personalized curators represent the next wave of the internet. The services that will command an increasing share of my attention will be those that provide freedom from choice by aggregating content from large companies and individual contributors and then filtering those choices down to what I find personally interesting or relevant. I don’t see how that can be accomplished without some central pool of knowledge.
