Content That Finds You (Part I)

For pretty much as long as the Internet has been part of our lives, pundits have been talking about smart technology that's able to surface content that interest you. This was one of the ideas behind General Magic in the 1990s. (Historians, please correct me if this is wrong.)

That early vision is now closer to a reality. It was one of the big themes to emerge from last week's International Council conference, hosted by the Paley Center for Media.

This is the first of two posts on the subject. The first covers the four underlying pillars of content that finds you. The second will cover the impact of this major change in how we interact with media and the impact on marketing. In addition, Part II will address how content that finds you might even mitigate The Attention Crash by helping us focus more, perhaps to a fault of exclusion.

As I mentioned, several underlying forces are coming together in a powerful way that will very soon help everyone find content that they care about more easily.

The first underlying technology is search. Specifically, I am referring to what John Battelle describes in his great book, The Search, as databases of intention. Search tools are gathering so much data that they are able to show you related content, such as advertising, just at the moment you need it.

The second building block is personalization. Today consumers are balancing the benefit they get from personalizing services against the downside risks of privacy. This will become less prevalent as the Net Generation ages. They live their whole life online already. I personalized my Google News page for example, and now it recommends news stories that are relevant to my interests.

The third is Web 2.0 people-powered services, such as del.icio.us, Flickr, digg and others. For example, Flickr Interestingness consistently surfaces incredible photos based on the activities that the community generates through comments, clicks and favorites. Similarly, Techmeme taps the global brain that is the blogopshere to show us what's hot in the tech news sphere today.

The fourth and final building block, perhaps the most critical, is RSS. Feeds by their nature bring us content that we care about to our desktops. However, today consumers need to preselect the content. We need to tell Google Reader or Newsgator that we want the Sports section New York Times. However, soon that will change and the readers will get smarter. Check out Newsgator Buzz for a glimpse of the future.

So how will this change how we consume media and the PR/marketing business? Stay tuned for part II.