Sharing links

People powered news are nothing new. We have seen the likes of Digg, Hackers News, Meta Filter et al becoming important venues for us to get our daily dose of important or interesting stories. The problem with these existing news aggregators is the lack of focus. On some days, you get really good reads. On others, it is just noise.

Yesterday, I tried Publish2, an infrastructure for links sharing that is targeted at journalists. I found this list of links regarding the future of news very relevant to myself. The high relevance is probably down to the the people contributing to it (a small group of experts) and the focus nature of the topic. Why can't such an infrastructure for sharing links be applicable to the entire Web, beyond journalism.

For example, I would love to be able to maintain a reading list regarding social capital that is contributed by the likes of Taylor Davidson, Ethan Bauley et al.

I don't think we need more platforms to produce links. We have enough of such tools in the form of Del.icio.us, Tumblr, Twiitter, your bookmarks et al. What we need are simple ways to share these links between groups of people regarding a common focus area.

I believe such a link sharing infrastructure will become an important part of how we consume news in the future.

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