I used to read the NYT every morning as a way to get an overview of what was happening in the world, find in-depth coverage and investigative reports, and see opinions on politics and the economy (I also used to do the same with the WSJ). But increasingly I find that I only skim the paper and then head for my computer to read techmeme and the Huffington Post. Both are great at what they do, but leave me yearning for more.
I want a personalized new service that meets the following needs
Covers a large universe of news sources by default that includes well-known blogs.
Lets me add additional sources for myself
Allows me to define my interests easily (ideally making use of my past work, as reflected in say my del.icio.us tags and urls)
Learns over time what I like and don’t primarily from my behavior (but gives me the option to explicitly give a thumbs up or down and control the amount of information that I get
Let’s me supply my existing social graph from places such as LinkedIn, Facebook and my email and makes use of that graph for filtering
Uses some amount of human “editing” to rate, select and update sources, major stories, etc. as input to and on top of algorithms to ensure highest quality
Such a service would get at least 30 minutes to 1 hour of my attention every day.
I just got back from a great trip to San Francisco and Silicon Valley where I met with three different companies all working on this problem. They are each trying different approaches and it’s encouraging to see so much energy devoted to this problem. There are also some interesting efforts that have already launched, such as Newser and Daylife. But so far none of them get close to meeting my wishlist. So who will be my New York Times?
