Human content aggregators

Posted Monday, July 30, 2007 at 8:53pm in Blogging, Media  | 

You may have noticed by a few previous posts that the ridiculously high-priced property market was on my mind. It still is. I still believe Tony Blair has left a legacy of little hope for first time buyers - excluding those who have the privilege of financial help from family or those that have made 000s on their own (fair play) to put down a sufficient deposit. It’s angering, it really is. Although most FTBers have accepted it.

Anyway, I digress.

The UK media is (quite literally) obsessed with the property market. Every day it’s a given that you will find at least two property related stories in any publication. Probably excluding the tabloids but the broadsheets can’t get enough of it. They lap it up. The common theme we’re hearing of late is that the market is slowing, property is 20% over-valued, buy to let agents are quivering and, indeed, we could see a house price crash.

Each newspaper usually tells a different story. One says we’re heading for a bust while another says there’s still room for price growth. Seriously, you would have to spend half of your day reading all these publications to make your own mind up about the state of the market. And you know why there is such a varying array of opinions? Because economics is an art and not a science as my accountant-by-trade boss, Adam, told me today. Meaning, they are all merely predictions.

So, as a consumer, you can either do three things. 1. You can stick with one paper of choice and rely on the opinions of the journalists or columists writing for that particular publication. 2. You can do as I said above and read every single one, or 3. You can subscribe to the House Price Crash blog.

In short, the House Price Crash blog aggregates all the property news from the day’s newspapers. Not only the nationals but the regionals too. You can sign up to the RSS feed and you’ll receive the link to the article and a couple of lines of commentary. This is a perfect demonstration showing the advantages of technology with human intervention. It’s also beneficial for helping those looking to buy a property and wondering what the hell is going on. ;)

I think we could see a lot more of these types of these human aggregations on niche topics as they seem like a valid solution to the attention problem we all seem to be going through.

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2 Comments

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Milton HIcks

Tuesday, July 31, 2007 at 9:35pm

The House Price Crash Blog is responsible for the most terrified I’ve been in decades. Since getting an offer accepted on a flat, I just watch the graphs. Shaking, mostly.

I like your point about aggregation though. Do you think it’s a pause between the time people learn to RSS themselves, or a real movement towards information filtering? And if it’s the latter, where does filtering stop and editorial influence begin (and therefore when do aggregated blogs become the new magazines)?

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Stephen

Tuesday, July 31, 2007 at 11:01pm

Congrats on the acceptance.

Oh, I’ve never paid any attention to the graphs but must start doing so. I think if you’re buying a property for the long term then things won’t be so bad should a mini crash happen. Which, let’s be honest, no one can say will or won’t happen.

Personally I don’t think there will be but it will be interesting to see what happens when the two million property owners come off their fixed rate mortgage in the next couple of months.

Re: information filtering. I really don’t know. But to have the new magazines (aggregated blogs) you’ll still need the regular blogs/content to create the aggregation. And, yes, the House Price Blog could potentially (I don’t think it is) be feeding only certain information to its readers.

I’d never actually considered that.

Righteous Brentano

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