Rich Sommer Quotes

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

All sorts of factors contribute to what Facebook or Twitter present in a feed, or what Google or Bing show us in search results. Our expectation is that those intermediaries will provide open conduits to others' content and that the variables in their processes just help yield the information we find most relevant.

The iPad is creating a new format for reading content. One of the things that's happening as a result is the world of personalized news aggregators, which is a category that's been around for quite some time, is getting new life.

I'm just an early adopter; I subscribe to more things than normal people and have a high level of inbound and a high level of noise.

A great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.

Basically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around.

If I want to spend the rest of my life reading one day's output of information, which is about what it would take, OK fine. But I personally prefer calibration from an aggregator or newspaper, where the No. 1 story is one they consider important, [and] they're usually right.

While the scale of our library is certainly attractive to our users, equally important is the quality of the content we provide and our state-of-the-art processing operation that vets every single piece of content that's submitted to ensure only the most suitable content is included.

The thing is, I have a zillion apps, and I'm always looking for the perfect arrangement for them, so scrambling my home screen is part of that eternal quest.

Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads.

For information to be useful, it should be dynamic, searchable, and accessible.

There is an overwhelming amount of information available to us all on the web each day, not to mention what is shared with us by our family, friends, fans, and followers. This necessitates the need to filter through all that information and to decide for ourselves where to put our attention.

With Internet technology you can capture a photo, a quote, or an article, store it locally and upload it into the Net more than once, if you wish, to multiple sites. Can you imagine then forcing the search engines to somehow not index that information?

Facebook is teachable. If you hide items, you'll see fewer of those kinds of items in the future. Like more items, and you'll see more of those in the future.

I'm not hugely technical with things, but I guess that the thing I use most is my iPhone, on a practical level.

I want Facebook to pick the best 20 items to show me every single time I refresh that screen.

I'll never forget the first time... I got a Blackberry smartphone, and I'm playing with it and I'm going, 'This is really important because my email, my contacts, my calendar. Everything is here and it's synced up with that computer. It's synced up with my assistant's computer.'

I am thankful the most important key in history was invented. It's not the key to your house, your car, your boat, your safety deposit box, your bike lock or your private community. It's the key to order, sanity, and peace of mind. The key is 'Delete.'

The newspaper offers something very different from Google's aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.

There is an explosion of information happening, yet people demand quick access to relevant content that cuts through the clutter.

I like having my cellphone. I like the Internet. I like being different.

I think I have over 60 apps on my iPhone. I use six.

I'm interested in sites that help people find information and filter what's available. The Internet is so big that no one can stay on top of everything.

I'm technologically an imbecile. But I do use the camera phone!

Babelgum has no ties to individual content owners and distributors, and as a result our editorial strategy is primarily 'user-centric.' That strategy ensures the platform satisfies the needs of a potentially infinite number of niche audiences around the world.