Subscribe to discover Om’s fresh perspectives on the present and future.
Introducing GigaOM Daily
This past weekend at Word Camp 2008, we announced GigaOM Daily, a Twitter-style micro-newswire that is going to take editorial inputs from our team and our growing network of blogs. Some might call it the Twitterization of news. If you want to be super-simplistic, then you also can think of it as a constantly updating LiveBlog.
Inspired by the thinking behind Dave Winer’s concept of “river of news,” it is a reflection of the changing nature of news in our time-constrained life. Many of our readers and sources have lamented that they have to read the full story when the real information can be wrapped up in two lines. At the same time, I was finding that my growing network on Twitter was feeding me more interesting stories to read than I could find myself.
So why not combine the two and come up with a live microblog-based newswire? Bloomberg, Reuters and Dow Jones have been using headline and news alerts forever. Except now we can do this on the Internet, using an open source platform (WordPress) and some clever hackery. (More details, along with notes about current and future features, below the fold.)
A Quick Rundown of Features:
- It will feature 15 to 30 short posts every day. Each post will be less than 250 characters. Headlines are restricted to 115 characters.
- You can receive the alerts by subscribing to RSS or on Twitter. Or, just sign up for once-a-day e-mail newsletter.
- We’ll post topical headlines from GigaOM network and partner sites.
- GigaOM Network editors and writers will file quick news bits relevant to their beats, including breaking stories and hot tips we pick up while on the go.
- We can use Twitter to file news “from the field” using our Blackberries and/or iPhones. We have worked out a way to interface Twitter with our CMS, WordPress. (Related post, Meet GigaLogue.)
Open To Other Blogs, Too
We are going to use our network to build up this new service, but if you want to participate, it is as simple as getting in touch with us. We are in the process of working with some other blogs who will be feeding their news headlines and short excerpts into our system.
Over a period of time, we are going to open this to more folks and eventually have correspondents from around the world send in their “alerts” to us. But that is in the future. For now we just to make sure it works smoothly.
Other Planned Features:
- Photos directly from our cell phones or digital camera when we are on the go.
- On-the-go video clips to this service as well, again mostly from mobile phones or handhelds.
- IPhone/Mobile Browser version of the site.
- Special widget that you can embed on your blog.
- Social networking widgets that will allow you to enjoy this in Facebook or on one of the many social networks and a desktop application based on Adobe Air. (If you want to help us on this, get in touch with me.)
- More undisclosed features…Stay tuned.
Good luck with this effort! I tried to do something similar, not going to bother linking to the site, that would be too spammy of me.
Anyway, one of the problems you’ll run into is unless you have a huge number of editors contributing, you’ll get burned out quite easily.
I have too much on my plate right now to contribute to this project, but maybe some time in the future.
Again, good luck Om!
Cool stuff, good luck.
Om, great stuff but I confess to being a little troubled by the statement that “Many of our readers and sources have lamented that they have to read the full story when the real information can be wrapped up in two lines.” Is this how far we’ve sunk? Reading a whole article is too much of a hassle? Didn’t we criticize President Reagan for getting all of his information on 3×5 index cards? Was The Economist right when they asked “Is Google making us stoopid?” a few weeks ago?
Hopefully this flood of info-snippets that reach us 24×7 on our multiple mobile devices will not preclude our ability to drill into more detail so that we can ascertain when the headlines are misleading.
@ kevin
I think the comment was more to the “commodity news” than anything else. Why wade through a re-written press release unless you have something to add. A press release has typically two lines of real information.
To be honest, I would rather spend my time writing stuff that is more detailed and analytical and adds value to you, and acknowledges that you are spending time with us in expectation of good quality/
@ Om,
As an occasional writer of press releases I could take umbrage, but I see your point. And I knew I was preaching to the choir on this one.
This looks great, Om. It’s incredible to see how much the delivery of news is changing.
If you have interesting things to say and “new” insights, people will read you. There is just way too much recycling and “me too” stuff happening. If you are running out of things to say its always good to jump on many bandwagons to keep people interested. But for how long? Doing one thing really well has always worked.