

Publishers: Forget the content, here's your business model - kareemm
http://jonbischke.com/2009/08/14/content-publishers-i-have-a-business-model-for-you/

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alanthonyc
"one of the best, if not the best, news/article filter out there. ... _if you
remove the coding and start-up articles ..._ a super-interesting collection of
smart writing and interesting thinking."

Rather ironic.

~~~
thristian
For Alanis Morissette values of ironic, anyway.

I've often thought that HN would be a great news/article filter if I could
only remove the start-up articles, and I'm sure there are people who feel it
would be great if they could read the start-up articles but remove the coding
ones. I am _somewhat_ surprised that someone would want to remove both, but
then there are often fascinating threads that spring up around security or
robotics or similar matters.

~~~
alanthonyc
Given that her song repeatedly ascribes irony to things that are in no way
ironic, I assume you're giving me a subtle jab.

Since this forum was (I believe) started to discuss startups and programming,
then it's ironic that the author finds those are the things he wants to
remove.

Please explain to me how I'm misusing the term.

~~~
thristian
Wikipedia goes into far more detail about the technical definition of irony
than I care to, but I believe the important part is that a statement is ironic
when speaker's words have a relevance to the situation that the speaker is
unaware of.

I'm assuming that nobody could read HN for very long and remain unaware that
the site is targeted at programmers and entrepreneurs. Because the author of
the original blog post knew the purpose of HN, he would have recognised the
incongruity between his statement (that coding and startup articles be
filtered out) and the reality (that HN is all about coding and startup
articles). Since he was aware of the disparity, and irony requires
unawareness, there was no irony.

I'd have given you "sarcasm" or "incongruity", but "irony" is one of those
topics that triggers my "Someone Is Wrong On The Internet" reflex, I'm afraid.

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eli
So... the answer is stop publishing and switch to aggregating?

Sorry, but I'm not seeing how building a better filter enables you to raise
the money for an investigation that uncovers secret NSA wiretaps.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I think the idea is to charge for filtering, not for content.

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njharman
Some problems:

That model has minimal cost of entry. Therefore an unpredictable and vast
number of competitors, therefore high risk. Google could decide to do it one
day on a whim and with their resources they _would_ do it better and bam!
whatever time/money you spent on it would be a loss.

Not sure what you mean by publisher and content, all your examples hn, digg,
delicious I wouldn't consider content publishers at all. The traditional
content publishers such as newspapers don't have the culture, management,
payscales to attract and support large teams of top-notch devs. btw newspapers
(and other content producers) already do a lot of filtering. Might not be that
noticeable because the crap that gets "downvoted" never makes it to
print/online and they filter for "mainstream" not intelligent, well-read,
young entrepreneurs.

Maybe a great idea for a new, young, small startup. As a model for existing
content publishers, not so sure.

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calambrac
The New York Times and other media companies _are_ filters. They pick the
stories that go on their front page, they decide where to dedicate news-
gathering resources, they have an editorial voice...

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kierank
What's he's talking about really is strong filtering.

Current filtering systems weight user contributions equally which means trolls
and other junk get in there easily.

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AndrewWarner
Is there a site that does some of what he talks about? Is there a site that
shows what articles were hot here yesterday or last week?

~~~
brandnewlow
He's really talking about an API. The NYTimes has one.

I do think there's a business model there.

What if the NYTimes shut out Google in its robots.txt file but then offered up
full "firehose" access to it's content via the api for a price?

Nobody pays for content. Everybody pays for data. Publishers should build
solid APIs, shut out the spiders, and then charge search engines, aggregators
etc. for full, rights-free access to their stuff.

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brandnewlow
So.....offer an API. Charge money for it. Got it.

