Random thought for the moment: When your news (or other content-driven) site tailors its presentation to your specified or implied interests, is it giving you a skewed view of the world?

There's little question that our individual world-views are largely creations of the media, which decides for us that the Jon Benet Ramsey (or better, OJ) case is more important in the world-view than a serial killer in Uganda, for example. But to what extent do we all rely on having the same fisheye-lens view of current events?

As important as the news that I get is to my own perception of a world view, so it is important to be able to constantly assess the state of the media, and what it means when post-election third-party Floridian recounts get less coverage than the new President's creative vocal stylings of the last day.

To a large extent, content personalization distorts this view further, by imposing a 'personal fisheye' lens to the already distorted 'media fisheye' lens in an odd attempt to correct the problem in the first place.

Why is this a problem? Maybe it's not. Maybe it's a good thing that some of us actually get news that isn't in the public memeset of the day. Maybe it's interesting to actually be able to say "did you hear about..." and not have the other person say that they too saw the story on CNN (ABCnews, Slashdot, MetaFilter, or what have you)

What do you think? Does fisheye media attention help focus us as a common people, or is it just the encapsulazation and palletization of news into nice little daily packets? Might things be different, for example, if papers (or media sites) weren't always the same length, and slow news days meant smaller papers, instead of thinner content?

This is a perfect example of why I should get off my ass and install a comments system on Fury, and I'll be doing it over Spring Break (read: 1.5 weeks away) but 'till then, please feel free to email me and I'll summarize comments and viewpoints on the blog, poetically and ironically applying my own fisheye on the viewpoints expressed. Actually, just to make things fair, I'll also post a raw data feed page of everyone's comments. Is that better?

PS: To the wonderful people I met at SXSW this last week, reading this blog for the first time, please don't run away! I'm not always so dry; only on slow news days...