News flow by and news vanish. The more news flow by the faster relevant news vanish. That's the attention trap which lies inside the river of news concept..
How do we get around the problem that the very positive concept of consuming news as a river of news (Google search link on purpose) becomes a dead end? The question is very simply: How to make (your) relevant news from today also stay relevant and findable in the future?
More precise: Today everybody produces a big amount of text snippets every day. In the blogosphere these snippets are even called articles. How to connect all these individual chunks of content (text, audio, video)?
Some answers ...
Solutions (... you can't ignore)
Nothing new since somebody knotted the first net ... but many people ignore these existing concepts today.
Let's quote a historical picture: Jesus threw the net and fed the hungry people with bread and fish. (Did he throw a net? Sorry, no bible at hand.) We have to knot a massive and very fine net around our content to satisfy readers with the results they want when they stop by for some research.
First keyword: Folksonomy, taxonomy created by (the) people.
Tagging of content makes the public knowledge better available. Problems aren't as big as people think. The classic anti example is the tag 'apple' - Good that they didn't name that company 'fish'.
Answer 1: You as a publisher must tag your content. That's the most important step towards granular information access. Every tag is a fishing net.
Second keyword: Transparency, like in transparent archives
That's the big task for everybody and every website who wants to keep readers on the site. You must create a fast and easy structure which allows readers to dive deep into an archive without using a complex search form (see p.com advanced search = horror). Only this way people will have fun browsing your content.
The archive must become transparent to the reader. This can be reached through extensive tagging, categories and sections. If necessary don't hesitate to create sub-directories or sub-domains to split your content into multiple streams. Choose a technical solution which can handle this.
Answer 2: You as a publisher must provide a clickable multi level structure. Don't be only the water hose feeding the river of news.
Third Keyword: Answers, created by people is no trend at all. It has happened since the first people network was 'created'. It's a technological task to transfer classic wisdom to the Internet. Successful first approaches can be seen everywhere (Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers etc.) and they are developing. Only die hard business people don't get it "Why are people doing it for free?" or even more stupid "Can't we blog back?" (from the recommended video: Day of the Long Tail).
This is a more abstract one. What is an answer (hint: precision)? Let's take the question: Can you give me the addresses, reviews, listings or outbound links for a certain subject only? What most publishers provide today is a link to an article. How lame! The reader still has to scan that big chunk of text ("Top 100 digital cameras") for the right information.
Answer 3: People publishing should become aware how to use microformats to bring more structure into publishing. It makes fishing the certain sort of fish in the river of news much easier. Applications like Firefox extensions or microformat aware search engines are developing. I published my first two articles yesterday using hReview, hCard and hCalendar. It took about five minutes to figure it out and now I have my own templates for hReview and hCard.
Last not least my future keyword: Comments a.k.a. notes are the personal feature which was invented by del.icio.us in social bookmarking. With the notes you are able to give that bookmark a personal more review like touch. This creates a kind of personal mini blog or if watching the list of sharing individuals you get a 'social review'.
Digg has the wrong approach IMHO because it crosses the line of simplicity AND it allows no listing because everybody can add another personal digg.
The missing feature is a feedback link which would allow to see all the 'social reviews' about an item like all StumbleUpon reviews, all CoComments linking to related articles and all del.icio.us notes on one page. Technorati is just trying the first step by following second level articles (only) which follow up to hosted AP articles.
Answer 4: This is a future feature. Combine del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and CoComments and you will see the picture becoming clearer in the crystal ball. Forget about digg!
So stay tuned and watch this channel. (And digg this article :)
The search engines will definitely do something about all this and you have to provide the fitting content to stay relevant in the future. Be aware of your own possibilities to reach that goal independently.
Do you want to go on forever with that 'water hose' confidence?
Technorati Tags: river of news, folksonomy, archive, metadata, microformats, search, transparency, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, CoComment
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