Coolhunt #2: April 17, 2007

By Steve O'Keefe(Peter A. Gloor)
Peter: You can see how data like this can be mined by pharmaceutical companies for drug inventory management. And also for finding out how people are self-treating diseases. One of the biggest uses for the web is gathering health ...

On Stage:
Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting
Steve O'Keefe, moderator

Leading the Coolhunt today is Scott Cooper.

SCOTT: I'm connecting from my home office in Massachusetts. I've just been working on a project involving using RFID tags on buildings to help guide tourists through European cities. The technology lets citizens decide what attractions people should see--not some agency.

MODERATOR: Scott, we look forward to a discussion of RFID tags at a future coolhunt. I'd like to update folks on the finishing work on yesterday's hunt.

MODERATOR: We posted the log, then we sent emails to six business and technology reporters at The New York Times to let them know we coolhunted the NYT Online and discussed their "most popular" box. We received a personal email back from one of the reporters at the NYT with comments on our hunt, but he doesn't want them made public. We also posted a comment to the TreeHugger blog, letting them know we used their thread as an example of citizen commentary on the news and its ability to help people with similar views connect with each other.

SCOTT: Newspapers are scrambling for readership and survival now. The truth is, they just don't know what to do with this new technology. Some day the home page of the New York Times might become user-specific (your priorities are reflected).

MODERATOR: Both Scott and Peter agree that having the front page of the New York Times Online reformat according to the popularity of stories is a bad idea. Scott mentioned that he doesn't want his daily paper to begin with news on Paris Hilton's latest exploits and Peter agreed. But having a newspaper that is elegantly customized for one's interests is a completely different matter.

PETER: I am involved with a $1 million Euro startup newspaper in Europe. The newspaper will be user-specified, both in print and online. I want to know what the crowds think. Personalized newspapers could lose the ability to see what's important to the masses. Combining the two--a personalized paper that also contained new stories popular with the masses--would be the best of both worlds.

MODERATOR: Why aren't there any feedback threads attached to New York Times Online articles? Why did we have to travel to another blog to see commentary on a Times story?

PETER: There are feedback loops at the New York Times. The journalists have blogs.

SCOTT: There are two means of feedback at the Times Online: Letters to the Editor via an email address and feedback on the journalist's blog.

PETER: Wikipedia and the Times are the most heavily linked-to sites, quoted most often. The Times still dominates news, but not the way it used to.

SCOTT: There was a time when you had to be in The New York Times to be taken seriously. I spend an hour every morning reading newspapers from all over the world -- thanks to the web. Before the Internet, I had to rely on the large papers for news -- The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post--and international news always lagged behind. Now I have up-to-the-minute international coverage in addition to the Times.

PETER: Yes, I read The New York Times Online first every day, then my Swiss daily paper, then Google News, which provides an amalgam of news stories that is inclusive of worldwide papers.

MODERATOR: The New York Times is still the fat pipe for news about our neighbors here and around the world due to their research capabilities. Let's move on to today's coolhunt.

SCOTT: I want to start today at micropersuasion--Steve Rubel's blog.

WEB: http://www.micropersuasion.com

SCOTT: Steve Rubel is an advertising executive. His blog covers subjects of how technology is revolutionizing marketing and public relations. Each day, he posts a brief but always wonderful set of links to articles. I find these link sets to be a good starting for finding articles on these topics. In fact, today already I have visited 30 articles online, starting from Steve Rubel's link set.

PETER: Steve's main post today [Open Letter: A Lesson Learned Twittering] tells an interesting story about bloggers themselves. They might take over the world, true, but they often type faster than they think, or are careless with their posts. Rubel is apologizing for a Twitter entry that says he never reads PC Magazine--that he trashes it immediately. But the Twitter post didn't go on to include that he reads online version closely.