Diversity and noise

News delivers what’s happening in the world right now. Social networks let us know what’s happening with our friends. Search is great at finding the needle in the haystack.

But how do we discover things from around the web that are new and relevant to us? There’s a plethora of curated content—from niche sites over Twitter to newsletters. While it’s interesting to see the web through the lens of the curator, our interests are unique and relying on a few curators alone is likely not diverse enough. If we add more sources to our mix (for example, following more people on Twitter, or using an RSS reader), we increase diversity but also noise.

We need a better filter.