Micromedia vs Mass Media

I want to share a personal experience today on the massive value of micromedia vs mass media.

I spent $15 buying Wired magazine to read on the trains today. At the end of the ride (about 40 minutes), I found nothing new. No new ideas, no inspirations, no new ways to think about the world. While the articles are well written, there is nothing is that I have not read before in a blog.

Compare the above experience with another article that I read on the train. It is a blog post by Fred Wilson that talks about disrupting education, with lots of insightful comments made by the community. It definitely gave me more room for thought than Wired. The best part of this: I printed that out and pay zero cents for it (not counting printing and paper costs).

This is pure economics at work. I read a lot of stuff on the web about technology and the new economic landscape. Niche blogs gave more targeted information than a mass market magazine ever could.

So, if you are into content, how do you compete with that?

Answer: You need to be the best filter there is.

Despite all the innovations we have seen in RSS readers, personal homepages, blog aggreations et al, I still spend a lot of time finding the right articles to read. Maybe the answer is not in alogorithms.

I believe the future of news discovery will be community powered. Twitter is becoming an important source links for me. How do you build on top on that to create a better filter for news discovery?

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