Using del.icio.us as an edited news reader

When newspapers go online, they tend to use a content management system (CMS); no one "hard-codes" the home page. An RSS news feed can also be viewed as a CMS, albeit one you have only sky-level control over. However, when all news exists in a CMS, and RSS abounds, it begs the question, what exactly is the meaning or relevance of a media title.

I want news by topic, relevance, popularity or author. I'm not sure the name on the journalist's paycheque is relevant to me.

That said, I've stumpled upon an interesting use for del.icio.us -- the "social bookmarking" website famous for inventing (or popularizing) the use of tags. I wrote an earlier post here about my mis-use of tagging, when I first joined del.icio.us -- spasmodically, I tagged every bookmark with a cathartic splurge of verbage. Any and all words that I associated with that website, or the unerlying concept, found their way into the tag line. In theory, a year or a decade down the road, your brain would not have changed so much than a slightly more restrained splurge of verbage, in a search, would not return the saught-for bookmark.

This was all stupid. Tags are not psycho-analysis. They are categories. They are an improvement on the Mac/Windows "folder" concept in that, though they still are folders,

there can be multiple folders for one bookmark.

I don't have much use for the "social" aspect of del.icio.us. I don't care what's "hot" there. Digg does that better. And I have even less use for it as an alternative to my browser's favourites feature. I do use del.icio.us as a very functional storage vehicle for news and other "thought leadership." My job requires me to know a lot about what's going on ... not just what news stories "have legs," but what smart people are saying about the economy and business, etc. Since I spend a lot of time each day reading original news (and thought leadership) sources, I take the opportunity to save interesting articles in del.icio.us. By tagging, I can look back over categories, which could equate with industries or clients, etc. Furthermore, since del.icio.us' URL conventions are logical (ie. a list of all posts you've tagged "IFRS" can be found at del.icio.us/your_name/IFRS), it is extremely easy to share segregated news feeds with others.

Futurism? Virtual bike race.

GPS's for bicycles are emerging, and they offer a lot. No more measuring the radius of your wheel ... just add batteries and go. Some include heart rate montiors (with the constrictive chest strap).

Though bike-focused GPS units do well as bike computers, in time they will likely do more. Imagine hitting a website and downloading a local route or waypoints from a friend or stranger to the unit. Then make your way to the starting point and hit GO to start the race. Nevermind that your competitor may have done his/her race weeks or years earlier ... you're going head to head on the screen! And you can upload the results for bragging rights.

In a race with waves, downloading the progress of others in real time (which goes beyond a GPS's capability now) would make it more of a head-to-head race.

What if data about poorly surveyed areas was aggregated to give a sense of the altitude of land masses?

Or if non-road routes were aggregates for map makers, who could analyze the data to locate popular trails that may have never been recorded (or intended by any authority!). Or imagine you were in an unfamiliar area and you could download non-road paths that were popular -- ie. to the GPS unit a field is a field, but if 30 people have ridden a particular route through that field, it might suggest the same to you.

They would likely also serve as Black Boxes in the case of an accident -- something that cyclists prone to breaking traffic laws should be mindful of.

Algorithms are the new "brand"

If you spend a million bucks establishing a brand, and you do it well, you could benefit from that investment for years. But if you spend a million bucks on innovation, society will benefit forever.

Establishing market share has been important since the start of the post-war consumer economy ... an era that hasn't ended, but has morphed a little into to the knowledge economy. As a business tactic branding is still relevant. Ask Jeeves, Yahoo and even Google are cute and huggable -- more so than the racks of computers that comprise their offering.

But, clearly, one of these is winning where the others are not, and it's not because people want to hug it. It's nice that a search for "blue jays" no longer returns ornithology, as it easily could have prior to Google, but the company's better search results are only the first taste of how algorithms will displace brands.

Plentyoffish.com is a dating site. It could be the most profitable company in the history of legitimate business (income is suggested to be $5 - $10 million annually). One man manages one website -- oh, and he writes algorithms, which form the core of his site. He doesn't advertise and clearly has never worked with a graphic artist. I'm not even sure if his neighbours know what he does. What does he do? He simply runs a dating website that learns about people's tastes and matches them with similar people. But here's the brilliant part -- rather than coding psychology, he simple allows his members to interact with one another -- some positively, some negatively -- providing real-time evidence of what makes the members get along. If, all things being equal, people who like Ikea furniture also want to visit Thailand ... Pentyoffish.com probably knows this. Over time, the site introduces members to fewer duds and, like how Google gives you the right Blue Jays, builds its popularity by continually improving its ability to match potential mates.

Not that lava life doesn't have sexy ads. They do.

Amazon has been doing this with books for nearly a decade, but their system doesn't appear as sophisticated. Web2.0 definitions may miss the boat when they talk about Ajax and social networking. FaceBook is cool, but so are those hub caps that spin around when you stop. What's really of value are the algorithms that build value in a knowledge economy, and displace the need for branding.

Why satellite radio will beat iTunes, IMHO

Regardless of whether Napster was itself illegal, it was only popular because no alternative existed which had the blessing of music "owners." Today, the iTunes store is a very popular web-tool that essentially gives users what Napster did, but with the blessing of the music "owners."

Some people who use iTunes own fewer than 1000 songs. In my opinion, in a library of 1000 songs, about 200 are truly enjoyable. However, a typical core library of 200 songs begins to lose its "freshness" after about three months of rotation. Adding songs to that list through iTunes costs $1 a song, so even being very careful and adding only "core" songs, it will cost $198 to gain another three months of "freshness," or $66 per month. Some people will pay this, and enjoy picking the songs. Many will find the cost -- and agony (watch someone sweat over a large, unfamiliar menu) of making 66 individual choices per month -- prohibitive.

Satellite radio (or Internet radio, TV radio, or other digital audio), on the other hand, can be thought of as someone with a library of 250,000 songs, including every new one. The key advantage, however, is in the feedback. If a satellite radio station can be "trained" to know your musical tastes, then it can not only deliver old songs that you are likely to enjoy, but predict which new songs you will also like. In fact, if it can narrow your tastes well enough, you may even be able to receive just a core of 200 good songs, out of a selection of 250,000 possible songs, and this core will automatically update with newly released songs every day, completely updating before any song becomes stale.

In the case of portable music, an iPod is comparable in price to a satellite receiver (it is likely cheaper, but has a shorter life). However, satellite radio costs close to $15 per month, while 66 new songs per month on iTunes costs $65. Furthermore, for the average consumer, no decision-making is required.

Despite my love of iTunes, I think that, within a decade, music-as-content will be stored on central servers and streamed to users, rather than "owned" by individuals.