Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Consensus Web Filters: on the always-cool Cool Tools tackles the relatively new breed of collaborative news sites that have emerged recently. Kevin Kelly talks about how important these types of sites have become to his news reading habits. In a clear way, he describes what they are, how they work and why they’re important.

What really caught my interest here was the idea that the collaborative process the sites use don’t necessarily mean that we just see popular news items.

But most important for me is the large volume of very interesting news that will not become “news.” This is the kind of material that is more interesting than random pages but which lacks an appealing hook to place it on the front page of a magazine or even a news website. Often these items are timeless; they don’t make the front page because they could be run at any time. But they are more valuable than odd curiosities. Because of the voting, tagging, bookmarking process enough people find the item worthwhile that they rise to notice. What emerges for me is a delightful counter-news, or what we used to call at CoEvolution Quarterly, “news that stays news.” I have encountered no other process in the world that is better at surfacing “news that stays news” and “news that will be news” better than these collaborative filtering sites.

I checked out some of the recommended sites to see if and how this might work. Indeed it does. On Digg, for example, you can see (or subscribe to the feed for) items just coming in, before they get “dugg” to see if they’ll make the front page. Other sites Kelly mentions offer similar ways of seeing stuff before (or while) it’s being processed through the collaborative process.

I had first run across this idea of “news that stays news” long ago in Stewart Brand’s book about the Media Lab at MIT. That was published 20 years ago. Things change; things stay the same.