Illustration: James Victore When he returned home from a long day at the office, Jeremy Brosowsky would glance ruefully at his coffee table. It was always covered with magazines he knew he'd never crack open. "The Economist just ended up being a $100-a-year paperweight," says Brosowsky, founder of the now-defunct Washington Business Forward magazine.
In 2006, Brosowsky realized that his "coffee table problem" wasn't confined to meatspace. He was similarly unable to keep track of all the information that poured into his RSS reader, to say nothing of the online versions of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and dozens of other publications. Brosowsky wished he had a way to manage the deluge and zero in on the few must-read articles.
His solution was to create Brijit, a Washington, DC-based startup launched in late 2007 that produces 100-word abstracts of both online and offline content. Every day, Brijit publishes around 125 concise summaries of newspaper and magazine articles, as well as audio and video programs, rating each on a scale of 0 ("actively avoid") to 3 ("a must read") so readers can decide whether it's worth their time to click through. "What we've created with Brijit is your well-read friend," says Brosowsky, whose eight employees sift through more than 100 sources, from AARP the Magazine to XXL.
Brijit joins a growing number of ventures that are using people, rather than algorithms, to filter the Internet's wealth of information. Veteran entrepreneur Jason Calacanis has launched Mahalo, a "human-powered search engine" that uses freelancers and volunteers, overseen by editors, to compile results. ChaCha, another nascent search engine — whose investors include Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos — offers live guides to assist users with their queries via a chat window. And Squidoo, founded by marketing blogger Seth Godin, pays users to build link-rich "lenses" on topics of interest.
These ventures have a common goal: to enhance the Web with the kind of critical thinking that's alien to software but that comes naturally to humans. As Calacanis told a conference audience: "Google's mission is to index the world's information; our mission is to curate that wonderful index."
The vogue for human curation reflects the growing frustration Net users have with the limits of algorithms. 
Unhelpful detritus often clutters search results, thanks to online publishers who have learned how to game the system. Users have tired of clicking through to adware-laden splogs posing as legitimate resources. And unless you get your keywords just right, services like Google Alerts spew out either too much relevant content — or not enough.
Even with armies of paid contributors, however, the curators can't cover Google-scale territory. They've had to make tough choices about resource allocation, opting to focus on topics and sources with the most mainstream appeal. Mahalo, for example, has plenty of curated listings dedicated to videogame cheats or Page Six celebrities, but it defaults to Google search results for topics like UAVs or Russian nesting dolls.
Despite its absence of long-tail fodder, Mahalo's traffic has grown steadily since it launched last June. After just seven months, the site tallied 3.3 million unique visitors in January. That's less than 0.2 percent of the search market, according to Nielsen. A startup able to capture just 1 percent would enjoy annual revenue of around $100 million, reckons Don Dodge, a director of business development at Microsoft. Considering that Mahalo was launched for roughly $20 million, it could be headed for an impressive return on investment.
But watch out for the King Kong of search. In December, Google announced that it was developing knol, a tool that will allow experts to write authoritative introductions — knols — about a vast range of subjects. "A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read," wrote Udi Manber, a vice president of engineering at Google. In other words, after spending untold millions refining its proprietary algorithms, the titans of the Web are starting to realize there's no substitute for the human touch.
Related Wired 2008 Business Trends: Sure, there's bad news out there, what with the panicky Fed and people whispering the R-word. But somehow, the wired world continues to churn out smart, useful, occasionally game-changing ideas. From the rise in instant manufacturing to the growth of open-source business models, these trends show that innovation can bloom even in a grim economic climate. Here's a look at nine trends driving business in 2008 — and a deeper explanation of the surprising secrets to Apple's success. 1: Open Source Tycoons 2: Social Networks Grow Up 3: Green on the Outside 4: Invisible Internet 5: Rise of the Instapreneur 6: Building a Better Banner 7: Invented in China 8: VCs Look for a New Life 9: The Human Touch
