There was this little flurry of excitement when one of the Silly-Valley TechWhatever news aggregators asserted that Twitter was dropping the use of Rails. It seems not to be true. This is yet more evidence that the news aggregators are becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution.
If you want care about Twitter, follow @biz or @ev. If you care about Rails, follow DHH here or here or here. If you care about Sun, read what the people at Sun say. Same for IBM or Microsoft.
If you care about the Big New Thing that’s going to change your life, wait till it comes and touches your life. Then you’ll know what it’s really about, not what some overworked underslept Bay-Area meme-promoter thinks. If the news is important, and your eyes and ears are open, it will find you.
The other problem with the aggregators is that there are a lot of smart, hungry, imaginative people working really hard to game them and get noticed. Sometimes it works.
Me, I don’t read hardly any members of any of the top-100 lists. But I think I’m well-informed. If I’m interested in a company or organization, I find an insider or two to follow. And I follow a lot of people who are smart and interested in some of the same things that I am; the effect of feeds and tweets is that we’ve in effect developed a shared and extremely sensitive radar network.
Isn’t the Internet supposed to be about disintermediation?
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: David Megginson (May 02 2008, at 13:27)
"If you care about Sun, read what the people at Sun say. Same for IBM or Microsoft."
I agree with a lot of the posting (especially that fact that any important new things will come and find you), but the above statement doesn't pass a simple substitution test. Try this out: "If you care about the Chinese government, read what the people in the Chinese government say. Same for the U.S. or North Korea."
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From: Shelley (May 02 2008, at 13:35)
Excellent writing. About the best and most succinct posting I've read in months. When I saw the posting on Twitter dropping RoR because of "what someone said somewhere", all I could think of: wow, what a threat we are to the professional journalists. Yup, no moss on us when it comes to fact checking.
(I wonder how many of the young'uns will fail your captcha test?)
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From: Neil Conway (May 02 2008, at 14:11)
I'm not sure who decided the Internet was about disintermediation. The Internet gives individuals access to a vast array of information, published by a bewilding variety of content authors and institutions. There is far, far more information available than anyone could possibly consume -- so intermediation, in the form of trusted search engines, blog authors, news aggregators, collaborative filtering, and a myriad of related techniques will naturally play a crucial role in connecting an individual audience member with the best content for what they're looking for.
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From: Max Erickson (May 02 2008, at 14:51)
Aren't the people you are talking about just acting as aggregators?
Really smart, highly topical aggregators, but still aggregators.
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From: Silvio Almeida (May 02 2008, at 15:18)
by the way, _watch_ Sideways as well: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375063/
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From: COP (May 05 2008, at 10:12)
it was ARRINGTON.. thru TechCrunch.. who made it a sensational news.. with dumb update later.. but such rumors will just be part of 2.0 or whatever
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