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[personal profile] stakebait
www.veryshortlist.com

Mostly, I'll admit, because I like the name. The Very Short List has one item on it (per day). It's cute, and I can't fault their labeling skills.

But also because of something the spokescritter said in the article where I found it:

"People feel they’re drowning in choice and are desperate to go into curated space"
-- Michael Jackson, IAC president of programming, in "The Way We List Now," Wall Steet Journal, 9/29, (I hate it when the attribution is longer than the quote)

I don't know that I'd go so far as "desperate," but yeah. In essence I think most of the hand-wringing about the Role of the Newspaper in the Era of Citizen Journalists or the Role of the Publisher in the Era of Self-Publishing is because people aren't focusing on that part of the job which is not about being an information provider but an information filter. Because that part has gotten much more in demand.

Being an editor, I think of this as editing, but editing is a workhorse word with a lot of other stuff to do already. Curated is a good choice, if a little highbrow. You could just as well call it DJed space.

It's partly about rejecting the junk and picking out the good stuff that I'm looking for. But I could probably do that myself, if I had time. It's also about picking out what I don't know I'm looking for, contrasting it with other information in a way that's surprising and causes me to make new connections, or putting a frame and some whitespace around it. Even if it's the exact same stuff, that treatment causes me to look at it with a more critical eye, to give it that weight.

I signed up for the email. I don't know if I'm actually going to like it -- I wasn't the right girl for Daily Candy, and I might not agree with what these folks think is interesting either. But I like the concept, a lot.

Date: 2006-10-05 12:25 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stakebait.livejournal.com
*nods* Especially since at the store stage, it mostly is information that makes it overwhelming -- the difficulty of juggling price with pleasure with long term benefit with side effects with environmental impact, etc., for each of thousands of items.

Of course, there are plenty of areas where I wouldn't give up my choice for anything. But there are times when I wish I could turn it off for a while -- and sometimes the choices where I care the least are the hardest, because there's so little to choose between them. Is baking soda better than peroxide? How would I know?

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