“The general sequence of friction-reducing inventions is thought to have been runners, rollers, rollers held in place by guides, rollers held in place by guides and thickened on the ends to make them roll straighter, the wheel and axle. The wheel appears to have been first used in Sumer around 3500 BC, whence it spread across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. This orderly diffusion pattern makes it conceivable that all the wheels in use today are directly descended from the invention of a single gifted individual."
— Cecil Adams

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Newspapers and personalization

Bruce Kasanoff thinks personalization could save newspapers, and here's how: Generate custom front pages for each user. Avoid echo chamber_i effects by providing alternate views. To make money, don't advertise. Instead, generate targeted leads for the most influential of your readers. Above all, focus on making your readers smarter. Remember information for them, not just about them.

Personalization holds promise for newspapers, and also feedreaders, online aggregators, and social news sites. Get it right and you can win the attention of lots of readers. It's a traumatic change for newspapers to attempt, though. People change; tuning for individual users implies adaptation and learning. Newspapers would require ongoing manual attention, expensive and culture-altering manual attention. Attention to take away from journalism and content-generation.

There may be an alternative. Personalization is important if you face customers, but perhaps newspapers needn't face customers. The alternative is a division of labor (and revenues) between writers and publishers. Let newspapers focus on original research and writing, and take a share of ad revenues from the aggregators that send them traffic. comments

  
Kartik Agaram, 2009-04-28: Hmm, newspapers may be forced into the division of labor anyway. And not even get a share of the revenues!   
Anonymous, 2009-05-01: Hi Kartik,
Thanks for the very interesting post. I totally agree with you that the future of newspapers is in creating a more personalized approach for each reader. In this rapidly growing information age, media providers of all sizes need to adapt their approach to the specific needs of each reader.
Moreover, major newspapers need to be held more accountable for the quality and accuracy of the news they produce. We at NewsCred are trying to deal with this aspect in particular and are seeking to engage more users in the debate on media credibility. Our ultimate goal is to become the online reference point for trustworthy news articles, authors and sources. I realize that we have grand objectives but we whole-heartedly believe in the importance of a free, transparent and accountable press and we must start somewhere!
One thing is for certain. We are experiencing a massive shift in the way news information is produced and consumed. It's high-time for the major newspapers to accept this transition and to work with it before they contribute to their own demise...
Thanks again for the interesting post! Alex
Community and Marketing Manager
http://www.newscred.com
  
  
Kartik Agaram, 2009-05-01: "..media providers of all sizes need to adapt their approach to the specific needs of each reader." My point was the opposite: perhaps providers don't need to adapt to readers.

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Oswald Garrison Villard in 1918: Few industries maintain so many unprofitable enterprises as newspapers. A newspaper owner gets a place at every table, access to all the top politicians' ears, and the power to impose his worldview on his readers—or, at least, the illusion of such influence.

Clay Shirky: Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. And journalism has always been subsidized.

Jack Shafer: What's gotten many newspapers in trouble today is poorly timed acquisitions. At the height of the bubble, no price was too high if a newspaper claimed to be the dominant daily in a market. Newspaper owners who overburdened themselves with debt are more vulnerable than the medium itself. Most struggling newspapers will survive at lower but handsome profit margins.

via

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Three books

Here are three books with the same fundamental substance: Vedanta, 7 habits, Flow. But there's huge variation in the form. Vedanta, written in antiquity, states the truth baldly in dictums. 7 habits, from the late 80s, avoids putting the reader off by phrasing its dictums as choices. Flow synthesizes cognitive research to describe how the changes we make within ourselves lead to external improvements. That's an appealing formulation to me after 20 years of the self-help cliches spawned by 7 habits.

These books exemplify a trend: knowledge gets progressively more accessible, not just by ubiquity but by the form in which it's consumed. When knowledge was scarce readers were supplicants, happy to take it in any form. Now it is abundant, writing is a buyer's market with greater emphasis on form. The filters readers create—against the preachy, against cliches—coevolve with the gimmicks of sellers and the skill of writers.

Credit: conversations with dad

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“Children even as young as three and four years old often know that stealing is wrong, even without being explicitly told by adults. They don't need us to define the goal. That's easy. The problem is actually living by those values day to day. We need to help them develop a deep, abiding commitment to these values, a commitment that can override other needs and goals. The hard part isn't moral literacy; it's moral motivation."
— Richard Weissbourd

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“GM might be the latest casualty of the distorted incentives created by our employer-based health care system. The whole idea of Social Security is that people do an inadequate job of saving when left to their own devices. But companies, even companies as big and proud as General Motors, are overly concerned with the present as well."
— Nate Silver on the limitations of corporations

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Eliezer Yudkowsky: Our culture puts all the emphasis on heroic disagreement and heroic defiance. A group which can't tolerate disagreement [and criticism] is not rational. But if you don't tolerate agreement [and praise], you also are not rational.

Rational people often feel ashamed of strong feelings. The best informal definition I've ever heard of rationality is "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." We should aspire to feel the emotions that fit the facts, not aspire to feel no emotion.

Carl Schulman: When we rate individuals highly the affect heuristic comes into play. Students can revere teachers simply because they only interact with the latter in domains where they know less.

A well-written piece that purports to summarize a field can leave you ignorant of your ignorance. Especially if it doesn't cite its sources. Without reading major alternative views you will tend to overrate whoever you came across first.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: In this world there are people who have created awesome things and it is okay to admire them highly.

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“Attaining fame and/or notoriety is the only key to career security. You can and should attain it deliberately."
—Giles Bowkett

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“I didn’t really find my style until I wrote On Writing Well, at the late age of 52. Until then my style more probably reflected who I wanted to be perceived as—the urbane columnist and humorist and critic. Only when I had no agenda except to be helpful did my style become integrated with my personality and my character."
— William Zinsser

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“The tendency for prices to fall during recessions has declined over time. An increasing proportion of the effect of any reduction in aggregate demand shows up as a reduction in real output. We shut down our factories rather than running them with lower wages and lower prices for finished goods; in the event of deflation reducing collectible property taxes, a city will fire half of its schoolteachers rather than cut any teacher's wage.

The longer a society remains stable, the more freighted down with special interest groups it becomes. Unions or cartels of businesses slow an economy’s response to change because they require the assent of many members in order to effect a change. This makes wages and prices much stickier than in a classical free-market economy."

—Mancur Olson as paraphrased by Philip Greenspun. original

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