A revolutionary marketing technique arrived this morning in an iPhone app. Fluent News will bring you, at no charge, headline feeds from dozens of news bureaus: CNN, ABC, FOX, ESPN, BBC, NPR, FOX Sports, the list is very comprehensive.
A for-cost upgrade to the product is available to filter out the feeds you DON'T choose to wade through.
Selah.
Yes, it now costs more, much more, to receive less product. And it is worth it.
Marshall McLuhan in the 1964 Understanding Media, chapter 2: Media Hot and Cold, was a prophet!
Of course we all use filters very day. "Search" engines like Yahoo! and Google provide a service where only half the function is actually to search. The other, and more vital function, is to filter. McLuhan used the unfortunate Freudian word censor, but regardless, the idea is to put the most likely matches on top of the search. It is the quality of the filtering algorithms that make or break a search engine.
The distinction here is that content used to be the product. You bought a newspaper for what was printed in it. With Fluent News the content is free, the product for sale is the filtering mechanism we need to bring sense to the flood of news, hence the name.
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