In previous posts on my own blog and here I have talked about the history of the Bee and the philosophy (which is to say the future) of the Bee. But it is worthwhile to put a check on all of this hindsight and foresight and talk a bit about what we expect the Bee to be today, which is to say, in the near term.
Today the Bee is what we call a "discovery engine." I contrast this term to "search engine" in the following way: a search engine lets you find something specific whereas a discovery engine helps you find things for which you aren't looking but are interested. So if I am looking for information about how people are nominated to the US Supreme Court, I use a search engine. But if I am simply interested in following the political process, I don't know ahead of time when a Supreme Court Justice might die or resign from the bench. And so I would need a discovery engine to inform me that this has occurred.
Why don't I just call this a newspaper? The Bee is not the place where you read the news. Like a search engine, we have a short entry with a link that takes you to the original website and content when you decide you'd like to read a particular story. We believe that the role for RSS "readers" is an important one, and we believe that we can provide a compelling reading experience in the future. But we are also very respectful of content owner's rights. We believe that by offering a discovery engine we are both observing copyright law and providing a useful service to content owners by directing new readers to their content properties.
A discovery engine works best on content that is "new" in some way - which is to say, on news. This doesn't mean news solely in the headline news context. There can be new information about any topic, and that is part of what the Personal Bee is all about -- providing a window into specific areas of interest and helping you to stay on top of whatever is new in that topic area.
In order to make the discovery engine work, we believe it is necessary to have both algorithmic analysis of information, and a human editorial process to promote the best and most interesting news in every topic domain. Initially we will be working with a small group of editors (we call them Beekeepers) as we develop the tools. But our plan is to allow anyone in the world to create a Bee edition about any topic. Ultimately we hope this leads to a discovery engine that can bring you new information about literally any topic you can imagine.
Hye ted, love what you're doing...
Posted by: Alex Barnett | January 29, 2006 at 11:09 PM
Hey ted, love what you're doing...
Posted by: Alex Barnett | January 29, 2006 at 11:10 PM