Breathe In, Breathe Out

Go On, Distract Me with Something Interesting

I love surprises, especially the informational kind. Most days bring the same types of news and subjects that I follow in my RSS aggregators and various social media sites I look at. I've written about this before, but I keep hoping for new, unexpected ways to discover new information. That is, I like finding stuff I didn't know I was interested in until I found it. You know, that "aha, I didn't know about this, but,gosh, it's interesting."

So when I saw a Profy post titled; Twitter and FriendFeed Leave No Chance for a Balanced News Consumption to a Technology Blogger I was on it like my cat on his toy mouse. Among other issues Sevtlana Gladkova paints this sort of problem in geographical terms: when you're getting information in an echo chamber of tech news and the sort, you miss local news that may matter to you. Her solution is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of local news sources in Friendfeed.

I've had a similiar concerns, and I now get the headlines for the Columbus Dispatch in my twitter feed. For the most part, that works.

Locality news issues aside, this got me thinking about how I've found news and information in the past, and especially how I've developed new informational interests. Not surprisingly, at least part of the answer is traditional media like newspapers (and their websites), and television or radio news. With traditional journalistic media like these, the editors aggregate information into a package: a business section of the newspaper, a half hour nightly newscast, a magazine, etc. In other words, information is filtered by a team, not an individual, an algorithm or a keyword search.

When consuming the package, I can be exposed to stories that I might find interesting, but had not been exposed to before. From there, I can develop subject and keywords to follow online.

In social media, information is mostly filtered by individuals or by keyword or subject. As Svetlana points out, individuals who share your interests aren't likely to turn up new information outside of that sphere. And keywords just point to stories that are somehow related.

Social media sites like Friendfeed and twitter are individually based. Individuals are the filters. To be sure, almost nobody subscribes to just one individual, so there is a kind of aggregation going on. And some individuals offer great filtering. But the team aggregation effort, per se, is not there.

So this gets me wondering: Do we need some sort of broad (read more than individuals or algorithmic) non-keyword based aggregation service here? Is there an opportunity for a new kind of collaborative-based information aggregation service that might help with the discovery process in a new kind of way?

Or are we already beyond caring about something like that, content to consume and discuss everything based on a familiar subject? I hope not, but I fear so.

It even does screenshots!

iPhone 2.0

I'm trying out the new Typepad iPhone app, so this won't be much of a post.

Robot Policy?

A few days ago there was a discussion on Friendfeed about tech policy in the election and the new administration. Like any discussion, there were a range of opinions. But in the end, it boiled down not to the U.S. presidential candidates themselves, but a question about who was advising them on tech matters. Sure, John McCain admits he can't operate a computer, but does it matter if he's got the sharper advisors on tech policy? That remains to be seen; there's a long way to go until November.

But if you think the tech policy decisions are tough now, wait until the later half of this century. What will be different then? According to some present day authors quoted in Android apocalypse, artificially intelligent robots will surpass human intelligence. There probably not much of a debate about that. But it's what's predicted to happen as a result that's the stuff of nightmares - political, ethical, scientific, any-sort-of-ific you can think of.

Will they give us short shrift and annihilate us accidentally or on purpose, as AI expert and author Hugo de Garis writes about?

And with the advent of what artificial-intelligence expert Professor Hugo de Garis calls artilects - massively intelligent artificial intellects - there is the risk that not only will we have created our successors but also that such machines may wipe humans out by accident or design.

Or will they work with us (and for us) as envisioned by author and technologist Raymond Kurzweil?

Others are more optimistic. In his book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, writer and technological visionary Ray Kurzweil says that "within several decades information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the pattern-recognition powers, problem-solving skills, and emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself".

As futuristic and far out as all this sounds today, I don't think it's too early to start thinking of the policy implications of this kind of stuff. I'm not talking about any sort of planning here, since it really is too early for that. But good discussions of scenarios that might play out? Never too early for that.

After all, we don't want robots taking over Friendfeed, right?

Stupid from Googling? It Depends

There's been no shortage of discussion around Nicholas Carr's Atlantic essay Is Google Making Us Stupid. Do we really share an unhelpful shortened attention span from reading tweets and blogs instead of philosophical tomes? (Ok, that's an oversimplification, but you get the idea.) Some commenters say yes, some no. One thoughtful post by Kevin Kelly points out we haven't had this much shortened information in the past because it wasn't profitable to print and distribute.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote yet another bit on it in the TimesOnline today. piece today, I had some additional thoughts. Sullivan sees the symptoms in himself, but points out he's writing hundreds of blog posts a week now. He needs the info gathering action offered by right clicking and looking something up in Google or whatever online source. But he longs for long form stuff, too.

All this has got me thinking we'd be better off asking a slightly different question here. Instead of wonder if Google dumbs us all down, maybe we should focus on what it is we're looking for in the first place. And why we're looking. The debate here is not so much about getting stupid from using Google and other internet stuff that it is about how do we go about getting information on what we want and need.

If what we want and need to know is something complex, we may not be able to fulfill our need if all this stuff about Google is correct. Although we might be able to at least find sources of information about the complex subject. And I'd bet there are or will be ways to summarize large blocks of text to see if we want to spend the time with them, or move onto the next item. So, while the internet sources won't replace long form text, it can at least point us in the direction of the one that will help us the most.

But what if our needs are not so complex? If we simply want to know what is the latest on Friendfeed, that's not so complex. If we want to delve deeper and ask about social media's place in internet usage, that's not so bad either, but we'd need to delve a little farther.

If Google is making me stupid, I guess I was already dumb enough not to notice.

This Is Your Brain on Google

Author Nicholas Carr asks Is Google Making Us Stupid? in the most recent issue of the Atlantic magazine.

In a way, yes, but in another way it might be leading the way to some other way of knowing and acting in the world. What fascinated me most reading Carr's essay was his comparing what's happening at Google with the work of early management theorist Frederick Taylor. Technology and the measurements and recording it makes available propels us into the future without so much as a glance in the rearview mirror. The times they are a changin' - again.

Brain plasticity is another interesting point. We've only recently discovered how profoundly changeable the brain is to our experiences. If we don't read longish texts that influence our brains to make connections and imagine new things, then the brain adapts to that. Spend you time reading enough 140-character tweets, and you get good at doing that. But don't expect a lot of joy when you have to read and digest something long and complex. I suppose our brains could learn to adapt back, though.

Technorati Tags: brain, learning

A New Video Literacy, Just in Time

If you want to comment on this or many other blogs, you don't need to write something. You can simply talk out your comments as you record a video with your webcam. I think that's great. It opens up commenting to those who can't or don't want to type. And, let's face it, many of us would rather talk than type anyway.

picture

Image by brymo, via Flickr (CC license)

maybe there is a way to interact with and share video, but we just don't have the tools yet

Despite my enthusiasm, the launch of video commenting has landed with a kind of thud. As far as I can tell, the main objection is that you can't scan a video as you can a paragraph or so of text. True. But look at it another way: maybe there is a way to interact with and share video, but we just don't have the tools yet. (note: As I'm writing this I noticed YouTube has announced an annotation system.)

Kevin Kelly calls this ability to share and interact with video vizuality - a term so new it's not in Wikipedia, or even your spelling checker. Not to worry, though. Kelly spells out exactly what he means and briefly surveys some of the tools being developed to equip us to deal effectively with the all encompassing video world.

If we had the tools of vizuality to the same degree we have tools of literacy - like cut and paste, footnotes, summaries, dictionaries and the like -- creating a link to a fez or bow tie in a film or video would be no problem.

The printing press completed the great move of western civilization from orality to literacy. Later inventions of indexes, bibliographies, concordances, typewriters and 3x5 cards (for random examples) enabled literacy to expand in power until it underpinned our society. Now printed words are so ubiquitous in our environment we don't even notice them. There is probably not an object in the room you are in without text on it somewhere.

Motion pictures are on their way to become equally ubiquitous. With the arrival of cheap organic LEDs, moving images will soon cover every flat surface. As they do we will march from literacy to vizuality. In order to complete that great transition, we'll need a whole suite of tools, like these first primitive ones above, which permit us to manipulate, manage, store, cite and create moving images as easily as text.

It'll be interesting to see if and when vizuality shows up in Wikipedia. In the meantime, though, I'm looking forward to using these sorts of tools when they show up.

Technorati Tags: learning, socialmedia, video, vizuality

On Giving Them What They Want

When I was a TV program director, there was always the temptation to program just the stuff I (or my friends) personally liked. That's a good way to low, low ratings. And we all know what that means.

I suppose it's kind of the same situation for marketers or any sort. In the tech content providing biz right now, there's a similiar danger. Many services are frequented by early adopters, and who knows if their needs are the same as the mainsteam that the marketers hope will follow?

Well, it's becoming apparant that the needs or early adopters and potential mainstream users aren't the same. Otherwise, everyone would be an early adopter.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market does a good job of fleshing out this situation. For example:

Although RSS has turned out to be a key technology which powers a number of interesting functionality behind the scenes (e.g. podcasting) actually subscribing and reading news feeds in an RSS reader has not become a mainstream activity of Web users. When you think about it, it is kind of obvious. The problem an RSS reader solves is "I read so many blogs and news sites on daily basis, I need a tool to help me keep them all straight". How many people who aren't enthusiastic early adopters (i) have this problem and (ii) think they need a tool to deal with it?

So we kinda know that. What do service providers need to do to get beyond the early folks and really start raking it in.  Not as difficult as you'd think; common sense, really.

However the one overriding theme is that all of these recent entrants is that they solve problems that everyone [or at least a large section of the populace] has. Everyone likes to communicate with their social circle. Everyone likes watching funny videos and looking at couple pics. Everyone wants to find information about topics they interested in or find out what's going on around them. Everybody wants to get laid.

So there you go - it always seem to come back to that sort of stuff, doesn't it?

Related articles

• RSS Needs An Easy Button [via Zemanta]

Friendfeed Activity

I've been spending a lot of time over on Friendfeed lately, so not posting much here. Here's some of the stuff I've been looking at:

Easy Ways to Participate in Social Media

Image by luc legay, via Flickr (CC license)

Earlier, I wrote about why I’m interested in social networking or social media like Twitter and Friendfeed. While these services are heavy with tech/pr content right now, I think services like this can be immensely useful for all sorts of groups and even individuals. Right now, those sites are heavy with tech/pr content, but that's not always going to be the case IMO.

But what can you do if you’ve been curious about social media or social networks like Twitter or Friendfeed or whatever, but you don’t know much about how to go about participating?

You might start with 5 Great Ways to Contribute to Social Media. Sharing can be as simple as one simple click to indicate you like something someone else has shared. Or you might just share information about a new application you've tried and liked. It doesn't have to be complicated at all.

Social Networks: Why I Care

I've been reading a lot about social media, spending time on Twitter and especially FriendFeed. Why? Primarily because of the ideas I read about Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. Boiled way down, the social networking technologies make it possible to do something that was unthinkable not so long ago - to organize without organizations.

Another effect of these new technologies has to do with traditional filters to publishing content: they just aren't as relevant anymore. Want to write an article about your favorite subject? Go ahead; write and post it for the world to see here on the internet. You don't need an editor to give you the go ahead.

One consequence is the explosion of content available. RSS feeds, twitter streams, etc. And we can feel like we're drowning in information as a result.

So I've begun to think about why I need to pay attention to stuff like Friendfeed and Twitter. But right now, both are primarily filled with Tech/PR types sharing lots of information. And I'm not a Tech/PR person.

If I’m not a PR or Tech guy, so what do I care what Robert Scoble and Louis Gray find interesting? Not to pick on them, mind you. They are two of the most popular and active.

What I’m really interested in is learning to use these new tools most effectively. Some day, the content distributed by these tools won’t be almost exclusively about Tech/PR. I might want to gather a group of Feldenkrais practitioners or clients to share ideas. But if I or they don’t know how to use these tools well, what’s the point? But if we do learn how to use Twitter, Friendfeed or whatever well, then we’ll have a sharing ability we didn’t have before. And that will be a really valuable asset to have.

Every once in a while, you get some gems on using FF or Twitter, or whatever, in a way that wasn’t clear before. For example, Gray posted some useful information yesterday about hiding stuff (that is, filtering information) in FriendFeed.

So I’ll keep on subscribing to their stuff. And someday I’ll figure out how to filter it for what I really need from it. Or some item in Scoble’s or Gray’s feed will help point the way.

Perpetual Early Adoption

How do things change? Yeah, I know, that sounds like a bunch of metaphysical BS. But it starts getting practical when you add a qualifier statement like change "from what in and to what" and then apply that to a specific field, like, say, marketing.

Every business school student comes across the idea of a product lifecycle: a product or service gets introduced, pickedup by early adopters, then mainstream adopters, and then onto late adopters. There's been a lot of early adopter buzz lately among social media geeks. You know, the people who've been on Twitter since it began.

Robert Scoble, champion of early adopters everywhere, wrote about Early Adopter Angst on his blog today. The take away message here, at least for me, is early adopters are the ones driving change in society. I certainly buy into that; you can follow me on Twitter to prove it. But I came away from Scoble's article with a nagging sense of "something's missing here."

A product, service or idea, if it's to appeal to even the earliest of adopters, needs to be seen as worthwhile. And for that, it has to make sense within the context of the current culture. Ideas too far ahead of their time can wither and die without as much as a whimper, let alone an echo.

And that idea came from remembering something I read a while ago in the book The Wisdom Paradox. I don't recall the specific terms used, but the sense of it is something like you never here about the real geniuses because their ideas are so far ahead, no one at the time can relate to them. Passenger service didn't make sense when there were no railroads, buses or airlines, for example.

Scoble promotes the idea that Twitter will be mainstream in a few years. Maybe. But even if an idea does make at least a little sense, I think it can remain in the early adopter stage for a long, long time.

One of the things I do is something called the Feldenkrais Method. Without getting into specifics here - click on the link in my blog's sidebar to read about it - it's been stuck in the early stage of the early adopter stage for about 40 years. And I don's see it getting out anytime soon.

And I think that's a shame. It has real benefits to offer almost anyone. Yet, today, it's somewhat known within the various flavors of physical therapy, and almost not at all outside them.

One of the things it does well, better and easier than anything else I've experienced, is change the state of tonus in your body. That is, it loosens overly tight muscles and tightens overly loose muscles, result in better posture and ease of movement. And, of yeah, it makes you feel good, and even reenergized. And you can get pretty stiff and tight by, say, staring at a computer screen for long periods of time.

It's been in the early adopter stage for 40 years or so. A related method, the Alexander Technique, has been in the early adopter stage for over 100 years!

Will they ever get out of the early adopter stage? Hard to say, but I'm thinking probably not. But I'm glad I adopted it early, even if no one's heard of it. The challenge is relating it to everyday life of all of us, not just people who need to rehab. It really does have benefits for all of us.

Will maintreamers and late adopters get in on it? I hope so, but I fear the answer is no.

But, hey, we can still Twitter about it, can't we?

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, learning, marketing, socialmedia, change

Less Television, More Media

Image by gbaku, via Flickr (CC license)

With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube.

Much of the useless information I know came from watching television. I know who shot JR, for example. Or, McDreamy and McSteamy used to live in New York, and McSteamy slept with McDreamy's wife.

Yep, I've pissed away a lot of hours in front of the boob tube. But not nearly so much in the last couple of years. There are plenty of other ways to consume media time - blogging, twittering, sharing stuff with friends and family. What? You thought I was going to talk about using the time to read or exercise?)

Oh, we still watch a few favorites, whenever we want, thanks to TIVO. But consuming media - maybe better put as using media like television - isn't the same as it was and never will be, thank goodness.

Author Clay Shirky has made a career out of talking about this kind of stuff. His book Here Comes Everybody will give you a clear view of what's going on with media and society. And a transcript of his speech at the Web 2.0 Conference puts it in a little more perspective.

Society's television viewing bender came not from the invention of television, but was a kind of side effect from adopting the 5-day work week in the 20th century. That change created a big dab of free time, and Philo T Farnesworth, David Sarnoff, William Paley, et al were happy to fill it.

Shirky calls the free time a cognitive surplus, time you brain doesn't have to think about work. With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube. The tube produced, and we consumed; a classic one-way interaction.

But the internet and social media have changed all that. We can still consume media, but we can also produce out own content and share it with whomever we please quite easily and cheaply.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And that's making for a big change that will be even bigger when today's toddlers grow up:

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

That all sounds like the most wonderful thing - and it is. But I think there are going to be some side effects that aren't necessarily good ones.

Increasingly we can consume, produce and share media on the go with mobile devices like iPhones, Blackberries, or whathaveyou. And we've probably all experienced trying to hold a conversation with someone who's preoccupied with reading email or looking something up on one of those mobile devices.

I've referred to this continuous partial attention syndrome previously. I expect it will get a lot worse as things unfold.

But at least we won't spend enormous amounts of time watching and wondering who shot JR.

Where Do Comments Belong?

Slow Saturday, so there's a kind of tempest in a teapot about blog comments and where they belong. Louis Gray started it out by asking Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners Ire? He's talking about the increasingly available option of posting comments about a blog post on social bookmarking sites (Friendfeed, for example). One of the problems with this practice is that the comments don't show up on the blog, and so the author might never see them.

Divorcing comments from the post they're commenting on doesn't make a lot of sense to me. On the other hand, social bookmarking sites are their own feed aggregators and take advantage of the connections in the networks of people using them.

Dave Winer wrote a little bit about this on his blog today. But he also mentioned a way the RSS 2.0 standard can support direct comments to the blog. And he demonstrated with a screenshot of one that does.

I tried it out, and lo and behold, it does. And I wondered if other aggregators offered a similar feature. The only one I could find was NetNewsWire. If you right click on a headline in NNW's headline list one of the contextual menu options is "open comments." At least it is on some blogs, but not all. So NNW must be using the RSS 2.0 tag that Winer talked about.

I think this would be a useful option for any aggregator, desktop or web-based. In the meantime, I've signed up for Disqus comments hosting that offers a way of coordinating comments.

What do you think?

TWIT on Journalism, Twitter

This Week in Tech or TWIT as it's known, is a podcast focused on, well, technical news of the week. As such, it's usually not that exiciting, though it does serve a purpose.

image by chodhound, via Flickr (CC license)

But the episode I listened to today broke the pattern. Host Leo Laporte and guests discussed the future of journalism, online and traditional. What made this stand out for me was the discussion wasn't coming from the usual suspects, traditional journalists. Instead, it was veteran content providers from he online information flood that continues to flow over the banks.

Stating the obvious usually doesn't count for much, but I found it refreshing when the panel agreed that most blogs are, at best, secondary sources of news. They are simply commenting or expanding upon the stuff uncovered by primary journalists - the men and women who dig up topics, research and filter them before presenting them to the public. So if the flow of financing for traditional journalism switches to secondary online sources, where does that leave us? Don't know about you, but I don't want to depend on Huffington Post as my primary source of news.

There were other discussions on meat and potatoes reporting subdizing stuff like international news: think New York Times. And of course recognizing how much times goes down the drain as the Twitter stream flows by. I'm starting to see a really big ratio of 'stuff I can't use' to 'stuff I can use.' Still, it's fun to watch the flow - sometimes.

As I think about this stuff, I'm leaning toward the idea of online delivery mainly supplementing local news. Let's face it, most local news doesn't take Woodward and Bernstein to report it.

If you are at all interested in online and traditional news, I wouldn't hestiate recommending a download and listen. I hope to see more TWITs like this in the future.

PC Experiences

Photo by rtpeat via Flickr (CC license)

$800 ... That's half of what he paid for the machine in the first place!

It was four years ago now that my frustration with Windows and PCs got the best of me. One too many crashes, lost information and mounds of time to restart, reconfigure and re-experience the nightmare that had become Windows. I switched to a Mac. My blood pressure came down and life just seems better overall these days. Have I ever looked back and regretted my decision. Well, not really, not even for just a minute. There's plenty of reinforcement to help provide backsliding here. Times writer Harry Hurt III provides one in [his account](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/09/business/smallbusiness/09pursuits.html?ex=1360299600&en=f630c3ca1da8f959&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss "Sending an S O S for a PC Exorcist - New York Times") of the $800 he had to spend to get his new PC's functioning restored. That's half of what he paid for the machine in the first place! So, no, I haven't regretted the switch. And even though I *could* install Windows on my Intel-based Mac ....

Information Wants to Be Embodied

We attended a performance by author David Sedaris at a local theater a few months ago. I had heard Sedaris a few times on public radio's This American Life, but didn't know much about him. For an admission cost of $95, I wondered what kind of performance he'd give us.

I guess I was expecting a kind of stand up routine or lecture. Instead, Sedaris mostly just read from a manuscript he was working on. And he was visibly editing the script based on audience reaction.

I loved every minute of it.

Had you told me beforehand I was paying good money to observe a guy editing copy, I probably would have dismissed the whole idea. After all, I could listen to Sedaris for free on the radio or borrow one of his books from the library.

What would make me happy to pay for something I could get for free?

Kevin Kelly couches the question in slightly different terms, but does a great job explaining in Better Than Free. He starts by making the point that the Internet creates copies of everything digital. This makes stuff that can be digitized more or less free.

But there's a paradox here: superabundant copies become free. However, when this happens, it's the stuff that can't be copied that becomes scarce and valuable.

Kelly calls the stuff that can't be copied "generative qualities." He lists and elaborates on a number of them in the essay. For the David Sedaris performance, the thing I was paying for was embodiment:

At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you'd like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same room? There is no end to greater embodiment. Sure, the hi-res of today -- which may draw ticket holders to a big theater -- may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new insanely great display technology that consumers won't have. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive.

It's a bit ironic that I found Kelly's essay in my news aggregator, available for free as are the hundreds of feeds I read regularly. Would I pay for this essay? Sure, if it were in a more permanent and convenient form like, say, a book. That would add a generative quality of accessibility, and make it worth a few bucks to me.

But it would also add the generative quality of findability, perhaps exposing the essay to readers who might not find it on the Internet. According to Kelly, findability is one of the value functions by aggregators. Not the software programs that process RSS feeds, but the organizations that package talent and information. Part of the bargain here is the aggregators (producers, distributors and labels or PDL), offer avenues to direct attention to the information being produced.

I think Kelly himself kind embodies this quality with his websites and books. He's also part of the lineage of that grand aggregator of information from the 1960's, The Whole Earth Catalog.

And if Kelly wants to come read from his manuscript , I'll happily buy a ticket.

Yellow Journalism: Not So Bad?

Yellow journalism generally gets a bad rap, but maybe it wasn't really so horrible. Some of the same factors that gave rise to yellow journalism are with us today. But we might all benefit from it this time, at least according to one journalism scholar.

It seems like everything's reality TV and celebrity gossip, neither of which I have much interest in. But everything isn't, thank goodness.

The hugely fragmented market for TV programming provides a lot of choice, and a TIVO provides the means to capture it and let me view it whenever I want. A lot of crap on TV, but I don't have to see it. No slam against Dancing with the Stars or Entertainment Tonight fans: they can do the same as me. (At least when the writers come back from their strike.)

Same idea with news and other sorts of topical information. The Internet has made for an almost infinitely segmented market where all sorts of regular (and irregular news) can be found. And that trend will expand greatly in the future.

Search engines make finding news and info easy, and distribution technologies like RSS and email bring it to you so that you can do whatever you want with it on your own timetable

This level of choice seems relatively new and shiny, but it's not, not really. We've seen stuff like this before in an unlikely place - the era of yellow journalism about a hundred years ago. At least that's what writer Steve Boriss is getting at in Yellow Journalism: the Golden Age of American News.

Now most of us are used to thinking of yellow journalism as a bad thing, what with Citizen Kane telling his journalists "you supply the headlines, I'll supply the war."

But there's a lot more to it than that. Yellow journalism arose in response to both technology's effects on publishing and distribution, along with population growth. Boriss paints a clear time line of all this:

• expensive-to-publish newspapers appealing to the elites at first;
• then steam driven presses driving down the cost of production;
• then the telegraph and telephone making in all current and relevant.

Suddenly in the late 19th century, technology stood the elite and the unwashed side by side, so to speak. The audience was a mass one, but the media hadn't caught up.

Then Joseph Pulitzer came up with a formula for covering the real news, but doing so in a sensationalist way that also appealed to the masses. The serious news presented in a way appealing across the board, driving circulation and profitability to new heights.

According to Boriss, this lasted until the elite publishers got pissed enough to form a cartel out of the Associated Press, drying up the sources of sensational news treatments and setting the tone of the news business for the next 100 years.

So here we are again. Technology has dealt us a new hand. If you want sensationalized news, it's just a click or two away. If you want the serious stuff, same thing. But now it's really segmented, coming from too many sources to count - for now, at least.

Not everyone will agree with Boriss' ideas. One commenter on the blog that published the post took exception, saying in effect it could promote even more Britney and Paris news than ever before. If Boriss is even remotely onto something here, the answer is yes, it probably will. And there will be people ready to snap up even the most minute gossip nugget. I'd bet saturation determined by advertisers,not news consumers.

There aren't any Pulitzers or Hearsts - yet, though we do have Murdoch. But that's OK. I'll just start to worry when someone like Murdoch owns Fox News and MSNBC at the same time.