Thought I’d throw out another business idea to the crowd… I’m not sure if it’s a business or feature, but how about the following:
I commute everyday to and from Manhattan. I spend about 20-25 minutes on multiple subways and about 35-45 minutes on the train each way. When I’m leaving the office around 7pm, I generally have not had time to catch up on my RSS feeds or industry news. I do most of my catchup either late night (when I get home) or early morning (right when I get in).
I am looking for a short and concise news breakdown from my RSS feeds or some other news source that is extremely relevant to me. 1-2 pages of headlines and content. Progress Partners does this well with their next media update.
Expand it beyond NMU and it could get interesting. As long as the content is relevant to me, I’d like the option to print it out and take it with me. Not digitally - but on paper.
Content when traveling - short and concise.
Instead of New York Time’s “all the news thats fit to print”, it could be, “all the day’s news that’s relevant to you.”
Who wants to be the publisher? I’ll subscribe.
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January 21st, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Oddly, I have been thinking of the same thing recently. I have a lot of data input, but little time to process it.
January 21st, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Check out brijit.com
I think that’s pretty much exactly what their strategy is with the main exception being that their focus is on long-form content and not news.
You can watch this interview with founder Jeremy Brosowsky who describes it in this interview:
http://www.socialtimes.com/2008/01/jeremy-brosowsky-brijitcom/
Note the 3:50-5:45 time segment in the interview.
January 21st, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Would be cool to take the top headlines and articles from Techmeme, Digg, and a few other sites and put them in a 5 page PDF for you at 5pm. I bet someone could write a script for that pretty easily.
January 21st, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Nate, great thoughts. I’ll fund it.
January 21st, 2008 at 3:58 pm
This is tough one. RSS news serve 3 basic purposes:
1. General news, industry, etc. Just to keep abreast of what is going on.
2. Ideas & Analysis: Especially in the marketing space you read blogs to find a little inspiration and be exposed to ideas that are bubbled up from the mess that is regular news.
3. Finally, blogs offer opportunity for discovery. By catering to niche groups they have relevant information to disseminate that would be overlooked by mass news orgs.
Sure you can just take a look at Digg, Techmeme, etc (which as we all know are far less democratic than they claim), but you actually missing the good information and only taking in the noise.
Information overload is something we all deal with, and Noah Brier actually started a discussion on his blog a while back on RSS filtering schemes.
In my opinion we need to zoom in from the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of OUR crowds. People that you trust to pass along the most relevant news to you. This can actually be done by subscribing to friend’s feeds through Greaders new pseudo social network, but it needs to go one step further and build in a system where your friends are rating others friends posts and you can view it at a high level. Finally, the ultimate system would allow you to not only see the bubbled up content, but also let you drill down into a high level trend, event, or ideas, perhaps through a tag-bases system, by grouping together other relevant information from across the web.
Personally, I ONLY ever read aggregation sites when I absolutely do not have time to read the actual sources. In the tech world the news is usually just being reposted and little analysis takes place, but in the design, trend, marketing space the aggregators lack significance. Read too much daily news and you get lost in the noise and it becomes harder to see the big picture, so watch out for the double-edged sword.
Seni
January 21st, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Seni, you do raise some good points, but there needs to be a very simple headline+description of some of the major news. Not really analysis - but just a summary of the news. On paper. For all of us, commuters.
January 21st, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Hi Darren,
It certainly isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, as it is still very digital not paper.
However, a lot of FeedHub users have been using the mobile version of NewsGator to get the most relevant posts from their feeds for their commute. They simply subscribe to their personalized feed from FeedHub and read it on the train / subway.
Just an idea …
- Sean
January 21st, 2008 at 9:57 pm
For really tailored content, I’d suggest using del.icio.us tags and adding/subscribing to tags most ‘relevant’ to you. You can then subscribe to your subscriptions via rss.
I also really like the method Webb Alert has of breaking down the headlines with links below their daily video
http://www.leveragingideas.com
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:06 am
Darren is Nate or a programer contact of his moving on this? What kind of funding are you talking about and has there been any additional qualified prospects?
February 9th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
[...] email of content summaries on a recurring basis. While I don’t think this is exactly what Darren Herman was asking for, it is getting [...]