This piece by Nick Carr, the author of the recently popular “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the Atlantic, is fantastic.
My summary: A print newspaper or magazine provides an array of content in one bundle. People buy the bundle, and advertisers pay to catch readers’ eyes as they thumb through the pages. But when a publication moves online, the bundle falls apart, and what’s left are just the stories.
This may no longer be revolutionary thought to anyone who knows that google is their new homepage, from which people enter their site laterally through searches. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the new gospel for digital content.
There’s only one problem with Carr’s argument, though. By focusing on the economics of production, I don’t think its observation of unbundling goes far enough. Looked at another way—from the economics of consumption and attention—not even stories are left. In actuality, there are just keywords entered into google searches. That’s increasingly how people find content, and in an age of abundance of content, finding it is what matters.
That’s where our under-wraps project comes into play. We formalize the notion of people finding content through simple abstractions of it. Fundamentally, from the user’s perspective, the value proposition lies with the keywords, or the persons of interest, not the piece of content, which is now largely commodified.
That’s why we think it’s a pretty big idea to shift the information architecture of the news away from focusing on documents and headlines and toward focusing on the newsmakers and tags. (What’s a newsmaker? A person, corporation, government body, etc. What’s a tag? A topic, a location, a brand, etc.)
The kicker is that, once content is distilled into a simpler information architecture like ours, we can do much more exciting things with it. We can extract much more interesting information from it, make much more valuable conclusions about it, and ultimately build a much more naturally social platform.
People will no longer have to manage their intake of news. Our web application will filter the flow of information based on their interests and the interests of their friends and trusted experts, allowing them to allocate their scarce attention most efficiently.
It comes down to this: Aggregating documents gets you something like Digg or Google News—great for attracting passive users who want to be spoon fed what’s important. But few users show up at Digg with a predetermined interest, and that predetermined interest is how google monetized search ads over display ads to bring yahoo to its knees. Aggregating documents make sense in a document-scarce world; aggregating the metadata of those documents makes sense in an attention-scarce world. When it comes to the news, newsmakers and tags comprise the crucially relevant metadata, which can be rendered in a rich, intuitive visualization.
Which isn’t to say that passive users who crave spoon-fed documents aren’t valuable. We can monetize those users too—by aggregating the interests of our active users and reverse-mapping them, so to speak, back onto a massive set of documents in order to find the most popular ones.
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