Thinking About Content Consumption

Posted by Darren on Jan 23, 2010 • (Comments)

I’ve been thinking a lot about content consumption lately.  The main reason for this is because for me, it’s broken.  Sub-optimal.   There is no way I can keep up with everything that is actively passed my way and passively written that I may want to consume.

There are a few reasons for this:

  • Not enough time in the day (which one can argue comes down to prioritization)
  • Content overload – at some point, my brain switches OFF, usually around 7/8pm after a 12 hour day
  • Filtering of content is weak.  Lots of people trying to solve this however
  • Access to content at the *right* time

The first RSS reader I used (and paid) was Newsgator, back in 2005.  I used Newsgator for a while and then switched over to Google Reader for a specific reason – though don’t remember precisely what it was.  I loved Google Reader for a while, but the issue I had with RSS readers was that if I did not check them for a period of time, I almost felt inundated with information and I would just reset all the feeds (mark as read) and start from scratch… though losing out on all of that particular content.  Needless to say, I’ve not used my RSS reader in the past 8 months or so.

I’ve recently been using My6Sense for my iPhone and happen to like what they are doing.  They are using something that they call Digital Intuition (their secret sauce filtering wizbang) to filter out articles that they think I may not like and it’s working so far.

Being that I have seeded a recent company within the content consumption space, I’d like to share you with a few thoughts which I hope you riff/expand/debate:

  • Screen Space (i.e. your laptop screen, netbook screen, iPhone, etc) is not used optimally.  Why should 1 application dominate the entire screen.  There are times when this is needed (i.e. spreadsheets, etc) but imagine dedicating a portion of your screen to “content”
  • Content consumption can be done two ways:  passively & actively.    Many people are trying to solve content consumption through active means but there is certainly opportunity around passive consumption.  It’s not OR, but rather, “AND.”  I think the killer content consumption application is passive AND active.
  • Filtering content is not easy.  Active filtering such as Pandora, passive filtering such as Amazon has not been perfected though many users expect this.
  • The reason for content consumption is not always logical or rationale, which throws off an intelligence engine/filtering product.   Some of the solid methods account for this, but you would be surprised how many do not.

An interesting company to watch in the space that just emerged is SocialVisor.  They released a ticker-like service (not dissimilar interface to what I just seeded) that is a dumbed down Tweetdeck.  Nicely done.

I continue to think there is room to aid for consumption.

  • There are 27MM tweets per day, 126MM blogs, 234MM websites and 350MM people on Facebook.  No shortage of content being created. (stats here)
  • There is over $500bln dollars worth of marketcap chasing the content indexing game.
  • Who is chasing content consumption?  (me!)
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  • Seems to me that our own actions can be used to create a content consumption taxonomy that can then be used to power some feed mash-up of our content discovery and content recovery goals. I think there are some interesting things happening along these lines in the semantic tech space.

    Google personalized search is also working on solving these problems including some of the temporal and behavioral attributes you allude to. Part of the issue is solving these problem on the per-user level just does not provide the robust data sets necessary to accurately tune relevance. This is after all at the end of the day, like so much else on the web, a matching problem.

    Personally I quite like the various content consumption tools at my disposal. I have 60 blogs on RSS, follow 350 people on Twitter, I get some interesting content everyday via email and I am pretty active searching Google, YouTube & LinkedIn. Only five years my content consumption world was barren compared to this. I'm psyched to hear you're working on trying to make it even better.
  • I do devote a whole screen- my second monitor is tweetdeck. I've yet to find curration services compelling. I like to pick my own sources, 15 blogs I read each day, and let te rest come via friends on twitter.

    Techmeme does some curration, and I read it, but it's more because it picks the most popular stories in our industry.
  • You do raise a great point - my second monitor has become solely dedicated to consuming. Techmeme, Tweetmeme,and Tweetdeck are almost always open in it. Great point.
  • Same here. Now that I always have my computer hooked up to my home TV, I'm starting to think about that screen as well.

    I'm now in the (bad?) habit of having TV in my apartment on as background --- having some sitcom or news on with the volume down low. I'd like a personalized video feed that just runs on my TV while I'm hanging around my apartment. If I see something I like, I'd turn up the volume or add to my Boxee queue. That would be the feedback loop for giving me better and more relevant content in my personalized feed.
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