Your news are good news

There's simply too much content on the web.

I've just finished reading an article about Rupert Murdoch. Do you know the guy? He owns news outlets, like Fox, Wall Street Journal, or IGN. A few days ago, he declared he's going to try and stop Google News from using content posted on his sites.

Google issued a comment: they can be asked specifically to not crawl (read) pages. Web designers giggled, as there are actual Web Design 101-level lines you can insert to pages to keep search engines out. And this one guy, whose blog I've just read, reacted by posting how Murdoch's own sites use similar techniques to, well, steal links to content.

None of these responses were covered Murdoch's media outlets. But that's not news; that's expected. News is that a man who built an empire on news distribution has no clue how news actually works these days.

Let me explain.

About a week ago, there was a lot of uproar about Zynga. Zynga is the company behind the ...well, more successful Facebook games. They also allow scammers to advertise in their applications.

New York Times ran a piece on Farmville, a Zynga game around the end of October. The company's profile (back then) looked clean, and NYT only did a tribute piece to a successful internet company. Shorty after, some guy from TechCrunch began writing a series of articles exposing Zynga as a front operation for money scams. He could build so much pressure that Zynga was forced to respond by quietly removing the scam ads; and as shortly after they phased them back in yet again, Facebook management actually banned their new game from the site.

Fact: NYT simply had no clue it was basically advertising money scams. (And I'm yet to see an editor apologizing for that.)

They're in a severe panic lately to provide in-depth, quality journalism, to justify their claim that people need to read newspapers because the news are there. Yet with all that pressure and dedication and fact-checking, they just ran a positive review on a product that's basically the front for various money scams; and completely failed at following up their story once it was out. Reason?

Zynga was too small. And frankly, nobody cares about Farmville, right?

Wrong.

Someone cared enough to investigate and expose Zynga, mutiple times, achieving actual results over the course of a week. And as it got popular on TechCrunch, it was all over the major news aggregators...

...so you might actually have read the story. If so, apologies; just skip lines next time.

Now this actually illustrates why newspapers are already dead, and why random blog posts might end up telling you more, and faster. Issue is, finding these posts.

Which is where aggregators like Google News enter the picture.

See, there is simply too much content on the web. Most of it is junk. Check Youtube - half of the videos there are "how-to" manuals of random people nobody cares about. Who would want to watch that? Yet it's also the most popular destination for video content - one you keep visiting every time a friend sends a link to the latest funny vid. Who finds these links and how? That's an issue.

Back in 2005, a site called Reddit was started with the slogan "Freedom from the Press." The idea was that users would provide links to actual content they come across online. Post them on the site, let others upvote them should they also think it's cool, funny, important, or just great to read. Get enough upvotes, and your link will get to the front page...

...today, even CNN uses reddit.com to get quick updates from the internet.

Reddit is limited by the choices of its visitors; if you don't like programming languages, atheists, or Democrats, you will probably not be interested in what the site has to offer.

But if you go one step further, and remove their subjectivity entirely, you'll end up with something very much like Google News. A site that displays content people cared to read. And such content aggregators are vital for connecting you with the information out there.

There's simply too much content on the web (and in the world) for Fox or WSJ or IGN to review and understand and write in detail about. And even for the content they properly digest, there's the diversity issue. There are too many of us, and we're interested in wildly different things. Who do they write for? What should they talk about?

Should you be warned that getting those extra credits in Farmville might get you to the sorry end of a 10-dollar-a-month-for-life subscription you can't cancel? Yes, if you're playing. Will NYT do it? Nah, only a few people are concerned. Will Fox, or WSJ do it? Again, nope.

Someone, somewhere, still gave it a shot, and it ended up being an issue huge enough to severely hurt Zynga, a 250 million $/year company (a third of which is from scam ads). Could actually buy a NYT review from that money, actually...

...but you can't pay off sites like Google News. It just displays what's already popular. Which, in turn, is decided by you, every you out there, reading any sort of content on the web.

And Mr. Rupert, instead of making sure the (added) content he provides as the middleman is worth the read, decides to simply cut off aggregators, and with them, the golden chance of reader discovery.

No wonder this was all over the news.