Tag Archives: content

Hello, Venture News

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I have to admit it: I’m a news junky. I’m addicted to my Twitter timeline, RSS feed, and often frequent the comment sections of Hacker News, Quora, Reddit, AVC, etc. I love it all. There is so much great stuff out there.

My news habit comes with great rewards. Building startups is such a difficult task, it helps to be a sponge and soak in the knowledge people are sharing across product, design, development, growth, marketing, community, data science, analytics, industry trends, etc. Everyday, I come across awesome stuff that alters my perspective, teaches me valuable lessons, or even solves my current problem of the day!

The only problem is that all of this requires a significant amount of time and effort. Let’s take Twitter as an example. It takes time to learn how Twitter works. It takes time to find the right people to follow, as well as discover who to unfollow. And, it takes time to sift through 1000+ tweets for the golden nuggets that invariably appear. RSS, HN, Quora, and Reddit are different, but time consuming in other ways.

So how do I keep the rewards, but save myself the time and effort?

A simple experiment.

This summer, while rifling through ideas and hacks with my friend Leslie in the Pejman Mar Summer Founders Program, we stumbled across something. Among the hacks was a little tool to discover frequently-shared links by 300+ venture capitalists on Twitter. It started super simple, but proved useful as an instant way to capture the daily conversation in the venture capital community.

We hopped into Gmail and sent the top 10 links of the day to two people at Pejman Mar. The next day, after positive reviews from our sample set of two, we created a Mailchimp account and began adding more friends, colleagues, and advisors to the mailing list. After playing around with so many ideas, it was cool to be able to send out this daily email that people we knew enjoyed.

In the following days and weeks, people began trickling into the mailing list from word of mouth. Our friends continually let us know that they loved the email, and wanted us to keep them coming. New users would email in to tell us how it covered much of their startup news needs. Mailchimp analytics showed us awesome email open and click through rates.

Great! So, why not make this the start of a thing?

Venture News

We registered a domain at http://www.venturenews.co, and put up our mailing list signup, as well as a live version of the links. Soon after that, Chris Messina posted Venture News to Product Hunt, which was relatively well received.

What now? Leslie and I are experimenting on the newsletter and on the website. We’re balancing new product features, talking with subscribers, and developing a broader vision for the future. It’s exciting, and feels like the seed of a news experience that includes just the gold nuggets without requiring much time or effort.

If you’re interested in a quick fix of startup news with minimum hassle, please give Venture News a spin. Even better, sign up for the mailing list to get a curated daily digest delivered directly to your inbox. Hopefully we can help simplify your daily tech startup news habit 🙂

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On the limits of constrained media and self expression

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After writing my last post on easing content creation, I’ve found myself repeatedly thinking about constrained media.

Here is the excerpt that got me thinking (with the most salient part of it bolded):

You can drastically simplify content creation by constraining the media format. There are many examples of this

  • Twitter limits you to 140 characters. Now you don’t need to worry about content length.
  • Tumblr makes certain types of posts super easy: photos, quotes, links, chats, audio files, and videos. You could write a long blog post, but it is easier to quickly share an image or quote that you like.
  • Pinterest and Instagram limit you to a single image, with an optional block of descriptive text.
  • Vine limits you to a six seconds of video.

The flip side of constraining the media format is that it limits self expression. Fortunately, media often has weird properties related to self expression, similar to doing arithmetic with infinity. Divide infinity by 2, and you feel like you’d have less, but you still have infinity. Divide it by 10, or 100, and you get the same thing. Media often works the same way. A blog post offers an infinite amount of self expression. An image or a 140-character tweet feels like less, but still offers infinite self expression.

If you follow this line of thought, it naturally leads to some interesting questions. Are there limits to constrained media? At what point do you lose the potential for infinite self expression?

Coincidentally, the YO app has just recently exploded and raised $1.2M. For those who haven’t seen it yet, it is a stupidly simple app: press a contact’s name, and the app will send the a push notification which says ‘YO’. Did I mention that it is stupidly simple?

Whatever you may think about it, the YO app is gaining traction and gaining in usage. And from a constrained media perspective, it is fascinating. The YO app is about constrained as you can get from media creation. It is effectively a 1-bit creation app. You either get a ‘yo’, or you don’t.

So what are the limits of self expression for a single bit of information?

It turns out that there still aren’t any limits: the potential for self expression is still infinite. Why? Because all of the context around the ‘yo’ matters: the sender, the receiver, the timing, and the situation.

A ‘yo’ could mean:

  • Yo, whats up?
  • Are you free?
  • I’m free now.
  • (from your SO) Love you — just thinking about you.
  • (from your annoying friend who send you 50 yo’s today) I’m going to continue bugging the shit out of you
  • (after a date, from a friend) How was that date last night?
  • (after a date, from the date) I had a good time. Would like to see you again.
  • (a week after a date, from the date) Why haven’t you called me back?
  • you could go on and on varying people and situations…

This is exciting.

The Internet has been around for quite a while and we are still inventing new ways to create content and express ourselves. On one end of the spectrum, we have apps like Medium and Storehouse who are letting users create elaborate stories using multimedia. At the other end of the spectrum we have apps like YO. And in between, there is a ton of possibilities.

When it comes to content and self expression, there are no limits.

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Photo credit: paintingsthatmove

Content creation for all: 8 ways to simplify online publishing

 

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The World Wide Web enables publishing at an unprecedented scale. Anyone can create content, and any piece of content can be instantaneously distributed to anyone in the world.

Pretty awesome, right?

There is just one thing: although content creation has never been easier, the number of people who create is surprisingly small. This has become known as the 1% rule: 1% of people create the content, 99% of people consume.

There isn’t anything wrong with the 1% rule, but it isn’t ideal. The web enables everyone to have a voice, yet 99% of people don’t take advantage of it. If more people created content online, we would have more shared perspectives, more communication, and in general, more people connecting over their passions and interests. You have to believe that the world would be a better place.

Content creation should be easier, and fortunately, it can be. Seemingly small product design decisions can make a big impact for encouraging content creation.

As a thought experiment, let us start with this blog post. Long form blogging turns out to be a particularly difficult form of content creation. If we study what makes this post difficult to create, we can uncover several ways to simplify and ease content creation.

 

1. Strip away identity.

If you look at the top of this blog, you’ll see my real name. Do you know how difficult it is to write under my real name? I’m afraid of publicly being wrong, sounding like an idiot, or even worse, coming off as a complete jackass.

If we separate my real identity from my online identity, writing becomes easier. I become less fearful of what others think, and may write things that I otherwise wouldn’t.

Historically, handles (or user names) have been used for anonymity. They were used back in the days of IRC and forums, and are still used today on many popular sites like Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Handles help with anonymity, but don’t ensure it. As time goes by, users leak information which can often be pieced together. With enough time, a motivated third party may learn the real identity behind a handle.

You could go further with anonymity by dissolving the idea of an online identity. For example, Secret uses transient handles. You have an identity, but it is a weak identity, a random icon that lives within a single conversation. Or, you could go all the way and completely dissolve online identity (e.g., Startups Anonymous).

The more you strip away identity, the easier it gets to create content about anything. And the more honest people get. It isn’t surprising some of the juiciest secrets are surfaced in anonymous social networks.

 

2. Constrain the audience.

This blog is public. That means that anyone anywhere in the world can read any bit of this blog and catch me looking like an idiot. As I continue to write, the chances of looking like an idiot increases. Doesn’t sound too good, huh?

Writing for the world is hard. There are things I will publicly announce to the world on this blog or on Twitter, but it is a small subset of the things that are on my mind. If we constrain the audience to my Facebook friends, things get easier. I’m more likely to share my current status. If we limit the audience my close friends and family on Whatsapp, I may share a rumor, a racy joke, or what is actually on my mind.

Audience matters, and the more comfortable the audience is, the easier it is to create honest and authentic content.

 

3. Constrain the media format.

The content in this blog is unconstrained. A post may be of arbitrary length and include any combination of images, videos, and text.

The unconstrained nature of a blog post makes it flexible and expressive, but also brings up many questions for content creators. How long should a post be? Should I add images? How many images? Where should they be placed? What about a video? Or a GIF? Should I have split this post into two posts or leave it as one? There are many questions to ask, and each question makes it less likely that the ‘publish’ button will be pressed.

You can drastically simplify content creation by constraining the media format. There are many examples of this

  • Twitter limits you to 140 characters. Now you don’t need to worry about content length.
  • Tumblr makes certain types of posts super easy: photos, quotes, links, chats, audio files, and videos. You could write a long blog post, but it is easier to quickly share an image or quote that you like.
  • Pinterest and Instagram limit you to a single image, with an optional block of descriptive text.
  • Vine limits you to a six seconds of video.

The flip side of constraining the media format is that it limits self expression. Fortunately, media often has weird properties related to self expression, similar to doing arithmetic with infinity. Divide infinity by 2, and you feel like you’d have less, but you still have infinity. Divide it by 10, or 100, and you get the same thing. Media often works the same way. A blog post offers an infinite amount of self expression. An image or a 140-character tweet feels like less, but still offers infinite self expression.

If you can simplify the media format while still allowing for infinite self expression, it is probably a win.

 

4. Remove the feeling of permanent publishing.

Most bloggers have a complex relationship with the ‘publish’ button. I definitely do. The button is the source of accomplishment (it feels great to ship a post into the real world!), but it is also a source of stress.

Blog posts feels final in two ways.

First, publishing a blog post feels like a one-time action. Once I hit that ‘publish’ button, it gets sent out to the blogosphere to RSS, my WordPress followers, and email subscribers. Most likely, if it is going to be read, it will be read at this point. Later on, someone may stumble upon it through a Google search, but old blog posts quickly loses interest as well as discoverability on the Internet. Second, the post feels final because it kind of is final. Once it gets cached in a search engine, or archived by archive.org, it is accessible forever.

Removing the feeling of publishing makes content creation much easier, and there are several ways to do this.

The first way has already been mentioned in (2) constraining the audience. A Facebook startus or a Whatsapp message doesn’t feel like publishing because it is relatively private (compared to this blog post).

Second, you can also remove by feeling of publishing by encouraging works-in-progress. In college, I used to manually write HTML for websites. I wouldn’t have any problem leaving my work online for people to see because it was a work-in-progress. Wikis are the same way. You can easily add to them because it is expected that the content will be edited/removed at some point in the future.

Third, you can delete by design. This has become a big thing with ephemeral content. Snapchat and Frankly are two great examples here; your content lives for only a few seconds, and then it disappears. Or, it feels like it disappears. I would bet that the content lives on their servers forever, but what matters is the ephemeral feeling.

 

5. Enable references to existing work.

This post includes original content. Original content is difficult to create.

You know what is easier to create? Existing content.

It sounds a little funny, but people do this everyday sharing links on Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. Or, sharing images on Pinterest, imgfave, weheartit, etc. Or quotes from other websites.

“Creating” such content isn’t as much creating as it is identifying with content. There is so much content out there on the web, and more gets churned out on a daily basis. While we consume existing content, it isn’t difficult to find something that we identify with and want to share.

It turns out there is an extra big benefit to sharing existing content: it is simple from an interaction standpoint. Websites have employed one-click buttons for resharing, reblogging, repinning, etc.

 

6. Add context.

This post started with an empty text input field. There was no context. Just an intimidating blank canvas.

Creating content within a vacuum is difficult. Adding context makes creation easier.

A common way to create context is to add a prompt, such as an image to caption or a URL to comment on. Creating content within a context tends to be an emotional response, a sign of agreement/disagreement, or a perspective/comment. Sites like Quora, Quibb and Reddit lets users create prompts for other users to react to. Sites like Pinterest and Tumblr let users write a note within the context of an image, video, etc.

Oftentimes, a reaction to a prompt becomes another prompt. For example, a message which requires a response. Or a comment that invites a reply.

 

7. Constrain reactions of others.

Allowing others to comment on your content can be intimidating. Unconstrained commenting allows anyone to come along and shit on your thoughts.

Because of this, it is often a good idea to constrain the reactions of others. Products do this in different ways. Quibb constrains its membership, only allowing vetted members to comment. Secret constrains comments to your friends and friends of friends, effectively removing the vast majority of trolls on the Internet. Tumblr is designed to encourage likes and doesn’t emphasize comments. Medium and many other blogging platforms require comments to be OK’ed by the original poster. Some bloggers implement a timeout functionality where the comments section for posts become closed after a fixed number of days.

Most people enjoy thoughtful comments and reactions, but this is the Internet, and there be trolls everywhere. Finding a way to limit reactions to content can be a big win.

 

8. Watch the content container.

This blog post doesn’t exist on it’s own: it lives within a blog called ‘On life and startups’.

Blogging isn’t easy. If you’ve ever started a blog, you’ll know friction involved here. There are a lot of question involved with creating a blog. Which platform should I use? What should the tagline of the blog be? Will the tagline be too restricting? Should I blog about everything on my mind, or specific topics? How often should I update the blog? What if I stop writing? What if I run out of ideas?

Giving users a single container often has these problems. For example, I have the same problems on Twitter. My twitter stream has become the startup version of Alex. I don’t share many other things on there, even though I have other interests in my life outside of startups.

One approach is to give users multiple containers. A great example is Pinterest, which gives users the ability to create multiple boards. The boards allow a user to be their full selves. They can share DIY stuff in one board, good recipes in another, and their favorite infographics in yet another board.

Another approach is to free containers from user accounts. Medium makes posts and collections feel independent. I can curate multiple collections, and my posts can be syndicated on all collections that want to contain them.

Yet another approach is to simply free content from containers. Secret does this by making each secret independent. Secrets don’t live within a user profile. And since user identities only exist within a single secret, all secrets feel independent.

It may seem like a small thing, but the relationship between the user, content, and the container makes a difference when it comes to content creation.

 

Enable content creation, change the world.

Did you notice a trend throughout this post?

Some of the largest and most successful social media sites are defined by their methods for simplifying content creation. Twitter is defined by its 140-character tweets. Pinterest is defined by allows users to curate multiple collections of images. Snapchat is defined by images that self-destruct. Medium has been purposefully vague about intentions, but it is clear that it changes the relationship between users, content, and collections.

One of the biggest promises of the web is that is allows anyone to publish. Anything that makes this process easier is a huge win for the world.

Have some other ideas on how to simplify content creation? I would love to hear them in the comments.

Better yet, build the idea and get it out there. If you discover a new way to simplify publishing, or create a new combination from the examples above, you just might change the world.

 

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Photo credit: want2scrap

My current project: Soulmix

This will be my 139th blog post. That means that I’ve published 138 times while barely talking about my actual work! That isn’t so cool. In an effort to be more open, I plan to start writing more about what I am actually doing.

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Those who have been following my blog have probably seen me link to my current project Soulmix.

Soulmix beta 1.0.

I started working on Soulmix last June, and initially, it was conceived as a niche community site for sharing content related to living a good life. People would share content related to life (personal development, relationships, psychology, lifehacks, etc.), upvote the posts they liked, collect their favorite posts, and discuss within the comments.

After building the site, I beta tested it for a few months. It seemed to have potential. Return traffic was growing steadily, but slowly. I sent a weekly email newsletter curating the best posts on living a good life, and it was well received. People sent emails thanking me for it, and I could track email clicks throughout the entire week. I think if I kept pushing for another year, it could have grown into a great little community for life-related content.

Making the decision to pivot.

A few months in the beta testing, I came to two realizations:

  1. I was getting bored of it. I enjoy reading great content about life, but after a while, it gets old. I have many other interests. I found myself wanting to discover and share content related to all of my interests; not just on living a good life. In short, creating a niche content site felt too restricting for me. I strongly believe in finding founder-market fit, and that means creating a site that I personally love and want to use everyday.
  2. I realized I was building interaction mechanisms. Soulmix was conceived as a niche site, but what I was building was general interaction mechanisms. Upvoting allows masses of users to choose great content. Collections allow users to save the stuff they like. Comments let users talk about stuff. Nothing about these interactions is specific to a niche. They are general, and can be used for general content.

These realizations made the next step obvious for me. I had to broaden the scope of Soulmix, and focus on the general interaction mechanisms.

Focusing on interaction mechanisms.

Furthermore, I’ve begun to strongly believe in keeping products simple. Soulmix had content shares, upvotes, collections, and comments. That felt like too much. I decided that I could go two routes:

  1. The discussion forum route. This would include content shares, upvotes, and comments. The problem was that I couldn’t think of anything much better that Reddit. I would like the Reddit community to be slightly more friendly, but at scale, I understand why it is difficult (if not impossible) to control the Internet masses. The other problem was that historically, I haven’t been a discussion forum kind of person. I lurk, but I’ve never been a big commenter. That means I would never be the power user of a discussion forum site.
  2. The collection/curation route. This would include content shares and collections. This route seemed much more appealing for two reasons. First, the large sites in this space (Pinterest/imgfave/weheartit/etc.) are mostly image collection sites. As much as I like images, much of the content that I consume are links, not images. This leaves me space for building something that I might love. Second, I love the passive social model behind these types of sites. It lets you interact with others through shared interests, but I don’t need to actively think about (or inject myself into) conversations.

So, about a month ago, I decided to pivot. The next version of Soulmix would be a general site for collecting stuff I liked online.

Soulmix beta 2.0.

This brings me to what I’m working on now: the new and improved Soulmix!

Soulmix is now an online tool for organizing and sharing the stuff you love on the web.

Your favorite images, links, and videos are typically scattered all across the web. Soulmix lets you take them all, and organize them into remixes (or collections). It gives you your corner of the web where you can collect and share the stuff you like. You can also follow others users (or their remixes) to discover new great stuff.

Sound good?

Soulmix recently became functional again and is in private beta. If you’d like to check it out, just request an invite *nudge nudge* 🙂

I’ll be letting people into the beta with time, and if you join, I would love to hear your thoughts!

What content people want

Paul Graham of Y Combinator has a motto: “make something people want”.

If you believe in the motto (which makes a lot of sense), and you are working on a content-related startup, Randal Olson has recently posted a gift for you. In a blog post, he shows the number of posts on Reddit across different subreddits.

A picture of the large timeline is below:

Credit: Randal Olson

Credit: Randal Olson

In this graph, you can see that Reddit gained traction within a particular niche which was most programming related (apparently this niche loves NSFW content also). In the first year or two, it covered other topics that programmers/hackers may find interesting, such as politics and science. In 2008, Reddit went mainstream, allowing users to create whatever subreddits they liked. And as a result, Reddit as a whole changed dramatically. Today’s Reddit is dominated by images, memes, videos, advice, and funnies.

Some look at it and cry out “Reddit has gone mainstream!”, or even worse, “Reddit has gone downhill with stupid memes and garbage”. That is one way to look at it. Another way to see this is to understand that the users have spoken. This is the Reddit they want. More specifically, this is the content they want.

If you are building a content-related startup, this information is gold.

If you are building a general content-related startup, you better allow users to share some combination of images, memes, videos, advice, and/or funnies.

If you are building a niche content-related startup, make sure to take a good look at this graph. The right side of this graph is what users want. If you are going to target it niche, it shows you which niches you might want to start thinking about.

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P.S. On a related note, last year, I wrote a blog post on the unbundling of Reddit. It is still continuing today, and if you are building a startup that unbundles a niche of Reddit, this tells you where the big niches are.

 

Curation as the third frontier of the web

One of my recent big interests has been related to our relationship with content on the web. I’ve written a few posts on this about the importance of old content, and on finding the best content on the web. I’ve been beginning to believe that curation will play a huge role in our relationship with content.

Today I stumbled across a great blog post that helped me crystallize more of my thinking on this topic by Patrice Lamothe (founder of Pearltrees) called The Web’s Third Frontier.

The most interesting part to me was a section on the founding principles of the world wide web:

The founding principles

These principles are simply the initial objectives that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau stated for their project. Eliminating technical jargon, these objectives can be broken down into three general, universally applicable propositions:

1-    Allow anyone to access any type of document

2-    Allow everyone to disseminate their own documents

3-    Allow everyone to organize the entire collection of documents

When I came across this, things began to make sense.

  1. Information access: The Internet allows anyone immediate access any type of document via a URL.
  2. Information dissemination: Blogs enabled simple creation of content, and timely dissemination has been enabled via mailing lists and RSS readers.
  3. Information organization: This is where we are stuck with limited options.

This is a huge insight. Access and dissemination have been solved. Organization hasn’t been solved, and it could be a game changer on the Internet.

As far as organization goes, we are limited to (1) the time-based nature of blogs and news sites, or (2) the retrieval process from automated search.

Curation provides a much-needed third option, and it sounds good in theory, but has been difficult to implement in practice. Outside of Pinterest, which is mainly about images, there hasn’t been another huge winner in this space (and many have tried!).

What will to take to crack the curation space? I can’t say I have an answer, but am starting to come up with some interesting thoughts. If you have any thoughts or opinions on current and/or future curation solutions, I would love to hear from you!

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P.S. This is post number #99 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

Your problem isn’t new

We all live our own lives starting from scratch. As we go through the different stages of life, we invariably hit challenges. As a child, it may be arguing with your parents, figuring out how to ask that girl out, or dealing with the school bully. As we grow up, it may be choosing a career, learning to achieve our goals, finding a person to marry, handling rebel children, etc. The challenges are all different, but because we start without knowing anything, each challenge seems like the biggest challenge in the world.

What often comforts me is knowing that my problem most likely isn’t a new problem. There have been generations of people that have come before me, and many (if not all) have hit the exact same challenges. Furthermore, many of them have figured out how to overcome the challenges.

What does this mean? First, most of my challenges are solvable. Second, there is much to learn from the people who have hit the challenge before I have.

People pass on lessons in various ways. They tell stories or pass on folk lore. They write books or articles on their experiences. Today, we have an even better option: publish to the Internet. Once a story is published, it is out there for all future generations, and can be immediately retrieved via a URL. This is extremely powerful, and one of the big reasons that I care so much about retrieving old content on the web. It isn’t simply accessing old content; it means helping people tap into the collective knowledge of the world when solving their life problems.

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P.S. This is post number #90 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix.

How do I find the best content?

Last week I wrote a post asking: what happens to old content on the web? This post continues from the thought process in that prior post.

When a person searches for information on the web, they only care about one question: how do I find the best content?

Because most of the best content is old content, the question often becomes: how do I find the best old content?

It gets more complicated. What does ‘best’ mean? What is best is often subjective. Suppose I am looking for relationship tips. You can’t really find a best set of tips. It may depend on many factors including my age, sex, cultural background, maturity, outlook on life, etc.

So the question really is, how do I find the best old content for myself?

Search.

As of now, search is probably the best option. Search relies on the fact that that over time, the structure of the web points towards the best pieces of content. That is, the best content has the most and best incoming links.

Search looks for the one best set of results across the web. As I said above, for many queries, there is no one best set of results. We are all different people, and the best set of results will differ between people.

This must be one of the big reasons Google cares about social. Personal information enables personalized search.

How good can personalized search get? Who knows. Even if you have a lot of information, as Google does with Gmail and G+, it must be tough to develop the algorithms to automatically determine the best results.

Recommendation engines.

Many startups are working on being the best recommendation engines. Usually, the challenge is the find the most relevant new content to present a user. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. For example, Pandora is great at finding old music that you might like.

I’m not well versed in the recommendation engines that exist, so it may mean that there is no clear winner for general content yet. But, it could be interesting for an intelligent recommendation engine to suggest the best old content.

Social.

It is possible to discover great old content via social feeds and social networks. Usually people don’t search for content on social networks though. Instead they stumble across good content. Most of the time, this content is new content. However, people occasionally post great out stuff. And if you were so inclined, you could ask your social network a question and hope for pointers to the best content.

A big problem with finding great content on social is that not all content is shareable. People share what they are proud about, but won’t share what they are more ashamed of. For example, if someone is searching for the best data on sexually-transmitted diseases, or birth control, they most likely wouldn’t broadcast this out on their social networks.

Aggregators/communities.

Aside from social, there are great link aggregators/communities that are largely anonymous. The largest that springs to mind is Reddit. Through anonymous aggregators, you could find great content on almost every niche of the web. On Reddit, simply search all of the subreddits and you’ll find communities on all kinds of obscure and dark niches on the Internet.

Similar to social feeds, you tend to stumble across information on these aggregators. And most of the links are new links. But, if there is a social discussion component, things may work out. If one was searching for embarrassing information, the best bet would be to find the right subreddit, and ask. Because you are anonymous, the people won’t know you, but if you ask the right way, you may find the best old content for your query.

Curation.

Recently, curation sites such as Pinterest have popped up. On these sites, people manually curate their favorite content. A big plus is that if you can find a person with your tastes, you may find the best content on the web specific to your liking. The downside is that you need to find the right set of people to follow. This takes upfront investment.

Also, with curation sites, you aren’t really asking a question. Instead, you follow people and stumble across what they have curated for you. The one X-factor here is that large curation sites provide a great data set for search. For example, I’ve recently started using Pinterest search for finding recipes. It is surprisingly good. Of course, Pinterest search doesn’t cover all verticals, but it is interesting that can be useful as a search solution.

So, how do you find the best personalized old content?

There are many ways to start going about it, and there are a bunch of startups tackling parts of this. Still, as a consumer, I don’t have a great solution.

The opportunity seems large enough that solving a sliver of the problem would make a great startup. And solving more than just a sliver? That would be huge.

If you have some thoughts, I would love to hear them!

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(Photo credit: Mark Probst/flickr)

P.S. This is post number #54 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

Or, check out my current project Soulmix, a site for sharing the best of the web.

What happens to old content on the web?

As I perused the recent Startup Edition on writing, I came across a great post by Kevin Dewalt. The premise of the post is that blog posts lose their value over time. This is very true. Blogs just aren’t designed for browsing past posts. Kevin proposes an awesome strategy for dealing with this by turning old blog posts into an email course.

Beyond blogs, there is a larger problem here: over time, all content on the web loses value.

This makes sense. In the daily (or even hourly) news cycle, new content gets churned out quickly. As readers, we have a limited attention span, and the old content usually disappears from our attention to make room for the new.

The problem is that not all content should lose its value. Some content is evergreen. It will never go out of date, and it is so good that it should always be easily accessible.

How should we deal with this evergreen content? How do we find it, or resurface it, when it may be useful?

There are countless news sites, social feeds, and other distribution platforms for new content. How many distribution mechanisms are there for old content?

For most, the main mechanism for discovering old content is the search engine. If an epic piece of content has the right keywords for the query, page structure, and incoming links, search will work just fine. But, this isn’t always the case.

For the more dedicated, they may search their private stash of bookmarks, or their saved posts on Digg, reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. This may help the individual, but isn’t a general solution to the problem.

The even more dedicated will organize their bookmarks, and publish curated lists on their own websites or blogs. These are more helpful, but the curation is scattered all across the Internet.

More recently, curation platforms such as Pinterest have popped up for people to organize and publicly share boards containing their favorite pieces of content. This provides a great way to discover old content based upon tastemakers. But, searching through a sea of pins can be time consuming, and isn’t always easy.

I don’t think there is a good solution here yet. Still, content on the Internet continues to be created at a rapid pace. Finding the best stuff can be difficult, and with time, will probably get more difficult. It seems like there is a big opportunity here.

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P.S. This is post number #47 in a 100 day blogging challenge. See you tomorrow!

Follow me on Twitter @alexshye.

BTW: I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot for current project: Soulmix.