Coming Clean Posted on October 31, 2008 Post a comment

In chatting with Roy Sekoff, editor of the Huffington Post, at the Webby Connect conference last week, I couldn’t help but spill it out like a sinner in a confessional: I am seriously addicted to the election.

Just a few short weeks ago, I led a fairly normal life—online most of the day checking email and surfing the Web for business purposes. But somehow over the last eight weeks, I’ve become a different person. A “nightcrawler” trolling every online news source at two in the morning for any bit of election news and gossip that might have gotten past me. I eat lunch at my desk while reading news clips on WSJ, the New York Times, and CNN. I watch political satires on HuffPo, the Daily Beast, or YouTube. I open separate browser tabs so I can mainline information from all the sites simultaneously. I even shelled out 99 cents for a poll tracking iPhone app. I’ve become a certifiable election junkie.

As part of the healing process, I have to ask myself how I got here. Sure, I’ve been getting daily news updates and news feeds for years. So what changed? How did I fall this far down the rabbit hole?

Four years ago, most of the content owned by the major news sources was behind a subscription wall. If you wanted to read online news, it required more work and perhaps, more money, to access it. Now the opposite is true. The New York Times is open to all and the WSJ even dropped their wall earlier this month following the overwhelming industry trend. That’s meant more news from more sources available more than ever before. 

Add in the rise of curated news sites like the Huffington Post and Daily Beast and it becomes even more interesting. Now they take the lead in rounding up the stories and serving them to you from multiple sources. Click over to HuffPo, the site born out of liberal blog, and you’ll find curated news from ABC, Al Jazeera, Fox News, and more. The same is true of Tina Brown’s new site, the Daily Beast. And at Webby Connect, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. talked about how their online property is planning to begin curating blogs, bringing the best of the best independent blogs to the table on behalf of their readers.

“Curation” was a common theme in many of the panel discussions and around the dinner table at Webby Connect. Granted, at this point in time, it applies almost solely to the news media. But it left me asking the question—will it filter down to brand sites as consumers grow accustomed to it, and if so, what it will look like?

Many brands worried about the legal ramifications and liabilities that come with unchecked user-contributed content have shied away from true online communities or social networks. And unfortunately, it’s hard to have a sense of community in a site when it lacks the voice of real people.

Perhaps the idea of curation can be applied to a brand site to solve the issue. Could a brand owner find the best of the best blogs online and invite them to have a voice in their online communities? Could a brand curate good blogs that write authoritatively, bringing voices to the table, but not owning them?

We think so. In fact, we believe the fallout of the election will be a change in what people expect from Web sites in general. Being the be-all, end-all expert or authority will be less exciting to people than being the catalyst of something bigger and greater. Authority will not only mean you have a distinct and trusted voice, but also empowering others to have a voice as well.

What do you think?

--posted by Christina