Publish2 As Blogger Journalist Platform

Fresh from a 2.75 Million funding round, internet startup Publish2 will seek to create a sort of Digg-like social bookmarking community for journalism and journalists / bloggers.

Venture Beat's got the scoop and notes in their article:

Publish2 intends to be a sort of news aggregator that’s based on the stories
that journalists — broadly defined to include bloggers — think are interesting,
so not unlike Digg or Techmeme. It’s a social bookmarking site ...

As Matt Marshall notes this is a really intriguing idea despite the fact that many such news aggregator approaches have so far failed to gain much traction with the exception of Google News. With Scott Karp, Jeff Jarvis, and other prominent journalists on board already Publisher2 could gain some immediate traction. Also, Publisher2 appears to have a component of cross linking by stories and journalists which could bring it a measure of ranking success at Google, which favors stories and websites that have abundant "inbound linking". That said, Google is notoriously suspicious of any linking systems that they feel may undermine the integrity of the Google algorithm. Yet Publisher2's approach appears to fall pretty squarely into what Google tends to view as a legitimate approach to linking.

Microsoft's Live Rome Edition. The Empire Stikes Back?

Harrison Hoffman, reporting at CNET, is impressed with the news feature that Microsoft is now bringing to the LIVE search environment as part of the changes to LIVE that are codenamed "ROME" and are to be released this spring. LIVE has struggled for some time to take market share from Google and/or Yahoo, and so far LIVE has failed to deliver.

Thus despite the cleverness of the Microsoft LIVE team I'm skeptical that they can do much to pull readers away from Google's excellent Google news service unless they manage to bring news directly into the explorer browser. Microsoft has a sorry history of losing to Google in virtually every head to head search item, so it is hard to bet that LIVE news will fare much better given that it does not even appear to include as many news sources as Google News.

Important News Will Not Find You

If the news is important, will it find you?

Two normally insightful web watchers - Matt Ingram who writes for the Toronto Globe and Mail and his own techology blog, and Mark Cuban who writes for the heck of it after making a billion or so during web bubble number one - suggest that the news will find them.

They are wrong, and this line of thought is both foolish and dangerous.

The notion is that in our globally networked and highly interconnected 24/7 information environment important items won't just drop off of the radar - rather these "need to know" news items will find their way to a reasonably alert person via emailings from friends, twitters or Facebook contacts, blog aggregation, or other methods. Matt and Mark think that just because they have broadband to the house and they've got some good social networking going on they are protected from ignorance. But they are not.

As much as we should appreciate the power the internet brings to the information table, it is imperative now more than ever that we identify the limits of that power. It would take a novel to illustrate all the examples of how our new information environment can distort and misdirect our short attention spans to the wrong stuff, but the ADD version of the story is that while the internet does a good job of helping us find specific information once we take the time to research a topic, the internet also leads to some very undesirable conditions with respect to news:

One challenge is the echo chamber effect. Aggregation sites like Google News, Technorati and TechMeme use various algorithms to determine how much "buzz" a news story has. This in turn lifts the most relevant sites on the topic to the top of the heap, which in turn creates stories based on that initial buzz. This feedback loop tends to create an over-examination of the buzz topic and ignore deeper, more complex issues that are hard to write about.

Another far more important challenge is our human and social tendency to interact with trivial but interesting news rather than heavy, important news. You can only view so much material per day, and if your social network is buzzing about the latest gadget or latest scandal you are more likely to encounter that news than an item about the ongoing genocide in Darfur, or the fact that expanding malaria programs and advances in oral rehydration therapy in the third world could save several thousand children per day. The latter are significant and changing items that only rarely make the news cut.

Our interest in the trivial over the substantive creates a commercial challenge as well. Most online news now has a very strong commercial component and people are more likely to bring pageviews to Britney Spears head shaving incident than a report on the effectiveness of famine relief programs in Africa. I'm not blaming the internet for our ignorance, but I'm not going to credit it with bringing us much enlightenment either.

My point is that simply having our new and massive information gathering capability by no means guarantees we'll have the wisdom to pay attention to what really matters.

The internet has not let us off the hook by any means.

Important news will not find you.