Monday, July 14, 2014

The bespoke newspaper – will the Daily Me soon be delivered?

Turns out Nicholas Negroponte's vision of a newspaper tailored to your own interests wasn't so far-fetched after all…

ebooks paper later-contributoria
Services such as Paper Later will make you a print version of your chosen articles. Photograph: Alamy

In his seminal 1995 work of futurism, Being Digital, MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte coined the term the "Daily Me" to describe a virtual daily newspaper customised to an individual's tastes. It's possible to detect versions of Negroponte's vision in many recent developments, from the "suggested articles" based on your surfing which now appear on many websites, to services such as Paper.li, which selects social media links according to your stated interests. 
The underlying themes of automation and understanding are also behind the Associated Press's recent announcement that it will start using algorithms created by a company called Automated Insights to generate news stories from raw data, and the furore over a 2012 Facebook study which manipulated the emotional content of users' news feeds.
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