Ups and downs of online alerts

News alerts that lit up pixels on my screen the past two days got me thinking:

• CNN.com sent a breaking news email just after 10 p.m. Eastern last night: "Barack Obama tells packed stadium he accepts Democratic nomination 'with profound gratitude and great humility.'" His nomination long ago secured, this speech was a media-friendly event planned for many weeks; I can think of no urgent need to know he accepted the nomination in it. (All such CNN alerts carry the same subject line -- "CNN Breaking News" -- which seems silly but may, in fact, be a clever ruse. I would not have opened the message if the subject line clued me in on its content.)
• Today I got two breaking news alerts by email from local news sites I follow -- Scripps' own courierpress.com in Evansville, Ind., and NewsOK.com in Oklahoma City -- informing me John McCain had selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Evansville's alert came in pretty quickly after the news broke, though still about five minutes after CNN's alert on the same story. NewsOK's alert arrived more than two hours later. Never mind. Before any email alerts landed here, I had already seen the story, and copious blogger reactions, in the RSS feeds I follow via Bloglines. So, some questions:
  • Am I hoping against hope that we will ever find ways to make syndication technologies such as RSS easy for everyday people to use and understand?
  • Are local news site leaders wise to hit up their alert lists with widely available national/international stories?
• I have a Twitter account but rarely use it, at least for now. Yet even if I didn't have my own account, it would be hard to avoid the "tweets" of friends and business associates, many of whom have integrated their Twitter profiles with Facebook or their own blogs. Connect with a Twitter user on Facebook, and you will probably start seeing that person's tweets. There again, news of the McCain-Palin ticket got many Twitter treatments today (say that real fast five times) before I ever saw an email alert. Don't even get me started on how much Obama speech reaction I saw in tweets via Facebook.

Alert systems such as these come with poor, if any, personalized filtering. To an extent, the nature of major news compounds the difficulty of any attempt to deliver a "Daily Me."

I dream, for example, that CNN's technology could be elegant enough to know I want breaking news alerts on roughly the scale of sighting one or more horsemen of the Apocalypse -- not when a prepared political speech containing no real news is delivered uneventfully.

If CNN chose not to send an Obama alert at all, people who hang on the formalities or the words he spoke last night could consider the decision biased or disrespectful. On the other hand, if CNN allowed alert subscribers to filter based on content triggers, it might risk failure to put critical information in front of the right people at the right time. If you live on the Gulf Coast and filter all references to weather, does that mean you miss out on alerts regarding hurricanes?

So we either sign up for a firehose flow of news alerts, or we subscribe to a zillion RSS feeds, or we follow tweets and bleats on our phones or social nets, or we do combinations of the above, or we worry that the intelligentsia of society will reject us for being blissfully uninformed.

Apparently that last part isn't really a problem -- more and more people appear quite content not to know at all.

Update 7:55 a.m. 9/2/08: Once in a great while, I double-check what Google flags as spam (months ago, I changed Small Initiatives email service to use Gmail as its handler). Probably because of the recent crush of spam posing as breaking news alerts from major news organizations, Google's filters trapped almost all my legitimate alerts from WSJ.com since roughly mid-August.

Not that a single one told me anything I hadn't found out about in due time via RSS; however, the spam problem just compounds the challenges of making news alerts relevant to individuals.