del.icio.us. channels

Some people have claimed that channels are dead. They wait paitently for the days when television is delivered a-la-carte, where watching TV is simply picking shows from a list of options.

But I think channels serve a separate purpose in today’s world; I think they help discovery. A while ago Fred Wilson wrote a post about his discovery pages, which for him was basically a list of services that helped him find new and interesting links or content on the internet. In my mind this is like what a channel does: it’s a load of pre-selected content within a certain genre.

On the internet, del.icio.us tags have come to fill that void. Like with music, I don’t always want to read the pages or blogs that I’ve picked, in the order I’ve picked them…it leaves little room for spontaneity.

Feeding del.icio.us tag feeds into my newsreader or video feeds into my iTunes allows me to have a steady stream of content in a specific genre, very much like a channel, except that the content is determined by the tagging public instead of media executives.

This is very cool. I think the more we start to think of these tag feeds in this way, the more useful they will become. And it gives us the answer to the question I’ve heard bounced around for a while: How, in this era of customization, will we encounter new and random content?

Through each other, of course.