One Search, Many Filters

I thought this tweet from Bijan yesterday was great:

  quick break in between mtgs and calls. was going to read techmeme but instead just reading my twitter stream.

I find myself doing the same thing, a lot.

Instead of going to a site with a single voice (or none at all), I go
to Twitter or Google Reader, where I discover content from hundreds of
voices I know and follow.

When we launched 9Neighbors, I was a big believer in centralized,
automated filtering. There’s a ton of content being produced locally,
and I saw a need for one-stop-shopping local content discovery — a
single site to help people find the best, most relevant stuff.

Over the past few months, however, it’s become clear to me that
filtering is happening everywhere on the web. Today I learned about the
DEMO event in Boston this eventing from Pistachio. I heard about
Bertlesman’s new Wikipedia publishing project from Mark. I heard about last week’s NewsTools conference from Dave. The content I consume is
filtered by the network of voices I follow.

Certainly some filtering nodes are bigger than others. I get a disproportionate amount of local news from Universal Hub, political news from NYTimes.com and technology news from Techcrunch. But these sites will never have
anywhere near the monopoly on my attention that Google does.

Aggregation and filtering, unlike search, is not a winner-take-all
service. It’s more like content, where the options are infinite.

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