On the subject of productivity and development it never ceases to amaze me how some of the daily grinds we are in have refused to adapt to technological advances that render them obsolete. Specifically, I am under the assumption that the majority of us have a computer, printer and some sort of internet access. That being said, why do so many of us buy newspapers every single day? Why do we have them delivered to our homes? I like to do the crossword and my brother like to read the comics. The local news is great and the classified ads can have hidden gems. Couldn’t I develop a platform that would print out for me all the morning headlines (major news), local headlines, weather, comics, and cross-word, classified, coupons etc? Maybe that would be the stepping stone toward having it all sent directly to my handheld phone/PDA. I know it must exist but why hasn’t it caught on? I want to program it like my coffee maker so that when I leave in the morning I can grab my coffee and news printout and be off.
Does anyone want to help me develop and market this? Unlike many of the techno-elite, I would be looking to profit from such an endeavor. Just enough to pay for educating my children through college, a nice fishing boat, my mortgage, retirement and a few nice vacations a year. Oh yeah, taxes too. Maybe the large media companies would buy this from me to bury it in the basement somewhere similar to how the oil companies allegedly bury alternative energy ideas.
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Call the press. I think they have what you’re looking for. Its called a newspaper.
Chris, I think the reason the newspaper is so attractive, at least to me, is the convenience. I pay for a daily subscription, and I really enjoy it. It’s also a different perspective than what I get on-line. I also find it’s hard to balance the laptop on my lap when I’m on the toilet. The paper is just a very different medium, and the very fact that I don’t select what’s there and the nature of how I browse it usually leads me to read things I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise. I’m generally a technophile, I believe, though not to the extent of Jim, but I’m also a member of the Lead Pencil Club for certain things, e.g., my address book is the same one I got as a high school graduation present. It’s simple, expandable, and persistent. The many times I’ve decided to type in all my addresses into some electronic format have always ended up as bits scattered into etheria in the end. Sometimes the old ways are the best, or at least good enough (cf. the idea of “good enough” in this Paul Graham essay).
ky
First of, Ken: nice link on the Paul Graham site. I’ve read a ton of his posts, esp. since he’s a LISP guy and, well, emacs is all about learning LISP which i totally suck at, but I digress.
Chris: dude. seriously. if you have a printer you could do exactly what you’re talking about right now. There’s nothing standing in your way, nor is there anything standing in the way of millions of other people who would want to do something like this. In fact, it was already done once and failed miserably. Actually there have been two failed implementations of what you reference above, both in the mid-90s. One was Netscape’s Netcenter which pushed specific news items out to your desktop for aggregation and printing. The other were wire-clipping services that faxed out aggregated news. The reason these services blew chunks was in part because of what Ken alludes to: namely; that having an easy to negotiate interface (A Newspaper) filled with content that you are both interested in but also possibly intested in is a more rewarding way to deal browse information. They also failed in part due to something you mention above, namely being able to get exactly what you want, aggegrated, in a centralized location.
In the 90s there was very little syndication, everyone was still trying to figure out how to make money from content and no one wanted to syndicate. Now though, with blogs and most media outlets waking up to syndication, there is an incredible amount of aggregation that is possible. More so than you’d ever want to be able to browse in hardcopy. Hence, the birth of a wide variety of aggregation software (from desktop clients, to phone/palm clients, to web-based tools).
What I’m saying is that what you want already exists in the digital realm. It does not exist in the print realm because the amount of aggregation of syndicated content that is currently available makes targeted aggregation (in a scale/size of content that could conviently be printed) next to impossible. If I were to “print out” the contents of my news aggregator every morning i would fill a 200-300 page binder with paper. Yet having that content digitally on my laptop and also on my cell phone means that throughout the day I can digest it, search it, save it and link to it in ways that are not possible in print.
To sum up:
You want a manageable amount of information that isn’t necessarily targeted to your interest in hardcopy: buy a magazine or newspaper
You want vast amounts of very target information that you can read at your convienience: learn about RSS and get an aggregator. If you need to read on the road, dump the contents of the aggregator to notes on your ipod or to your cell phone or your palm pilot.
YOU REALIZE THAT YOU JUST COST ME MILLIONS OF $$$$’S!!!!
back to the drawing board….