Since I got my photobook published, I’ve focused my efforts on a new enterprise: a content curation and personalization startup. What does that mean? Think about combining Pandora and the Huffington Post – I’m working on connecting you with the news content most relevant to you and doing it in a social, engaging way.
The first step here is re-launching my energy blog, You and Your Energy, as an energy news site. That’ll happen just 10 days from now – wow, that’s not much time at all – and then we’ll learn a few things about the process and then work on the bigger project, a full-scale content personalization site.
This may seem like a big shift – and in many ways, it is – but at the heart of it is the same point that led to the energy road trip: it needs to be done. We live in an age where there’s so much going on and so much information out there. It’s more important than ever to be informed but with so much coming at us from every possible direction, we don’t know what we need to know. Is there a way to make that simpler? Is there a way to pull out the best content from across a breadth of sources and give the part that I care most about to me? Why should we both see the same thing when we go to a news site? Should the news be the same to you as it is for me?
Many of the next few blog posts will be my attempts at identifying the problems along the process and dealing with them. I’ll be discussing entrepreneurship, recruiting, networking, fundraising, and of course, building the product itself and getting it out there. And scattered among them will be other random ideas, other stops along the way.
Just about a year after I hit the road, here we go again.
deep thoughts 