News curation news: 2 Inside(.com) stories

Interesting points emerging from the first two articles I’ve seen about Jason Calacanis’ his new venture, Inside.com. Essentially it’s a human-powered journalism curation engine …

We have a team of curators summarizing the top 1,000 stories every day [covering] over one thousand topics…No link-baiting, just the facts of the story … as the curator of the best journalism in the world, we’re very specifically only linking to the original journalist… if you’re someone who does original journalism, we’re going to drive a lot of traffic to you…I think high-high-high-end curation is in and of itself an act of creation… I think our success will be largely based on our ability to get rid of noise.

… with a mobile-first content strategy:

Twitter has the tweet as their atomic unit of content. We have something called an update…. about 40 words, just enough to fit on a smartphone screen. About 10 facts is what we shoot for. And we aim to link to the best journalism in the world.

Taxonomy-wise, they’re keeping it simple to start with:

We’re going with a flat taxonomy to start …. We may build a hierarchy, like entertainment → movies → independent → documentaries [but] I would say we’re not going to get that granular. I would say we’re doing the fat tail and the mid tail, but maybe not the longest part of the tail yet.

He’s also very dismissive of some competitors’ reliance on machine-driven curation:

I’ve tested all the semantic software and it doesn’t work… a human has to read the story, understand the story, and write the summary.

I have to agree for now (he’s referring to using semantic software to write the summaries, rather than just auto-classifying the content, as in the BloggingPortal reboot), but the software will get there eventually, which he does admit:

20 years from now, when artificial intelligence takes a huge jump, fine

In the meantime he wants to build a company which is:

a Google-proof company. I wanted to have a killer brand that people would remember … Google have no respect for human curation… They don’t value writers or creators… [and] can’t control apps even though they have a big footprint in Android … 
We’re also adding an email component to this. So email, social, and apps are three things that Google can’t control. This is very social — people will share. It’s mobile — Google can’t control that.

As for income, he’s betting on native advertising:

The update format would be perfect for native advertising. What I think will be the model is to let advertisers insert updates, then pay to promote them — obviously clearly labeled. … People can just buy native ads by topic.

Full articles:

- Nieman’s interview: “I see this as the next CNN”: Jason Calacanis’ Inside.com aims to solve news on mobile devices

- GigaOM: Jason Calacanis launches Inside, a mobile news-curation app powered by humans

See also:

- Circa

- Yahoo News Digest, (based in part on Summly)

- Breaking News

- Trove