| This is totally a commercial idea. They seem to be interested in the clicks and henceforth the dollars. The idea would have been a runaway hit if they tried to personalize news as per personal interests.
There was a great magazine article sometime back -- that I can't find now -- that featured a guy who'd been in the radio business for a long time complaining that the ratings and rankings system that he'd developed effectively killed radio, causing so many stations to all play the same homogeneous crap. Yahoo's system, and news in general reflect the same problem: following the money leads to this steaming pile of crap that a lot of people seem to hate.
But there's another edge to this too. People who claim to be interested in specific subjects, or in meatier or niche news, are still drawn in to some of the vacuous material. So, nobody actually really wants a completely personalized news service; I'm convinced that that's one reason why jaanix hasn't made it big, while Reddit continues to steam along. People will tune Jaanix for the news feeds that they think they ought to like, and then they quit following it after a while because they'd actually rather click on all of the [pic]s on Reddit's front page.
Hey! I had never heard of Jaanix. Thanks for mentioning that. It's interesting. Its like some twitter for news, minus the phone syncing(I summed it up like this when I saw the follow button for news keywords).
But I couldn't figure out what the "follow [keyword]" button does. I clicked it. AndChecked the FAQs but found nothing. Even their FAQ page has voting system. A bit weird. They should have had a normal FAQ page.
The sliding bars on the homepage to customise the news you want is good. But I am able to notice a bug in it. I am using Firefox-3 on windowsXP and when I click on a sliding bar, the marker moves to the position, but the green shade seems to be somewhere else. I had to do around 10 clicks to get the green shade and the marker to coincide (surely had some fun with it).
And whenever I changed the slider the news gets optimised by Ajax. That's cool again.
I noticed they allow public voting on their news items. They are easily exposed to 'click' spam. Not requiring users to signup to vote actually seems like wanting to be spammed.
And I also found out that they don't requires users to signup to comment. Seems like some sort of Open Digg or Open Reddit.
But one thing I found nice on Jaanix was that their youtube channel(not sure what they call it) at http://www.jaanix.com/youtube they have this 'quick review' kind of feature for the videos. Just place your cursor on the video thumbnail and you will see more thumbnails of the video.
Well, Jaanix or Digg or Reddit, they are all cool for user submitted news. Maybe all the other mainstream news might also be subbmitted. But you don't see all mainstream news there. You might surely find out the Release date for iPhone 10G on Digg, but there are surely some news items that don't reach the top stories even in the section news.
Those are covered by mainstream news fellas. In simple words, you can make a pizza at home. It'll surely be tasty. But still you will like McDonald's Pizza. It's like... two different good tastes, so you like both :)
And still I haven't found any source except Google News Search feeds for personalized mainstream news.
What I mean by mainstream news is - news by news agencies like Associated Press etc (I don't know what these agencies are called).
But your point is right. People will surely find that they are interested is more stuff when they follow something randomly. Again: all that's going to be featured on the front page of Y! is celeb gossip for sure. Not everyone likes celeb gossip. So its going to be forcing people to read celeb gossip. I would rather read news on any other source like Digg or Google News or Jaanix (as you said random news is good).
I have a Q and also and A:
Why did Yahoo choose celeb news over any other topic?
Because they found that they would get more news news in the celeb news category than any other. Which translates to more links, which in turn translates to more clicks and then more money.
On one hand they have a really cool thing like BOSS and the other they have a plain stupid idea of dollars from celeb gossip.
I've been following (and rooting for) jaanix for a long time now -- pretty much since their debut -- and it's strange: I really really like their idea, and I really really like that they've put a ton of work into improving it. Yet, I have a really hard time sticking with it myself; I find myself gravitating instead towards Reddit, which frankly I have come to loathe. I don't understand it, and I wish I did.
| Why did Yahoo choose celeb news over any other topic? Because they found that they would get more news news in the celeb news category than any other.
That's an interesting angle. I have to chew on that for a while. I always just figured that it went that way for the same reason that all the cheap glittery celebrity gossip mags line the supermarket aisles: it's everyone's guilty pleasure. They sell more copies of "People" in a week than they'd sell of "Discover" in a month.
But, it could still come back to the news always being new, that people are drawn to junk like Britney's latest embarrassment because it's always new, even when it's really still the same old thing.
Or, maybe they're just barely literate gossip hounds that get some kind of psychological positive feedback from finding out that there are other people even more screwed up than they are. ...
There was a great magazine article sometime back -- that I can't find now -- that featured a guy who'd been in the radio business for a long time complaining that the ratings and rankings system that he'd developed effectively killed radio, causing so many stations to all play the same homogeneous crap. Yahoo's system, and news in general reflect the same problem: following the money leads to this steaming pile of crap that a lot of people seem to hate.
But there's another edge to this too. People who claim to be interested in specific subjects, or in meatier or niche news, are still drawn in to some of the vacuous material. So, nobody actually really wants a completely personalized news service; I'm convinced that that's one reason why jaanix hasn't made it big, while Reddit continues to steam along. People will tune Jaanix for the news feeds that they think they ought to like, and then they quit following it after a while because they'd actually rather click on all of the [pic]s on Reddit's front page.