Short interview excerpt in which Robert Scoble discusses real-time news curation. He explains using Twitter streams and curated lists (world news, tech journalists) to surface real-time items, mentions tools like PearlTrees for organizing links, and expresses skepticism about fully automated filters—citing Techmeme as a hybrid with human editors and noting companies experimenting with behavior-learning filters (mentions Janaya/Israeli efforts).
What do you think about what is going on and what will be going on in maybe two, three years? Will we really get some real useful information related to curation of the news?
Well, the thing that's happening right now is we're able to get streams of news in Twitter. Right. And that is real time. It flows down my screen and I have lists of different kinds of news. Like I have a world news list which is all the, you know, cnn, Economist, India Times, BBC, you know, stuff like that. That's all in one list. Then I have another list of tech journalists and another list of other kinds of news. And so now we're able to see these streams. Now what's going on now is the curation tools are coming so that you can take things out of those streams and put them into something like pearl trees. Lets you put it into a tree. Right. And then you can add some content into. In between the links.
Yes, but is it something related to the filtering those information to get the real information from the real time? Which is really interesting.
Are you talking about automated filters?
Yes.
I don't believe in automated filters. I just don't believe in them. There's a role for them like techmeme, it's more of an automated filter. But even he has seven humans who read the web and pull stuff in real time over to TechMeam and rank it. Right?
Yes.
And he does have algorithms that can help with that. But a human is still a machine to do that kind of stuff than a machine is. I don't. I've never found an automated filter that I like.
Yes, yes, I think that it is. It is. So do you, do you agree? Maybe if you. I hear that answer, but do you hear that some people said that maybe in four or five years there will be something related to that filtering, which is something.
Lots of companies, there's Janaya, they're here. My sixth sense is Israel is trying to work on automated filter that learns from your behav.
Yes.
And that's good for some things, but it's. I like the small weird stuff. That's what adds value to me. And I don't want that filtered out completely.
