September 15, 2006

| Meme Tourism >>

By the way, do you guys subscribe to Activate? It’s a weekly world news filter from Flavorpill. I really really like it.

The newsletter very diligently ignores the conventional wisdom and consensus news judgment; its story choice is almost brazen in its divergence from the AP/NYT agenda.

Pretty great preamble to their mission statement, too:

News is personal. We think it always was.

Lately, though, that conviction has been lost in a sea of impersonal, politically correct news sources that have volume, but no point of view or larger context. We miss finding smart connections between front-page stories and the important — but often neglected — ones. Meanwhile, links to “1,339 related” articles on massive news sites don’t activate your mind, but rather, overload it.

I think that last line is actually quite profound. Mega-scale algorithms are great for searching, but horrible for meaning.