newschallenge:

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

Put two journalists to work sifting Quora for fascinating, unanswered questions, then doing the reporting to answer them.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

There’s the Wilmington Star-News’…

Here is my answer to “What are some ways for a non-technical person to get noticed by a startup they want to work for?” on Quora

Publish copious, thoughtful feedback, log it, and present it to the startup. I used WorkFlowy and Evernote to keep track of my volunteer evangelism. Both work pretty well.

Here are some of the best channels for getting on a startup’s radar:

Quora
Ask and answer questions about them on Quora. If they don’t notice a question, tweet it at them. 

Here are some good questions to ask (and answer.) Let’s call our imaginary startup Shmooble.

• What is Shmooble?
• What is so great about Shmooble?
• How could Shmooble be improved? Note: As you get come up with more ideas, update your answer.

Look for questions relevant to the startup and mention them in a non-spammy way. Always @ mention them—the startup is more likely to notice, and you have a record of everywhere you pitched them. Shmooble’s topic page will show 37 @ mentions by you—that’s impressive.

Blogs
Blog about them and tweet them a link to your article. Mention them in blog comments.

Twitter
Praise them in a tweet. Startups like to retweet praise, and if yours is better written or more insightful than the average, they’ll notice.

Ask them questions on Twitter if none of their employees are active on Quora. You usually get quicker answers.

Finally…

Summarize
Present your activity to the startup in an easily digestible form.

They are bound to notice you if you do all these things. It has worked for me.

I am very glad that there is a way to get my dream job without a traditional resume. I want to do community management and social media marketing for a consumer web startup, but I have no relevant experience. I wasn’t even a marketing major. I have little work experience of any kind. I wasn’t an exceptional student, and didn’t join many clubs. Unless I am ridiculously overqualified for a job (ie retail) my resume will not stand out from the hundreds of competitors. 

Enter the Internet. I am able to jump right to the front of the line for marketing positions with consumer web companies because I live on the web and I have a do-first, plan-later approach. I very nearly got my dream marketing internship without ever being asked for a resume.

I just evangelized their product for free without asking permission, logged my activity, then presented that activity in a cold email, along with my pitch. They weren’t even hiring for that position, but they agreed to create it and have me fill it. That particular gig fell through, but I am confident that I can get a similar one.

I outlined my strategy in detail here: http://colemanfoley.com/post/19208975687/how-a-non-technical-person-can-get-noticed-by-a-startup

Lately I’ve been getting really interested in Prismatic (http://getprismatic.com), a personalized news reader web app. I have been obsessed with personalized news readers for a while now, and this is the most excited I’ve been yet.

Quite simply, it is Zite in web app form. You tell it which topics you want to follow, and it starts delivering relevant news. You tell it whether or not you like the recommendations, and recommendations improve.

One thing that makes it better than Zite is its emphasis on adding trusted sources. In Zite, sources aren’t emphasized much. The focus is on posts. You can tell Zite to block a source or to show more stories from a source, but it’s hard to tell it right away to focus on certain sources. You have to wait until you see a story from a source you like, and only then can you ask for more from that source.

While recommendation is useful, a personalized news reader should be able to make a Google Reader refugee feel like he won’t be missing news from the sources he loves.

You shouldn’t have to use multiple news readers, but so far, it’s been necessary. You want to see news your favorite sources miss, but you also don’t want to miss news your favorite sources get.

Flexibility is a big strength of Prismatic. They do personalized news as well as anyone, but they allow you to get more serendipity, too. You can view a social feed of people you follow on Twitter, or even a global feed, that shows you what the whole Internet is talking about. So there are different levels of serendipity, which is really nice.

I love personalized news, but sometimes I feel a little claustrophobic and want to break out my filter bubble. I shouldn’t have to go to different app just to do that. Besides, there should be as much fodder as possible for the recommendation engine.

Personalized news readers are hot right now.  This has long been the holy grail of online news, and now they are finally getting good enough to largely replace old-fashioned news readers.  It’s hard to know which one to use, though, so I’ve written this to break them down.

Most personalized news readers focus on up-to-the-minute, real-time news.  This is certainly valuable, but it is nice to get an idea of what has been going on with a topic in a longer time frame

Trapit reaches farther back in time than most personalized news readers.  It searches for articles published in the last 30 days.  I like this because it lets you get an overview of a topic when you first start following it.  Say you follow “personalized news.”  Trapit will go fetch a bunch of articles written on the topic in the last 30 days.  This way, you can see what the larger trends in this space are recently.  

As a bonus, this gives Trapit more fodder for learning what you like. Once I have processed the backlog, Trapit has a good idea what news to recommend to me going forward.  And, indeed, Trapit does a good job learning what I like.

Other personalized news readers are focused on giving you the day’s news.  Some of my favorite others are Zite and Prismatic.  They both personalize the day’s news for you, and do a good job of it.

Another advantage Trapit has on these two is that it lets you follow far more topics. You cannot directly follow “content discovery” on Zite at all.  You can follow it on Prismatic, but the results are few.  Prismatic works best for topics it has already defined, while Zite works only for topics it has defined.

Trapit is designed to follow any topic you ask for.  Of course, not all topics have many results, but you can be confident that you’re getting a good idea of developments in whatever space you’re following.

These are the only personalized news readers I regularly use.  Others just don’t keep me interested. News.me has been in the news lately for its new iPhone app.  I don’t like News.me because it only shows me news that people I follow have shared.  There are two big problems with this approach.  First, I get a lot of news I don’t care about.  I always want to hear what Om Malik has to say about the consumer web, but he often tweets about other topics.  The other problem is that the people I follow miss a lot of news that’s important to me.  There aren’t enough of them to catch everything. Of course, both of these can be seen as pros.  There is something to be said for limiting the amount of news you get, and for getting news that you wouldn’t usually read.

The best of both worlds is to be able to switch back and forth between a super-personalized feed and a less personalized feed.  Prismatic does this, letting you can switch from your personalized feed to a social feed like you would find in News.me or a global feed, with content from everybody. There are different levels of serendipity: little from your personalized feed, a medium amount from your social feed, and a lot from the global feed.

You can do this in Trapit and Zite, too, by following both feeds on niche topics you like and broader topics that will always have things more tangential to your interests. But I like how it is a little more designed into Prismatic.

I wish I could mark places in a comment thread I want to come back to.  To bookmark them.  Say I’m reading a thread with 100 comments.  I would like to mark comments as “to-comment-later” as I go through them, so I could read the thread without interruption, without losing track of what I want to comment on.

Prismatic has a lot going for it, but I jsut realized its big shortfall: it’s too real time.  I checked on the weekend for the first time, and there’s pretty much nothing.  It would be cool if it reached farther back in time like Trapit does.

News.me is doing a lot of stuff right with its new iPhone app.  The reactions app is smart.  The idea of making different levels of sharing is good.  This kind of social news reading feature will be popular, whether it is on News.me or another service.

I suspect this feature will reach people as part of another app, though, because News.me is pretty weak when it comes to discovery.  It is too focused on the social graph.  I don’t want to see what’s most popular in my social network.  

Zite, Trapit, and Prismatic all far outdo News.me on recommendations because they are more focused on the interest graph.

I think what would be best is a combination of interest-based discovery and social.  I would be interested to see a news reader that sourced content from the Curated Web, sorted by topic with the social emphasis of News.me.  This way, I could get the content I care about, but also interact with others who care about it.  There’s no centralized place I can interact with everybody with the same interests as me.  

I would like to have a way to switch from interest-filtered news to social-filtered news, to global popularity filtered news, like Prismatic does.  That takes care of the serendipity problem.