The lead singer of the punk band Fugazi* once said that before he sits down to write fresh material for a record he stops listening to punk rock, insted listening to other stuff like jazz and country. It's a pretty simple point: you don't get inspired to write good punk rock if you're just listening to punk rock.
Not a day goes by when you don't hear about some social news/music/video startup promising to help you discover new content based on what your friends like. Either that or they scan the stuff you're currently interested in and recommend you new stuff.
Most of these ideas are total losers.
As Paul Kedrosky put it in a post today: "I like TechCrunch, for example, as well as a host of blogs, but I don't need more feeds/services telling me to go read article XYZ "your friends & colleagues are reading article XYZ". No thanks. Because if my friends and colleagues are, then there is no urgency for me to do it"
It's the same with music. No need to be told that my friends like Radiohead.
Along the same lines, services that look at your particular content collection and then recommend stuff are just as bad. Supposed you were to take my particular collection of RSS feeds and determine some ones that I might like. Invariably, whenever I see a service, I get recommendations like "You might like BoingBoing or Lifehacker." No offense -- I'm sure those are both fine sites -- but, hey, if I wanted to read those, wouldn't they be in my feed reader already? Seriously. It's the same with music. If I wanted to listen to Steve Earle, I already would be (I actually like him, I just don't have any in my iTunes at the moment).
The problem is flawed premises -- that somehow our social circle and/or our existing tastes are good predictors of what we want to discover. It's too reductionist.
Like Paul, I recently did a major feed cull and eliminated over 150 feeds in my reader. It's too bad in a way, because most of those were put in there because they, at some point, had something I was interested. But, realistically, I can't read as many blogs about metals, cattle and pharma as I'd like to (though I still read several). What I want is a site where I put in like 1500 feeds, but then with the majority of them, it only pops something up when they have something that I really want.
I suggested something like this before, saying that it's time to reprise the "new" tag, a popular thing from the early days of the web. Except it would need intelligence. A "new" tag that actually indicated that something behind a link was new and fresh, not stale and not well known.
So someone please come up with a new way of discovering news and music. But throw out the premise that a give a damn about what my friends are into. And don't be lazy and come up with Freshman algorithm predicting what I'll like next based on the stuff I already like. Chances are, I've already heard of it and didn't like it.
*It might not have been Fugazi actually. It was from an interview I read in high school, back when I read interviews with lead singers of punk bands. So it's possible my memory is totally off.
I had a problem with information overload for a long time too, but have dealt with it by using the folder feature on Google reader. I probably have 40 blogs on my short list.
Other interesting sites are broken down by keyword topics. By aggregating similar topics together, it lets me read about something and skim the 15 copycat articles that are sure to follow.
My final folder is devoted to bulk publishers. This is where I put the sites that publish like crazy everyday. I like these sites, but don't have the time to read them all. Once I've cleared out my short list, I use the search feature on Google reader to restrict my search only to my bulk RSS feeds and it lets me read about the items that I'm most interested in.
It makes it a little more difficult to find new news items, but its still nice to be able to do a search for the story of the day and see only the articles that have been written by the sources I care about. It's not a fool proof system yet, but when I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader, it made my RSS much more efficient.
Posted by: Davis Freeberg | April 03, 2008 at 02:18 PM
Pandora.com sucks. Last.fm is actually somewhat decent.
Posted by: miracule | April 03, 2008 at 05:40 PM
i like this part of the post:"It's the same with music. No need to be told that my friends like Radiohead." is very good
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