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.
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.
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how is this different....
from the examples of the orginal Yahoo! and Open Directory, both of which were human-mediated and both of which failed?
The continuing conversation
This is not broadcast. You can interact with the information, you can influence, you can easily become one of the voices.
I think it's that much more personal. Open Directory is a good example to use. There was nothing there to pull you back, no continuing thread of information.
Instead, you now have comments, trackback, and continual new sources of information.
I'm increasingly becoming convinced that the "pull you back" factor is something that always has to be looked at: why would people want to come back to your site or service?
think this question was studied to death
and people found secret to stickiness are varied but centered on usefulness. 2 key things are: how many clicks it takes to successfully find what u'r looking for at an informational or shopping site, how much fun you had at a recreational site.
Yes, for information
What you are talking about is information- or task-based sites. And this is where (finally) information architects are getting a bunch of work -- finding out what people are actually doing and making those tasks easier.
Community sites are a little different (yes, like the Well, et al) in that level of interaction is important, feeling of belonging, having a stake in how things evolve.
Well is very basic...
a big BBS really. no fancy tech, just focused chatter.