Tom Landini's Profile

But most important for me is the large volume of very interesting news that will not become "news." This is the kind of material that is more interesting than random pages but which lacks an appealing hook to place it on the front page of a magazine or even a news website. Often these items are timeless; they don't make the front page because they could be run at any time. But they are more valuable than odd curiosities. Because of the voting, tagging, bookmarking process enough people find the item worthwhile that they rise to notice. What emerges for me is a delightful counter-news, or what we used to call at CoEvolution Quarterly, "news that stays news." I have encountered no other process in the world that is better at surfacing "news that stays news" and "news that will be news" better than these collaborative filtering sites.

Another set of new websites use shared bookmarks to rank links.

You should have folders for website feeds and tags for particular articles. That way you can effectively manage and search through feeds later.

o what's the solution? Allowing users to rank their contacts. So I might rank the girl that I like (in my case my wife mrsth) as a 100 score out of 100 possible. I might rank my brother who I kind of like as well as a 90. I might rank Robert Scoble who is a popular blogger and also a good personal friend as a 75. And I might rank a blog like Engadget, or Gizmodo, or TechCrunch, that I don't always need to follow but enjoy reading from time to time as a 10.

There’s no “blurring of the lines of journalism” in this instance. Any intelligent human being understands the difference between the work of veteran reporters and editors… and the eyewitnesses with their cameras on the streets of Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, recording what they’re seeing. And any intelligent person knows both are invaluable.