Here's a little observation. No, let's make it a bonus double.
Wife calls, she's away with the kids at the in-laws. She was unaware of the Heathrow plane crash, because she had only looked at the BBC News website on Thursday morning, and again this morning. So she'd missed the window during which it was a headline.
Second one. I get the Edinburgh Evening News by RSS into my feed reader. But I hardly ever read it, because there's about 70 articles a day, and many are 'national' news that's I've already read somewhere else, and the volume is way too high.
So, what's the common thread? There's the old cliche of putting the "me" back into "media". This seems to have two distinct parts:
With the former, which is what most personalisation efforts concentrate on, you're trying to pick the stories that fit the individual's interest. This is hard, because it requires someone to crawl inside the head of the reader.
With the latter, all I want is "tell me the new news since the last time I checked". But none of the news services do that. Each time I go back to the BBC News home page, I have to manually scan to see what "new news" there is. Don't we have computers to take all this donkey work out for us? And how come none of the RSS readers seem to have the ability to summarise a thousand articles into the ten that really matter (with a "more..." button), based on actual reader activity?
Looks like an opportunity for someone...
Posted by Martin Geddes at 4:01 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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