For the last year or so, I've been playing in the news app
sandbox, delighted that Project X will soon see the light of day. That is, if the algorithm gods are
willing. From time to time, I pull my head out of the
sand and notice that other parties are moving in with buckets and spades in
considerable numbers. The competitive set is becoming very
competitive indeed. We are all in search of that nectar, that
secret sauce. We want a news app that is
personal, reliable, beautiful, predictive, and getting better by the day thanks
to machine learning. And we want to hang on long enough without
seed money or venture rounds until Google or a large media company agrees to
buy us for at least $30 million. This
story is more than a thrice-told tale and not such a fantasy after all. It is the sound of Orpheus with flute.
Ken Doctor at The Nieman Journalism Lab just published a
mobile aggregator roundup, reminding us of how hot and full of intrigue this
space has become. Most of the basic
facts are well-known, but Doctor’s perspective is nonetheless quite
interesting. So tablet aggreggator Pulse
was sold to LinkedIn for $90 million. I’m still trying to get my head around why
Yahoo paid $30 million to an English teenager for Summly, a smartphone
aggregator. CNN had earlier picked up Zite and Google had
purchased Wavii for $30 million and closed it down. One assumes the software will find a home
somewhere. Doctor notes that this leaves
Flipboard , which is probably valued at $400-500 million, with Facebook and
Google lurking in the wings.
Clearly the above start-ups have gotten the jump on
traditional media companies that are learning to deal with them. And
the more established start-ups, such as Flipboard, Pulse and Zite, are in their
second or third generations, where design and business model are taking center
stage. In some ways, there is a great
deal of commonality among the news aggreggators—and I mean as a compliment. As
Flannery O’Connor reminded us, everything that rises must converge.
Just this morning, I learned about another start-up or at
least an idea of a start-up: News Genius,
which is a first cousin to Rap Genius. The
latter richly and deeply annotates, through crowd-sourced commentary, textual
analysis, and clarifications, specific lines of rap lyrics such as ZPac’s “Hail
Mary Lyrics.” Those who contribute
useful annotations earn Rap IQ points and can become contributors. I’ve
heard that Rap IQ points are being traded like Bitcoins, and could be as
valuable.
This is a curious site that publishes tons of respectable
coarse rap lyrics with a layer of commentary floating over the profane body as
if delivered by an army of professors who are dedicated to annotating the
world. To get the flavor of this site,
have a look at a YouTube investment video (DLD13 Conference: Annotating the
World) in which the investment lead and
the Rap Genius start-up team, apparently from Yale and eager to cite Plato, talk
about their venture as if it’s akin to a kind of biblical exegesis. Yes, the Torah does appear in an
annotation. This is not like analyzing poetry and finding
the hidden meaning. Rather, with the help of the wise and filtered crowd, this
is about building layers of knowledge about knowledge. If you
are up to it, you can enter that DMZ between Gucci Mane’s thug lyrics and that
quiet zone of linguistic and textual subtlety.
I was fully ready to call this a scam, an Internet joke that
marries, shotgun-style, discordant layers of meaning, such as rap hyperbole and
semantic squatting, until I learned that the business had received $15 million
in funding from the increasing rap venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. What to do, what to do!
Rap lyrics have a density, discordance, and a metaphorical
vulgarity that would be an English teacher’s wet dream. Have a look at Rap Genius; meaning is
breaking out all over. It’s an open
question whether the extended metaphor can reach all the way into the crucible
of news. That is, unless news becomes
rap, a kind of melodramatic, vital poetry that focuses on the shadow side of
news, our desperate underbelly, our alligator shoes that neither talk the talk
nor walk the walk.
Lately I’ve been broadcasting Bit-poems on Twitter and
Facebook. It’s a desperate attempt at legitimacy. Rap Genius seems to have a better idea. Annotate rap lyrics until they smother you. These Yale guys seem to know that the media
business, the land of suits and summer yachts, is a two-valued nightmare. It’s either this or that, Newton or the NRA;
in other words, a semantic and profitable pissing contest. Perhaps
a service that adds layers of crowd-sourced meaning, vulgarity, flights of
fancy, error and disdain might have a fighting chance in this field of the also said.
Marc, call me. Maybe.
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