One of my favorite aggregation sites is Business Week Exchange.  To me BX represents a knowledge inventory.  Everyone who posts to this site is a media maven, social influencer, and trust agent.   Each one represents a galaxy of relationships, experiences, and followers.   All the categories are sourced by these users.  All of the articles are sourced and often written by these users.  All the trending data are produced by the users.  By far, my highest QUALITY followers come from BX; not Twitter, not Facebook, and not Friendfeed.

The site is massive and I’ll spend a great deal of time skimming categories and reading titles to get a good idea of what people are thinking, what they fear, what they want, and what they are optimistic about.  Most articles represent real-time main street issues.

Now, when you compare what’s trending on BX and you compare what is “editorialized” in the mainstream media…and they are different, an important conclusion can be made.  What people care about and what is passed off as “news” are too often quite different from the other.  Herein lies the apex of the social media divide.  News that increases my daily productivity nourishes me.  “News” for which I am powerless to influence is nothing more than sugar calories. For Example:

The top 10 topics from BX on Monday, November 16:

Social Media
U.S. Economy
Social Media Strategy
Business Innovation
Entrepreneurship
Global Economy
Business Technology
Career Change
Leadership
Google

The Breaking News on Bloomberg the same day at any given time:

U.S. Stocks…
U.S. retail…
3Com Options…
EMI Debt Burden…
USB Debt Trading…
AMBACS Bond Insurance…
NY Pension Fund…
Obama/China Trade…
Iranian Nukes…
Bernanke says…

I tried this experiment with many different combination of categorization from the Bloomberg site and not once was I able to produce a set of priorities that represents what other people like me actually care about.  It’s great entertainment, but is it my News?

Bloomberg has an incredible opportunity ahead of them and the question is whether they will develop BX to the highest standard of transparency and promote it to the highest level of editorialized influence – if not the outright taxonomy for their editors to classify so called “news” – or will they squander an astonishing resource of business intelligence.

At the end of the day, the people who created BX and those who support the BX process got something very right in an environment when so much is going wrong for journalism.  They had the guts and the humility to listen to me and people like me.  They gave me their respect and their trust; more tangibly, they gave me their name which empowers my SEO rankings among the mainstream.  In return, we give them a look deep into our humanity – this is who we are, this is our human nature.

The creators of BX are precisely the astonishing resource to whom so many people owe a debt of gratitude.  I call it Journalism at it’s 21st Century best. Let’s hope that Bloomberg sees things our way – at the bottom line.