QuantWorks

Scoble, Feeddit, Valleywag and Mashable account for 25% of the stories I read

I'm an avid user of Google Reader as my portal to new stories on the internet.  I've noticed the following patterns in terms of the timing in which I read new content:

I tend to get most new content within 4 hours of being released, driven by sources like Scoble ("Items Shared by Scobleizer.com"), DiggFeedr, Valleywag and Mashable:

• Scoble tends to be the single person who finds and filters content that is relevant to me.  I read 11% of Scoble's shared items, which is quite a lot.
• DiggFeedr gets me the top 100 stories of the moment from Digg - and links me directly to the source content instead of dumping me into the sophomoronic discussions on Digg.  Of course, I skip over all articles on Ron Paul, anything that says "pwned", any Borat content and all things about putting electronic devices into blenders.  In short, I read only 6% of Digg content.  (BTW, DiggFeedr is now called Feeddit.  Did they get strong armed by Digg about the name?)
• Valleywag gets a lot of my attention because they tend to report news before it's official.  They tend to be quite accurate, at least according to my standards.  I read 16% of Valleywag content.
• Mashable is a very high-quality news source focusing on social networking and I read 10% of their stories.

About 25% of stories I read come from the above.  Since I have about 400 sources, these are my top 1%.  So I'd say there's probably some 80-20 thing going on here in total.  OK, so what have I noticed about how news spreads (at least in terms of how I come into contact with it):

1. New content tends to be first picked up by Digg or someone like Scoble.  With Scoble, you can be sure that the content is motivated by intelligence.  With Digg, chances are the the content is what I might call "geekity" (sort of technical, very "geeky", kind of interesting but not very useful).
2. Within two days, content appears on hundreds or thousands of blogs.
3. About a week later, the content makes it way over to CNN.com.
4. Local newspapers pick it up a week after that.
5. About 2-3 months later, the story gets reported in a so-called "magazine" like PCWorld or Computerworld.  They always tend to be behind the times.  Perhaps it's their publishing timeline, or perhaps their too big, or perhaps they are too focused on hardware and haven't yet figured out that content these days is only "fresh" for perhaps 1-2 weeks tops.

This is the modern Attention Economy that we live in.

Jakob Nielsen: No longer relevant. Jeffrey Zeldman is the new usability guru (a la standards)

I've been reading lately some articles about how the old-school usability expert Jakob Nielsen has apparently said that Web2.0 is dangerous for businesses.  Interestingly, I went to the Jakob Nielson site thinking that I'd find his comment/article, but I couldn't find it.

Ironically, had he used some sort of Web2.0 plug-in that showed me the most viewed articles on his site, I would have been able to read all about it.  And that's what Web2.0 is all about, sort of, whatever Web2.0 is.  I really don't have time to track down his real words.  I'm just too busy and this blog is just a hobby for me.  Due to attention scarcity, I skim articles.  If I can't find what I need, I move on.  The point here is that I agree with the gripes others have, because I pretty much know what Jakob Nielsen would have said.

It's all about relevancy and I label Web2.0 relevancy efforts as Relevancy2.0.  And, by the way, it is possible to have a Web2.0 (or Relevancy2.0) website that conforms to W3C web standards.  On that note, to me, the modern usability expert is Jeffrey Zeldman.  I highly recommend his book.

My point is that without Web2.0, I wouldn't be able to skim 2000 article titles per day, searching for the 50-70 articles that I'll read.  I understand the Jakobian conservatism, but Web2.0 is a boon to relevancy.

Update:  Adam Fairbanks of Tidy Tech has pointed me to  the location of Jakob's article ("Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous") on UseIt.com.  Nielsen indeed says that Web2.0 can be dangerous for business.  It's a pretty general argument with lots of theoretical comments but relatively few practical comments.  While he mentions Facebook, he doesn't mention Google or Yahoo.  I understand his points, but still think that Web2.0 is transformational in nature and will lead us to Relevancy2.0.

The Yin and Yang of Relevancy2.0

The Attention Economy is causing a general shift in the way people use the internet.  There are just so many billions of pages out there and so many forms of communication that we are starved for the things that are relevant to us.  Thus, we all have attention deficits.

I just began thinking a bit about what is relevancy in today's world, perhaps we could call it Relevancy2.0 (hey, why not?).  As I see it, the main drivers of relevancy will be:

• Artificial Intelligence:  Intelligent, automated recommendations will play a greater and greater role in our lives.  Google recently began proactively making feed recommendations.  They auto make Google News recommendations and can easily create a custom iGoogle portal page on any topic in just one click.
• Social Networking:  What are friends recommend to us is automatically relevant to some extent, right?  This is because even if it's a bit off-topic, the authenticity of the message makes it interesting.

There you have it.  We'll have smart computers and authentic people.