Sounds really similar to my last startup and I'm glad to see it. There hasn't been a good solution so far to making news relevant to you without making you search all day for it. NLP, Machine Learning, smart news alerts, etc., can all make some interesting solutions to these problems without needing to be perfect. Also, mainstream news is the least socially connected news source out there and there is a lot of work to be done in this space.
Woven sounds like a Gist competitor to me (like we indirectly were), but I felt like Gist transformed into a plaxo type company in recent months rather than news intelligence so I'm not so sure anymore. At any rate, I look forward to seeing Woven grow!
The problem is that this is all a lot harder than just news discovery. I don't just want a news item that is relevant to me; I want a high quality news item. I also want to reward the news source for its high quality.
Solve that problem and I'll come over and hug you.
At least for me, news items I pursue fall into two categories - news I really ought to know (either on the local or national or international scale), and news that expand my understanding of the world due to the high quality of the presentation (think of the great magazine features, and generally the stuff you can get from places like givemesomethingtoread.com) but are not actually directly "relevant" to me.
It's actually the latter category that is harder to find (and where the fact that there is no good source-agnostic reward model for news sources causes me to feel most bad).
Really? I'd say "on" is pretty clearly a preposition— here meaning "onward". Since "on" isn't often used in that sense except in the case of compounds like "go on", "move on", "drive on" etc. it might make more sense to say that "go on" is a phrasal verb and a single lexical item. (Note that we could replace "go on" in its entirely with a more semantically shallow "leave" without affecting the rest of the sentence.)
"To" is tricky because it seems that we can replace it with a conjunction and maintain the meaning of the sentence— "I go on and start Woven" does mean nearly the same thing. However, you need to look at the ellipsis (linguisticspeak for omission): "I go on and [I] start Woven" makes sense. "I go on to [I] start Woven" obviously doesn't work. So we've actually changed the structure of the sentence, meaning our replacement is no good.
It makes more sense to see the "to" as attached to the infinitive "start", with the form working as an adverb of reason: "Why do you go on? To start Woven." The actual implied conjunction here is probably "in order". (If you're feeling clever, the infinitive also assumes the subject of the main clause, thus the ellipsis: "I go on [in order] [for me] to start Woven.")
So by my analysis, both of those words are actually part of verb forms. Uncapitalizing either seems to separate them from their verb phrase, causing the confusion we've seen. However I'd recommend, especially in this informal context, just using normal sentence capitalization, which everyone will have no trouble parsing— and which is how the title is capitalized on the blog itself!
I'm not a big fan of that headline style - it tends to look a bit cheesy in my opinion. I think it's mor of a US newspaper thing - the NY Times do it, but guardian.co.uk doesn't. To be fair, neither does the washingtonpost.com
The "social echo chamber and pop-culturization of news" phenomenon described in Brad's latest blog posts is exactly the issue my friends and I have been discussing for some time now. As a shameless news-junkie, I'm genuinely curious to find out how the Woven team aims to tackle this problem. Oh, and congratulations on the acquisition!
Woven sounds like a Gist competitor to me (like we indirectly were), but I felt like Gist transformed into a plaxo type company in recent months rather than news intelligence so I'm not so sure anymore. At any rate, I look forward to seeing Woven grow!