Wired makes a good point in this article but they write from a newscentric view…it reads like someone in "the industry" writing about "the industry" and screams that Wired has lost touch with the non-industry Internet user who doesn’t view everything as news. I blog. Is that news? In essence yes but you don’t need one of my blog posts flashing across your breaking news app. I write stuff that, according to my stats, people read three months after I write it. My flickr rss feed? Not news. But it is news. Yes, we could lump all media into news but that’s not really what Wired is talking about. Wired is claiming that as content is produced (they call content news) that people want it immediately. Frankly, that’s the Facebook model. And the Facebook model irritates me to no end. I miss things. Granted, there are not enough minutes in the day for me to consume everything but with an RSS reader I can selectively choose what I skip. Wired’s approach would deem that because I was in meetings in the morning, content that was published in the morning is not relevant to me.
Back in 2007 I would tell my clients that people come to the Internet for three things:
- Information
- Utility
- Entertainment
I contend people go to the Internet in that order but you can go back to 2007 for that explanation. Getting back to Wired’s article, my point is that even as a very connected person, most of my day is not spent consuming media. I spend my day doing my job. Once home, I want to catch up on things. I peruse the content I enjoy on the Internet which might be an audioboo by Christian Payne, or a podcast by Jason Jarrett, or an insight from Cathy McCaughan. I don’t need it shoved at me as it happens and if that is why Google killed Reader, they made a poor decision.
