Back in the year 2000, I had an email newsletter called “DesignArchitecture” which had 30,000 daily readers. It was completely created by hand. We would get up early every morning and scour the online news papers to find great stories about architecture. The problem was that I had to hire someone to do this for me, since I was building Cosential, and it became a very expensive thing to maintain, especially when ad dollars dried up. I had to decide which was the better path to profitability so I had to let Designarchitecture go for a while.
Today Techmeme announced that they are going to add a human editor to curate the automated newsfeed.
Any competent developer who tries to automate the selection of news headlines will inevitably discover that this approach always comes up a bit short. Automation does indeed bring a lot to the table — humans can’t possibly discover and organize news as fast as computers can. But too often the lack of real intelligence leads to really unintelligent results.
This is a great idea and I can see that the machine/human hybrid combination will make a much better way to aggregate news. It will also help prevent smart people from gaming the system by automatically posting stories when they figure out the algorithm of Techmeme. Technology is great, but a human editor can modify the algorithm much faster than a programmer.
Add New Comment
Viewing 1 Comment
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment
Trackbacks
(Trackback URL)