I must confess, I didn’t invest much emotion in the kidnapping of human rights activist Kate Burton and her parents. There’s probably a reason why ‘Bring Your Parents To Work Day’ hasn’t caught on in Gaza.
Suddenly, quite by chance, I discover that the family lives a couple of miles away from me. I pass the parents’ home on a regular basis. Guess what – I’m a lot more interested now.
Thus far, personalised news works on a calculation of someone’s predefined (or observed) interests. But how do you factor in the stories they aren’t generally interested in? The closer the story, the more likely I am to care about it, no matter what the subject. I can see a time where all news stories are geocoded, with proximity given significant (if not the main) weighting in any ‘news value’ algorithm.
But as with true personalisation, only the biggest players – either huge monoliths like Reuters or the BBC; or huge networks of local media – will be able to offer the total coverage necessary to make this work. Every news story from everywhere, geocoded (and of course, subject-tagged) accordingly. An intimidating prospect.