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| May Jul |
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From David Weinberger's report on a panel at an Annenberg Center conference, I find Martin Nisenholtz of New York Times Digital making the following statement (I'm trusting David's report of the words, but they're notes, not a news article):
"Our research says that a relatively small group of people want to aggregate RSS feeds."
I don't doubt that the Times has such research, and that it is an accurate snapshot of current Net user desire. But it's a bad predictor, because when you ask most Net users, "Do you want to aggregate RSS feeds?" their likely answer is, "Huh? Aggregate what?"
Imagine it's, say, 1995, when a lot of us early adopters were already spending tons of time online but much of the world barely knew the Web existed or how it worked. And imagine you did research then that asked people, "Do you want to access Web pages with HTTP?"
Such research would have shown that a "relatively small group of people" wanted to surf the Web. And that research would have guided you in precisely the wrong direction.
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I'm basically a believer in the general value and usefulness of the Digg/Reddit model in which users submit stories and vote on them. The debate over at Edge on Jaron Lanier's critique of the "hive mind" notwithstanding, I see these services as interesting additives to the old-school editorial world I still work in, rather than as potential replacements, and I enjoy using them.
Now Jason Calacanis (of Weblogs Inc. and now AOL) has revamped AOL's moribund Netscape.com property as a somewhat modified Digg clone. Digg devotees appear to have taken umbrage, and registered their disapproval by flooding the site with votes for a story headlined "AOL Copies Digg" (Valleywag captured the screen). That story was the new Netscape's top headline in the day after its launch. Another headline voted up by Netscape users reads "Digg rules...Netscape is utter Crap."
If you're going to empower the vox populi, you'd better be ready for, and okay with, its inevitable yen to bite your ankle.
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