Clay Shirky, Andrew Keen and the Real Time Web
When you think about Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, and Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur, you don’t usually look for places they agree. However, in the two video interviews posted today (Clay, Andrew) on the SupernovaHub, it is clear both of them are noticing similar problems keeping up with the real-time web.
The real-time web should be familiar to those who try to parse their Twitter feeds for critical information, or attempt keep up with the flow of information from their friends on the Facebook newsfeed. Much of the information is raw, unfiltered, out of context, or just random. Google’s Udi Manber notes in this piece from ReadWriteWeb that “Search has to be lightening fast, relevant comprehensive fresh, but the main point is that even that is not enough.” So, even Google is having trouble returning real-time, relevant and contextual information.
About 4:45 into Clay’s video, he talks about what’s new and next, including the concept of Greylisting (origninally a term describing technology that would dissuade email spammers) now being used to describe a way to limit information flow from the real time web. “Only show me stuff that x number of my friends, and their friends also thought of as important.”
About 4:45 into Andrew’s video he talks about real time web, and notes that Twitter and other services are unmediated and potentially overwhelming. He mentions the example of Middle-Eastern news network Al Jazeera , who reported at Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference that they actually have a team that monitors Twitter during certain events, curates the tweets, and presents an edited and logical flow to their viewers and readers.
Keen, who famously railed against the flow of consumer generated media in Cult of the Amateur calls for more editorial and filtering in his interview, and this isn’t surprising. Shirky, who’s much more positive in Here Comes Everybody about the power of “Everybody” to create, publish and organize, is also calling for filtering. They both approach the problem different ways, with Clay looking for programmatic solutions to use our friend’s actions as a filtering mechanism, while Andrew is looking for the human filtering of editors.
Keen’s approach is less scalable, though proven through years of traditional media workings (by result if not by business model.) Shirky’s desire seems possible, but difficult, with the same issues of search-vs-find we have with search engines now coming to mind. UPDATE: The topic calls to mind the concept of a curator, whether digital or analog, to help us along.
How will we parse the real time web? We hope to bring you more from both these authors and from others on this topic here on the Supernova Hub and at the Supernova 2009 conference.
[...] Supernova Hub: Clay Shirky, Andrew Keen and the real time web. [...]
[...] content on the real-time web, much of which is irrelevant and nonsense, he’s become a fan of Greylisting, which – if used to its potential – excludes nearly everybody who does not matter [...]
[...] © Superniva Hub 2009. [...]
[...] great post about filtering by Howard Greenstein at Supernova: Clay Shirky, Andrew Keen and the Real Time Web, (7/22/09), a post on the “personal journalist” by Julian Matthews at trinetizen: The [...]