It really always comes back round to this: how do we know what to read. Well, we’ll find someone/something/somemagicbox that will tell us what’s good and what’s not. Maybe we’ll pay them for the service.

Thing is, we already have that. It’s called “The Media”.

I’m not saying to challenge the idea of the new forms of reporting, but rather to point out that the old forms are like they are for a reason. They grew up in pretty much the same way as New Media has. And at every point in the history of any medium, there’s been a time where Gatekeepers had to arise.

The other thing that springs to mind is that we haven’t lost the notion of information gatekeepers, rather we’ve got networks of them now. To deal with the second problem, look at the tech blogging networks. You know which blogs to read about Apple development. That network will overlap with one on, say, Python so you should be able to find the Python gatekeepers fairly easily.

The tech world is obviously more mature online than everything else but we can expect everything else to catch up eventually. When the news bods are fully intertwingled you should be able to travel from Finance to Pakistan to Ecology fairly easily through recommendation. And those people will be parsing the crowds for us.

I’m pretty sure we’ve developed the tools to do this over the last decade but the noise of the stupid is proving a little daunting (and understandably so).

Like I say, it’s late.

I’m not so convinced. There are two problems to deal with here. The first is that the crowd is on both sides of the divide: they’re the audience too. Which means that you can’t rely on them to effectively filter the stupid out. (If we could rely on crowds to do that, we’d not have an echo chamber in the first place). Sure, you and I might be right, but that’s not going to help when the everyone else is wrong. For the iPhone, who cares, but for important news, this is a big problem.

The second problem is that you can only filter on topics you know about. Sure, I know which blogs to read about Apple news, from long bitter experience. But how do I build that experience about the blogs about, say, Pakistani politics? How do I know who is part of an echo chamber, and who is a provider of quality independent thought? I have no “don’t go to digg” type reference for that topic.