The future of publishing: A living collection
Richard MacManus of Read Write Web recently wrote about the future of publishing being one of streams.
A stream is a continuous flow of information: Anil Dash declares he wants “a clean, simple stream of my writing, organized by topic and sorted with the newest stuff on top.”
Thinking around topics instead of pages, blog posts (shorter pages) or Facebook updates or tweets (even shorter pages) resonates a lot with what we do here at Squirro.
It is part of that same quest to find relevant information. In our view you can go one step beyond and at to “find” also “remember, organize and share” as next logical steps. The end point then is more than a stream with a RSS-like ‘latest-post, top-position’ logic but a living collection of curated content on a certain topic of interest.
This living collection then updates continuously and automatically. As a reader I may want to consume this in a traditional ‘latest-post, top-position’ logic, but I may want to consume that stream in a number of other ways, too. E.g. based on the reputation of certain contributions, the level of ‘noise’, i.e. the number of posts I want to read in such a stream, the type of post, the reputation of the contributors, etc.
Over time I will be able to sort this living collection to point me to the seven* most relevant posts and the seven most relevant contributors on that topic. That in our view is the future of stream-based publishing.
* Why seven? It’s an arbitrary number.
