How to Fix News Aggregation
This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. I’d love to create it, but I would need serious funding.
Let me just put the idea out there:
Right now, it is difficult for users to find local content on socially populated news aggregators like Digg, Reddit and others.
You can find local content on Google News, but it lacks the social aspect, the pre-selection based on popularity.
This is because news aggregators are global, and for a signal to rise above the noise, it must have mass appeal.
You could solve this problem by giving news stories a geographic radius of influence which would expand or contract as users vote them up or down.
As it arrived, each news story would be tagged with a radius of influence, and each user would be tagged as inhabiting a radius of interest.
The radius of influence would be circle on a map, drawn around the location where each story was reported. The circle would be larger when the population density was low. So, an area with a small population would have a large circle on the map. Densely populated areas have small radii of influence. So, an area like a neighborhood in New York City would have a small circle on the map.
The radius of interest would be a circle drawn around each user. It would follow the same rules, but could be adjusted if the user wished.
All stories would begin with a small radius of influence, but this radius would expand as users voted up the story. Stories with local interest would not expand far beyond the area relevant to the users in that community. Stories with mass appeal would expand rapidly and eventually become available to all users.
Users could click on areas around the country to see what was most popular in a specific community. A story about state taxes would generate a circle which would likely cover the state and the surrounding areas. A story about a mass shooting would cover the entire country based on interest, but do so organically.
There is a need for local news to be delivered to the public through the social aggregation tools which have proved so valuable over the last few years. Local news outlets are constantly attempting to get stories picked up by larger outlets.
At the same time, there is a need within those social aggregation tools to eliminate skewing of data through agendas and hijacking by PR and advertising efforts. Between the two models – algorithm based news delivery and social link sharing – there is a gap.
The above would bridge that gap and bring something new to the table – the “living” organic growth of important news stories across multiple audiences by first serving the intended audience and then the worldwide one.
I’ve told you before that I’ve always thought this was the way to do it.
I really don’t think it would take that much money to do. Doing it right is more than a “one guy in his spare time” project, but I dare say that building it would be cheaper than you think, and it could be self-sustaining financially by the time it had enough momentum to require any serious capital to run.
Where do you see most of the cost coming in?
Your stuff is brilliant. It’s been awhile since I’ve found someone online that I kept reading all the way back to their earliest stuff. Your short paragraphs, your tone, the external links collected at the bottom of the post — there’s lots of innovation going on in your blogs, to say nothing about your great content. But this post tips into greatness, so simple yet exactly right. I’ve never read anyone who combines these skills the way you do. Great work.
Thank you much. If you know of any way to get this idea out there, I’d love to see it happen. Again, thanks.