Flip side of idea discovery engine: Discover people

Since my earlier blog post about discovering new things, I have been thinking about how discovery works for me.

When I discover new things, I am looking for idea.  New idea that can give fresh perspective to things that I did not think of.  Or new story that inspires me to take the next step.  It's not the latest news.  It's certainly not commentaries on latest events, although it can be.  What I look for is unique perspective and narrative.  What I'm after is new ideas.

But you can flip this to think about it from different perspective.  As talked about yesterday's post, idea is propagated from person to person.  Some people copy and echo idea, some people amplify or mutate idea, and some comes up with idea.

Discovery engine for interesting articles

I have been looking around to see if I could quickly hack some APIs to suggest interesting news to read.  My idea was to receive daily journal of news on our family Kindle Touch.  It should contain two types of articles.  Articles that I should know (i.e. current events that everyone is talking about) and articles that I might be interested in knowing.

First one is easy.  I can get Google News RSS feed or WSJ feed to figure out what news are breaking today.  If I wanted real-time news, I can filter Twitter or Facebook posts.  But second one is not so straight forward.

How can I figure out what I might be interested in before me looking at it?

How do you find out what you don't know?
That's what I mean by discovery engine.

It seems an intractable question to answer.  But I think we can get close to it.

How do you keep up with news?

One problem that I deal with every day is discovering interesting content.  I need to read interesting content to keep me up to date with what's happening in high tech startups and social networks.  Also I want to discover new content that expands my perspectives.  Something that I don't even know that I'm missing is what I want to find.

Despite many social readers and discovery tools, I have not found a good solution to solve my problem yet.

How do you discover your news?

There are many sources of information.  Yet not all sources are created equal.  Some sources give you breaking news, while others don't.  Some sources have better coverage than others in certain topics.  Some are created by media companies, while others are authored and curated by crowd.  Because there are so much richness in available sources, we have to rely on our sources and curators to filter out signals from noises.

These days I find myself getting my news from three different types.

1. Online news outlet i.e. Google News

2. News media such as NPR, WSJ, NYTimes, Times, Newsweek, Forbes, Fast Company

3. Social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn News, LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Interest