Can you build a news audience without original news? Update on my experiment

My attempts to set up a group of newswires on Twitter just over a week ago (see here) didn't produce the simple success I'd had in mind. If you build it, they will come - and you can get back to the garden, I'd thought cheerfully. 

Well, some of them did come - 29 followers for six automated tech news feeds on Twitter after a day, which didn't seem like a bad result. But in the back of my mind was an interview I'd done in 1999 with the founder of eGroups, a dotcom business that was eventually bought by Yahoo! and turned into Yahoo! Groups.

It was a classic start-up story. He was a Silicon Valley programmer working on an idea in the spare room. One night he set up an online group to do with, I think, pet insects, his hobby. He went to bed and was amazed to find that when he logged in again the next morning, hundreds of people had joined it. It was the start of a great business. 

Just like my experiment - the only difference being that my amazement in the morning was at finding that not many people had signed up to my Twitter feeds. 

But I wasn't going to leave it at that. I'd press on with phase two, which I liked to think of as 'consolidation' - or a lot of little fiddles designed to make the Twitter services more visible, and cross-promoting them.

First of all, I set up a Blogger account to create a simple page (above) whose first post, in big letters, offered links to all the accounts. Then I wrote a line for the top of each Twitter page: "Visit the _TODAY GROUP blog for direct links to other tech business feeds to follow on Twitter" and linked to Blogger below it. If someone liked one feed then maybe they'd want to start following some of the others.

Then I set up a Facebook page (below) which received feeds relating to all six tech businesses. HootSuite allowed me to preface each entry with the name of the relevant company so that it didn't look too confusing. 

I 'Liked' my own Facebook page but that resulted in my Wall getting too many updates from it - and probably put other people off, too. I haven't cracked how to make it work on Facebook yet.

But there is something to show for my efforts: follower growth has been heading in the right direction (below). After nine days, I have 76 followers. Not bad considering I haven't actually had to write or know anything about the subjects myself. And I'm starting to get more of the right kind of followers, some of whom are retweeting things they've got from my feeds. 

But going back to first principles, as a journalist it's ultimately good news if this experiment is a failure, and there isn't a little trick of technology that short-circuits the need to collect and pass on original information in an intelligent way. 

Jaron Lanier (who I referred to last time) persuasively describes an emerging era of "digital serfdom" in which creative work is so finely chopped and repeatedly disseminated that all individuality and claims to reward are eliminated. 

In the process, the difference between original content (like this) and redirected content (like the news on my Twitter accounts) becomes indistinguishable. In Lanier's nightmare vision of the future, there is more and more recycling of less and less new work and "creative people - the new peasants - come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert".

He may be onto something. 

But I'm still curious to see whether I can build my Twitter audience with nothing but recycled news. And so far I've found that, far from being the passive process Lanier might imagine, it's taken a fair amount of effort and concentration. 

If there's a free lunch to be had anywhere round here, plenty of hard graft and low cunning is required to find the restaurant.