While we are limited by staff numbers and time in doing this, updating this section throughout the day has become part of our routine.

Not only does it keep me updated on breaking news throughout the day by having to manually select these stories, it gives an impression to our audience that we are trying to stay at the front of developments in our sector (new media).

Given our small editorial team however, this process is hugely time consuming and I wonder whether there would be an automated way to overcome this problem.

This in turn would bring its own problems like how much editorial control over this section we should relinquish to an automatic process.

Your proposal sounds like Digg driven by journalists and editors. Is it possible sub-communities would form (or already have?) within service sites such as Digg (for example, journalists.digg.com)?

It seems “information about information” services will spread as quickly as information does on the Web. Some will be machine-driven, others human-driven.

With the proliferation, we’ll start to need “information about information about information.”

However, at some point, doesn’t it become impossible to keep up, unless your audience or topic is so small (comprehensive precision works well on the Web) that it remains manageable?

The other strategy to remain relevant in an environment of exponentially expanding information, information about information, and information about information about information, is to, as you say, build networks of intelligence to sort information (and information…). But that requires everyone to agree to participate and continue to participate in your intelligence network. To do that, the network will have to demonstrate consistent and remarkable utility.

The problem is as a network grows, it is threatened with becoming less useful. It pulls in more information, and at some point, there is too much information to be useful, and to retain its utility, there must come an “information about information” service, which will be followed by “an information about information about information” service…

Anyway, the point is that controlling attention in an information environment that is constantly changing and rapidly growing will have to be a constantly evolving business/endeavor. Your attention-directing organization will need to split, adapt and specialize in perpetuity as the information perpetually grows. As a whole, this is how the Web is working. Search engines seem to retain a simple (but limited) way to explore such a complex landscape made up of a steadily increasing number of networks.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to hearing more about Publish2.

You tease. : )

I believe we need a single big, branded, civic-minded site that aggregates the best UGC at a moment like this. Unless one exists and I’m missing it.

Anybody?