I recently attended the O'Reilly TOC Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. There were talks on a myriad of topics, however the overriding theme was clearly the change from paper to digital in the publishing world. I already published one article about libraries, digital marketing methods and copywright from TOC, which I published on Technorati.

I heard some very interesting speakers speak about the change over time of information, not specifically in books.

Clay Johnson - Author of The Information Diet - Keynote talk titled "Is SEO killing America?"
The keynote talk was the same as the premise of his book - we need to be just as careful about the information we read as we should be about the food we eat. Just as we eat pizza even though we know that broccoli is better for us, we often read or watch news that is not good for us.

What news is not good for us? With the competition of so many news channels on Internet sites, many of them pander to us by giving us news we want to hear. They affirm the way we already feel. They make big stories out of nothing because they know it is what their audience wants to read. So we wind up reading junk food.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, I highly recommended you watch the video of Clay Johnson's speech, below, or read his book The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption.

 

Mark Johnson - CEO of Zite - "What Should I Read: A Brief History of Recommendations"
I have to start off by saying that Zite is one of my favorite iPad apps. It is a news recommendation app. You choose topics that you are interested in and it feeds you stories on those topics. As it gets to know you over time, its recommendations become better and better.

A recommendation engine is very different than a search engine. With search, you know what you want, you are just trying to find it. Recommendations are for when you are trying to discover something by browsing and others help with suggestions.

Search engines will give you the most popular result, but not necessarily the most interesting. Serendipity is the enemy of search.

"Curation comes up when search stops working" - Clay Shirkey. 

There are many online websites that allow you to use discovery and recommendations to find a variety of items. Just take a look at Netflix, Pandora and Amazon as some of the most popular examples. 

There is just too much media of every kind for us to discover it without help. For news, I highly recommend the Zite app (free) if you have an iPad or iPhone.

I plan on writing at least another article or two about the extremely education O'Reilly TOC conference. I will post a link below when I do.

View blog reactions