from buzzfeed.com
Two sites/services have launched this week that seek to help the discerning reader sift through the morass of content out there and find the gems that are worth their scarce, valuable time: BuzzFeed, an attempt to capture water-cooler conversation virtually with targeted web crawl technology and "human tastemakers" which help to "distinguish what is actually interesting from what is merely hyped" and Very Short List, which sends email recommendations daily about excellent new (and sometimes vintage) entertainment, media, and cultural things you may not know about because they haven't been hyped to within an inch of their lives." (So expect to see a lot of VSL items crop up on Buzzfeed.)
What's interesting about these sites is that they reflect a trend* of net-savvy but time-pressed users buckling under the weight of the exploding online destinations. Whereas three years ago you could look 
forward to reading Gawker to get the quick and dirty on what was in the papers, now there are ten other websites that similarly aggregate, recommend, analyze, interpret, goof on and sift through content, obviously creating more in so doing. At what point does value-add reach saturation? BuzzFeed and VSL suggest this point.
The other interesting thing about these sites is who is behind them: In both cases, they are the creation of active members of their respective communities, people who were behind the creation of the first wave of content that has been joined so overwhelmingly that they now have to step one level up in order to keep ahead of it. HuffPo's own Jonah Peretti is behind BuzzFeed, who has his finger in many successful Internet pies and is is usually at the forefront of what's evolving, and VSL's rarefied panel of high-powered hot-palated tastemakers: Kurt Andersen, Simon Dumenco, Michael Jackson, Moshe Koyfman, Bonnie Siegler, Emily Oberman, Tim Nolan, Ben Leventhal, and/or Scott Kraft, backed by Barry Diller. That both of these sites come from the top is interesting; it reflects the fact that modern tastes are evolving, and that awareness and interest is trickling downward, or, pushing upward, from the masses. If this trend continues, look for an even more rarefied list in a year or so, promising to cull only the very best from all the rarefied sources of highly cultivated recommendations that tend to make short lists long.
*We'll just pretend there's three of them.
