Simon Willison: Personalisation? We've already got it

No computerised system could possibly compete with 130 hand-picked human editors, working around the clock to channel interesting information in my direction. Blogs are conversations, but they are also filters. Never before in my life have I had to invest so little effort in finding so much diverse and fulfilling content. As a certified infovore I don't know how I survived without them.

What this means for traditional news media is anyone's guess. It's certainly not going to die out: someone has to collect the news and there's only so much unpaid bloggers can do in that regard. We certainly live in interesting times.

Simon Willison: Personalisation? We've already got it

With UrbanVancouver.com, we're trying to experiment with this fact: use humans to do filtering, use humans to do categorization. We have computers do the tedious part of aggregating and searching, then we decide what sticks.

Simon also linked to Vin Crosbie's "What Newspapers and Their Web Sites Must Do to Survive", which I have to take some time and go through in detail.