In my last blog post Search is Broken I wrote about the emerging existence of realtime, expressed content. I also explained that the significance of that content to me is heavily influenced by my social graph.
We don’t have any full analyses yet, but at this point in time there are at least two main kinds of information in the “expressed” web.
The first is expression of personal thought, feeling and experience. For instance “I just had a burger at FiveGuys with @chesspark and it was good.” There’s a lot of information. I was with @chesspark. We ate at Five Guys and Gerry, being a known connoisseur of greasy meat-foods, likes the burgers there. That’s interesting and it is packed away in the Twitter feed for eternity, for anyone who wants to know.
That’s sort of interesting when it’s about food. It may be really interesting to find an accidental drug interaction. It might also be of value to see that I know @chesspark. I am going to leave that type of information for now and focus on what I think is the real disruptor, news.
News is changing. And I am not only talking about the stuff we get on the 6:00 news. I am talking about anything that is a new piece of information that is relevant to me.
Historically, agencies have been the herald of the timely, the unexpected and the impactful. They have been the agenda-setter for (at least a chunk of) the things we care about. Journalists, schooled in ethics and fact checking techniques – driven by a desire to be the next Bob Woodward – search for the place and time of the next big occurrence.
Problem is that news happens everywhere, all of the time. So the task of staying on top of it with a professional team of journalists is impossible. Infinite places and times for things to happen – finite number of reporters.
Good for us things are changing and we now have umpteen sensors out there, collecting and expressing tidbits of detail that have varying degrees of relevance to us. This has an enormous potential for transforming not just the type of “news” we are exposed to, but the proximity of the news too. Specifically, when our friends and connections express information, there is a high potential for that to be relevant to us, possibly moreso than our favorite newscaster…
Truth is, every jackass with a blackberry/iphone/run-of-the-mill-phone can snap a picture and shoot it up to Twitter, Facebook and the like, creating an ever-ready blanket of sensors… tapping into everyday events and offering them up for consumption. Jim Hanrahan (@manolantern) snapped the first photo of the plane in the Hudson, literally seconds after splashdown. That’s news. Not to say he’s a jackass, though…
No reporter, no pre-ordained credentials. A guy with a smartphone saw something interesting and snapped a shot of it.
This is happening every second of every day and it is accelerating.
This is sensor media: every microblogger, social network lifestreamer is now sensing and reporting on the world as they experience it.
To drive the point home, Facebook just hit 175million users worldwide. If only one percent of those people publish observations about the world as they experience it, they will outnumber professional media by more than a million reporters (rough estimate). The best part is that some of these news sensors are my friends and will discover things that are personally relevant to me.
Is this the end of journalism? Not by a long shot.
Reporting and big media will undoubtedly retain its traditional place in the delivery of news; bringing credibility, focus and fact-filtering to the equation. It will, however increasingly fall behind in the ability to deliver timely information – unexpected information – to readers. This is the place that will be occupied by social networks, automated status bots and an entirely new breed of active content filters.
If this is the future, there are a few things to contemplate here. Opportunities…
- Whoever comes up with a way to filter and concentrate the breaking news, separating the valuable information out of the noise, will be a disruptor and will be an important part of the realtime web
- Relevance of news is, to a large extent, unique to me and my social world. Not all stories have the general/broad interest of planes in the Hudson. Location and topic are huge influencers on personal impact
- There’s a business model in this around sensing and reacting to news with financial/economic impact. Timeliness is extremely valuable to some
- Search, as well as most accepted organizing formats (feeds, news destinations) are wholly inadequate to concentrate and parse the volume and velocity of valuable realtime information that will be generated
As with my last post, I am going to leave the conclusion a little vague. There is a product or set of products here. Without a doubt.
I leave it vague for two reasons. The first is that I am working on my own ideas and they’re not fully baked yet. The second is that I am energized by the thoughtful comments on the topic. I want to continue to discuss the expanse of thoughts without anchoring to a specific solution yet.
Illustration and design by Kurt Aspland
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March 6, 2009 at 1:45 am
[...] Lucky Robot - Rise of Sensor Media February 25, 2009 http://luckyrobot.com/2009/02/25/the-rise-of-sensor-media/ [...]