Last week, Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times that when we go online, “each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.” This, apparently, is a bad thing, as it insulates us in our own “hermetically sealed political chambers.”

Brian Lowry of Variety got in the act two days later. Mr. Lowry also seems terrified that the news experience is becoming more personalized, and that people might actually get to choose what they want to read. He specifically called our site, Veritocracy, a “worrisome tool” that “limits online exposure,” creating “hermetically sealed thought-bubbles.” (Is it possible that “hermetically sealed” was the term of the week at big media’s weekend getaway?)

To be honest, I’m not sure either has actually used social media. Mr. Lowry, in particular, says that users of sites like Veri “never need see an article or link that challenges their existing opinions.” This is one criticism I never expected, given that we built Veritocracy to make it easier to find multiple perspectives on the topics you want to read about (from blogs, mainstream media, readers, etc). This is possible today only because there are so many unique and diverse perspectives in the blogosphere and social media.

To some extent, this feels like old media looking for a boogeyman, and not taking the time to learn about why these new technologies are so popular. The idea that mainstream media provides a noble, unbiased, universal truth, is simply wrong. If anything, sites like Veritocracy are making better information more accessible, and eliminating the inevitable biases that come from having a limited amount of human editors deciding what people should read.

This isn’t to bash mainstream media — it still has a tremendous amount of value, and I personally read the NY Times, WSJ, BusinessWeek, and, yes, Variety (among others). But it’s now just one form of consumption among many, and I think that scares people who a) work in that space, and b) don’t understand the other side.

Mr. Lowry never talked to me directly about what Veri does or how it works. Instead, he seems to have cherry-picked bits of information from an email that a friend of ours sent out to his own list the day we launched. That’s unfortunate, because as I’ve said, Veri’s goal is simply to help people get better information about the topics they care about. That, to me, is something we all should be rooting for.

More Perspectives: Is Social Media Trustworthy?

Mark Cuban thinks cable will continue to be the dominant platform for TV. He makes some compelling arguments, but he’s wrong on one account: Personalization. Cable’s one-to-many distribution technology makes it a very efficient way to distribute video, but it fails on personalization, and that is the Internet’s killer app for both consumers AND advertisers.

In a world where all the world’s video content is available on embeddable Hulu-like sites, really creative people and companies will create technologies that give us the convenience of TV with the personalization of the Internet. You might watch Joe’s Channel one night, Jane’s Channel the next, and CNBC’s during the day. More powerful systems will give you Pandora like stations. Choose a genre (comedy or sci-fi or action) and get a personalized stream of tv episodes and movies chosen specifically for you. The point is technology moves towards convenience, and Internet TV has the ability to give it to us in personalized ways.

One of the big reasons newspapers are dieing is not because every one of their old subscribers decided to follow them online; it’s because many of those subscribers DIDN’T. The NY Times used to be able to depend on the fact that if you want 10% of their articles, you would be willing to consume all 100% of their paper. Now you find those 10% through links from thebusinessinsider.com, Twitter, or maybe Veritocracy, and the other 90% comes from other papers and blogs. It’s personalization from increased choice (even to make less of them sometimes!) that is the killer app of the Internet, and the reason old distributions platforms will fade away.

The beauty of this transition is that personalization also enhances the experience for advertisers. Combine all of the information about you on Facebook, with the complete history of EVERY tv show and movie you have ever watched, maybe even what you’ve purchased before, and what web sites you visit, and all of a sudden that 15 second ads becomes exponentially more effective. In fact in a world where ads are so much better targeted, you can show less of them, which means people are more likely to actually pay attention.

None of this is easy, but there is nothing technologically that cable will be able to do, that the Internet eventually won’t. The same is not true in reverse. And while Mark does make a good point that standards for video monetization have not progressed quickly, there is enormous economic incentive to do so. Anyone (include some big companies like Facebook and Google) can work on this right now - and many probably are. It’s a big technical challenge, but if i had to bet on either a few cable companies, or millions of entrepreneurs getting there first, my money’s on the latter.

We’re still at least a couple years away before we start really seeing this happen first hand. And I dont fault cable companies and content providers for maximizing large, exisiting revenue sources. BUT and this is the big but, the trend is there, and it will only continue to gain steam. The decision content owners (and cable operators) have to make, is whether they want to stay ahead of that trend and try to exploit it, or fall behind and watch others do it instead.

More Perspectives: Will TV Over the Internet Challenge Cable?

Its official… Veritocracy has officially opened up to the public. Check it out.

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We started Veritocracy based on a simple idea: to create a personalized news site that really worked. There were and are a lot of social content sites and news aggregators, but we believed it was possible to build a site that wasn’t just finding popular stuff — it was finding the highest quality and most relevant content, specifically for you.

It took a lot of testing, tweaking, designing, and building, and quite honestly it proved a lot more complex than we originally expected. But today, we’re really thrilled to allow everyone in to see what we’ve been working on.

Simply put, Veri gives you a personalized view of the topics and news stories that interest you. The system brings together articles from the blogosphere, mainstream media, and readers, and then helps group them into specific and narrow topics (like a news story, a stock or a movie). As a reader, you simply vote up on the articles you like and down on the ones you don’t, and Veritocracy automatically learns to feed you the best articles on the topics that interest you most.

Instead of searching for information and hoping that what you read is credible and complete, Veritocracy creates a rich and full picture of each story you read about. And of course, since Veritocracy is a social content site, if you have a better perspective on any topic, you can always submit your own. In fact, for bloggers and publishers, Veritocracy automatically helps build organic traffic by connecting you with other publishers and readers interested in the topics you’re writing about.

At the end of the day, we believe that if you create a site that can deliver the best information on a personalized basis, you create a true meritocracy of content distribution as well.

We have a lot more in store in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned and definitely let us know what you think.

Interesting TED talk (embedded below) explaining the innovation that went into making Benjamin Button’s face entirely digital. Essentially the tech works like this:

1. Brad Pitt’s face and facial movements are scanned in 3D into a computer, which then creates a library of every possible facial expression for Brad.
2. A makeup artist’s models of Brad’s face at every age are scanned in 3D and the computers extend the library to include every possible facial expression for Brad, at every possible age.
3. Brad’s face is recorded acting the film.
4. The computer renders the library of Brad at various ages and facial expressions over Brad’s live action recording.

Amazing stuff, and it raises a really interesting question: how long until step #3 is no longer needed?

If CGI animators can already create accurate facial mannerisms on purely digital characters, it’s only a matter of time before those same animators can create indistinguishably human virtual actors. And of course virtual actors, unlike their human counterparts, have no physical limitations, can be summoned to act and shoot a scene anytime/anywhere, and don’t require multi-million dollar paydays.

We’re several years away from nailing the visual side of this technology (let alone the vocal), but it’s easy to see how the profound benefits of this transition (lower cost, more flexibility) will quickly force a transition to it. Like digital vs. film, as the technology matures, many will reject it, but in the end the better solution will always win.

In the bigger picture, it’s interesting to note that this is another example of technology and innovation leveling the playing field. In a world where fame is completely a product of artistic/intellectual creation, not physical genetics, there will be vastly more people supplying the product, and far more meritocracy for how dollars are allocated amongst them.