The mantra of a lot of web software is the same: Use technology to take the human agents and costly middlemen out of the equation. Connect consumers to sellers, thus creating a more efficient marketplaces. There are many examples of this working well and generating fantastic new business opportunities.
Along the way, the web aggregated everything: airfares, hotel rooms, auctions, stock market data, weather information — you name it. The only problem is, the software that made everything comparable has also made things increasingly unfindable. Today, as the web shifts from data to content, the sheer volume of undifferentiated content makes th e very tools that have propagated and cataloged data increasingly part of the problem. While data is the ideal candidate for disintermediation and aggregation, content — when placed in orderly stacks of undifferentiated muck — becomes less and less valuable.
This is why the new software frontier isn’t about removing humans, but empowering them. And software tools, many of them now in beta, are creating scalable opportunities for editorial teams and individuals to curate their collections.
Here are three examples of software products built for humans, rather than as a means to replace them.
1. Paper.li
I spoke with Paper.li’s founder Edouard Lambelet at this year’s Blog World Expo. Paper.li has 1.5 million monthly unique visitors, and more than 300,000 Paper.li “newspapers” have been created.
“Paper.li is about narrowing things,” Lambelet said. “I thi nk mainstream media can't...
