David Beisel’s Perspective on Digital Change
Channeling Content: The VC Channel
Last week, Nivi launched an RSS feed entitled “The VC Channel.” It is an aggregation of a number of VC bloggers’ RSS feeds (disclosure: including my own). In his words,
“The VC Channel is for the person who wants to read VC blogs but doesn’t want to spend the time to find the good ones and subscribe to all of them… I will add good VC blogs as I find them and prune the blogs that get stupid. You just sit back and read.”
This “channel approach” is effectively trying to solve two of the problems that I think are apparent in reading blog content today:
1. The difficulty in searching and discovering content.
2. The trouble in filtering through the massive amount of content available to read only that of value.
Nivi is essentially becoming an editor of sorts by keeping updated on the newest VC blogs, so I don’t have to (solving problem #1). And then he is actively selecting what he deems valuable (and hopes that I as a reader do as well) (solving problem #2).
It’s an interesting model to approach solving these two issues. And it looks like the SuperBlog service that he is using offers a plethora of other “channels” put together by other users. Is this editorial process going to solve our/my problem of information overload? Or are technologies like Findory going to do this in a more automated fashion? There are a number of ways to search and discover new content (blog search engines, tag feeds, etc.), but what’s the best way to filter through all of that which is available? I am not sure of the answers to these questions, but for now, I am going to subscribe to the VC Channel here. Obviously, it’s an evolving space, and I don’t think that there is one right answer.
(Note that there are a number of copyright and monetization issues involved with this re-syndication of content, which perhaps I’ll comment on in a later post. But for now, you can read some of the comments about it on Nivi’s blog. My own motivations for blogging aren’t financial, so I am less concerned about re-syndication, but others, especially those in the publishing business, aren’t as tolerant.)
Last week, Nivi launched an RSS feed entitled “The VC Channel.” It is an aggregation of a number of VC bloggers’ RSS feeds (disclosure: including my own). In his words,
“The VC Channel is for the person who wants to read VC blogs but doesn’t want to spend the time to find the good ones and subscribe to all of them… I will add good VC blogs as I find them and prune the blogs that get stupid. You just sit back and read.”
This “channel approach” is effectively trying to solve two of the problems that I think are apparent in reading blog content today:
1. The difficulty in searching and discovering content.
2. The trouble in filtering through the massive amount of content available to read only that of value.
Nivi is essentially becoming an editor of sorts by keeping updated on the newest VC blogs, so I don’t have to (solving problem #1). And then he is actively selecting what he deems valuable (and hopes that I as a reader do as well) (solving problem #2).
It’s an interesting model to approach solving these two issues. And it looks like the SuperBlog service that he is using offers a plethora of other “channels” put together by other users. Is this editorial process going to solve our/my problem of information overload? Or are technologies like Findory going to do this in a more automated fashion? There are a number of ways to search and discover new content (blog search engines, tag feeds, etc.), but what’s the best way to filter through all of that which is available? I am not sure of the answers to these questions, but for now, I am going to subscribe to the VC Channel here. Obviously, it’s an evolving space, and I don’t think that there is one right answer.
(Note that there are a number of copyright and monetization issues involved with this re-syndication of content, which perhaps I’ll comment on in a later post. But for now, you can read some of the comments about it on Nivi’s blog. My own motivations for blogging aren’t financial, so I am less concerned about re-syndication, but others, especially those in the publishing business, aren’t as tolerant.)