The Daily Me
What's the future for news personalization?
Calvin Tang, co-founder of Newsvine
from USC Annenberg School for Communication.
I mean there are two problems to solve and because you have to solve them both, it becomes difficult. One is that people don't want to get certain types of information. They want their international news but they may not want sporting news, or something like that. And as a result there are services out there that are narrow in terms of topic--like a site that's all technology news. That's good but that can't be your only news site. People like to discover things that they might enjoy reading but they didn't necessarily know that they would before they were exposed to it. So giving them a way to sift through the large body of content out there is one problem.There is also the type of news that everyone should generally know about. If there is a huge event in Iraq that is going to impact our domestic and foreign policy, a reader should have access to that. Now whether or not you spend a lot of time reading about it that's another question. We think that bringing you the top news is one of the important things. That's why we present our site with traditional media content right next to citizen-generated content. We don't favor one or the other. We think that they are complementary in many ways.
