Read It

No, no, NO! Not "read it" as in "reed it", but "read it" in the past tense as in "red it".

I had heard of reddit.com created by the kids working with Paul Graham. If you've seen the Aardvark'd video about four summer interns working at Fog Creek Software, then you saw a glimpse of the kids working for Graham. They developed the website, which seems rather simple. It allows users to submit and rank articles. It's been compared to digg.com.

A website is only as good as the articles it posts. I find that I'm heading to reddit just to skim the titles on there. A few always appeal to me. Yes, I'm a lurker who doesn't push article ratings up nor down. Many have titles that are far more interesting than the content it points to.

I point out reddit because it had nothing to do with the way people are supposed to look at online content. We're supposed to get personalized content, don't you know? Suited to individual tastes. And yet, this is not the way we've received content, at least not exactly.

When you subscribe to a newspaper, you choose one versus another, but the content of the paper is the same for anyone who subscribes to the paper (late and early editions, not withstanding). You let the editors decide what goes in the paper, then select the stuff you want to read.

I read somewhere that someone wanted memeorandum to have personalized content for the readers. Gabe, who started the site, thought it was that beyond what he felt technology could reasonably do. Picking the same content for everyone seems to work well enough.

He asked me if I used an RSS aggregator to get content. I tried it once, but realized if I didn't keep up, it would suddenly bloat up my page. It was a pain to mark the articles (meaning, I couldn't figure out an obvious way to do it in ten seconds). reddit doesn't care if I saw an article or not. Once it's gone, it's gone (oh, I suppose it could archive it), but it gives me the illusion there's only 20 articles I need to care about at any moment in time, and that's comforting.

RSS aggregation merely collects content. I want someone to filter it for me, to pick out the content I care about, and yet, I think I'm like Gabe in this respect. Can any automated means do this effectively for my personal tastes? Heck, I don't even know what I want to read about.

I know I surf the web a great deal, but most of my sports information comes from my morning commute listening to Mike and Mike in the morning and to Mr. Tony. I had suggested to Gabe to do the same thing in sports that he's done for politics, tech news, and now Hollywood gossip. But there may be no need. Sports sites have reporters and there's a proliferation of sports commentary shows which tend to have the same topics to talk about.

Most sports programs have a disdain for women's sports. For example, Maryland just won the women's national championship in basketball, an ugly game that saw the Terps claw back from a 13 point deficit to force over time with a 3-point shot with seconds winding off the clock, then finally edging out Duke in the overtime. I'm sure this topic was discussed some by Mike and Mike, but when I listened to it, the talk was on Barry Bonds.

Why? Male sports reporters hate women's sports. They hate soccer and tennis and sometimes hockey. Soccer is that European or South American sport that sports commentators are often happy to say they know nothing about. Some commentators say they know a little tennis, but really, how many are fans. A few like golf. But it's baseball, football, and basketball. Occasionally, you get notoriety for a smaller sport.

Duke lacrosse is suffering a huge blow. Their successful head coach has resigned due to a scandal that may involve rape, but certainly involves strippers. Were there racial epithets? There's a town-gown relationship between what is perceived to be the mostly white Duke (although I suspect they have their share of Asian Americans, but lacrosse tends to be very white, even though the famous football player, Jim Brown, often said his passion was lacrosse--and the man played tennis well too!) and the mostly African American Durham where Duke is situated.

But when does anyone ever talk about lacrosse. Sports reporters might as well not bother talking about such sports, even if they have a passion for it, because sports is built around personalities, and it takes time for people to learn who is who. The average fan needs to do some legwork before they can follow sports.

My brother, who doesn't care for sports, once asked how he could learn more. He wanted to look at sports scores, but that's the most horrendous way to follow sports. I told him two things. First, watch PTI, the show co-hosted by Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon. They hit the major sports issues in 30 minutes. It'll take a while to learn who they're talking about, but in a year, you'll know who's who. The other way is to pick a team and follow them. Not just their scores, but the names of players. In a sense, the numbers don't matter, the people do.

Anyway, point is that sports shows already aggregate information for you. Someone is already deciding what is important in sports. This is not the case in technology. For some reason, people can agree when it comes to national news and sports, but almost nothing else. Thus, tech news aggregators that can spot "interesting" articles are helpful. There's no good equivalent of PTI on television.

Let me end on an interesting compare/contrast. In Aardvark'd, the Fog Creek kids were compared/contrasted with the Graham ("Y Combinator") kids. The biggest difference was what they were doing as projects. On the one hand, Copilot has a model of making money that's rather obvious. Pay per use. Whether it can draw enough business remains to be scene.

reddit, on the other hand, is one of these websites where there's no obvious way to make any money from it. It's very much like comparing Microsoft to Google. Microsoft had obvious products that make money. Google does not. Where does Google make its money? Not search. Ads. It makes a whole bunch of other things, while cool, aren't themselves moneymakers. Google maps. Google Earth.

This is an intriguing contrast of obvious ways to make money vs. less obvious ways.

And there you go, my typical entry, starting from reddit to RSS aggregation to a summary of sports, to the contrast of reddit and Fog Creek. Hey, I didn't major in English.