Some of you may have already seen this, but Dave Winer has sketched out his vision of a futuristic MSNBC. In essense, he visualizes a bunch of checkboxes that would allow him to opt in and out of various stories as he watches a linear newscast. So if he unchecked the Virginia Tech box, those stories would no longer appear. “I think this is another form of the River of News, the checkboxes represent subscriptions,” he writes. “I could see MSNBC including stories produced by CNN, and sharing revenue with them. The goal is to get the best news experience tailored to the interests of specific users.” He even built a mock-up of what it would look like. If this were an online streaming experience, frankly, why wouldn’t I just click on the individual clips? But as a TV experience, it could be a killer feature — although it’s far from technologically feasible right now. But maybe with IPTV’s bigger pipes? Thoughts on all this?
Adds Tim in comments: “I see the checkboxes more as ‘tags’ or categories: set your filters for the tags you want, or perhaps set your filters for tags you no longer want. The tags present an issue: who decides what the “offical†tag is? ‘Virginia Tech shooting’, ‘Virginia Tech chaos’ and ‘VATech shooter’ all could refer to the same thing – so how are the tags going to be assigned to storied to allow us to filter easily?”
Adds Geoff: “The problem with Dave Winer’s model is, it assumes your choices are final. I dismissed broccoli in 1955 – was that my last choice? I have also thought about this and favor tagging stories and matching them for affinity. You would tag for geography (zip code, for instance) and substance. A story would have many tags, so Paris Hilton’s latest foray might be sent to criminology fans who wouldn’t have gotten stories about her shopping or clubbing….”