Clay Shirky has a great chapter in his book titled “Publish First, Filter Later." The gist is that when publishing was expensive (print a book or newspaper, bind and collate, distribute to reader, etc) there was no alternative to filtering first, i.e. figuring out what to publish. With the Internet, the cost of publishing is essentially zero, so anything can and should be published with the filtering taking place later. The web at large of course illustrates this, but it’s true in specific areas as well. For instance, in online video, the sites that have tried to program specific channels (filter first) have attracted only a fraction of the audience of Youtube (publish first).
This insight is applicable much more broadly than just media. Take financial services. In a world where it was expensive to compile and distribute performance data (and gather assets) it made sense to have firms like Fidelity. Fidelity would recruit portfolio managers and would decide upfront on the kinds of mutual funds those managers should offer, e.g. a Japan equity fund. That is the same "filter first” model as in traditional media. The potential power of something like Covestor (a USV portfolio company) is that it can provide a platform for publishing portfolios first and filtering later. All the performance and holding information that’s needed for filtering is right there and the cost for distributing that information is zero. So there is no need to try to figure out first what kind of “funds” people might be looking for along the traditional categories of geography, industry, risk, etc.
It will be exciting to see this fundamental transformation play itself out in a variety of industries where the historic cost of information distribution had resulted in a filter first model.
