There’s a lot of good discussion coming out of the events of the Media Center Emerging Technologies conference this week.
Ross Mayfield’s written a(nother) superb post, this time on personalization and customization, spurred on by the apparent building out of RSS tools by Yahoo and others. Ross says (reacting to a comment I made):
“Yahoo has blended personalization and RSS to form the most widely used aggregator on the planet. Keep in mind that the vast majority of traffic goes through a handful of portals (and an oligopoly of carriers) and mainstream attention follows the power-law.
(snip)
…A new editor is rising and it isn’t your blogging client, nor branded aggregators, its an algorithm that supposedly will grow to know you better than people can.”
Ross goes on to say that all the “superpowers” will have personalized RSS readers in the next year–and he’s right, they will–and they should.
But–and here’s his big interesting point– customized personalization– smart, self-adjusting, filtered system–limits discovery (think EPIC).
Ross insists that the new new thing is the social exchange of info–that I read something hecause Doc Searls wrote about it, or Mary Hodder, or my friend Lisa Williams–and that has a higher value than some machine filtering me.
He’s right again, but organic, web-like organizations don’t fit corporate structure, so we’ll see those networks grow outside and around the new tools as they’re fitted into the mainstream–and see additional tools (maybe FOAF?) radiate out from their hub.
Side note: Jere my Zawodny had a post on all this as well, but I wasn’t able to leave a comment–I checked the MT Blacklist, and I’m not there–anyone have any ideas why leaving a comment might not have worked?
There’s a lot of good discussion coming out of the events of the Media Center Emerging Technologies conference this week.
Ross Mayfield’s written a(nother) superb post, this time on personalization and customization, spurred on by the apparent building out of RSS tools by Yahoo and others. Ross says (reacting to a comment I made):
“Yahoo has blended personalization and RSS to form the most widely used aggregator on the planet. Keep in mind that the vast majority of traffic goes through a handful of portals (and an oligopoly of carriers) and mainstream attention follows the power-law.
(snip)
…A new editor is rising and it isn’t your blogging client, nor branded aggregators, its an algorithm that supposedly will grow to know you better than people can.”
Ross goes on to say that all the “superpowers” will have personalized RSS readers in the next year–and he’s right, they will–and they should.
But–and here’s his big interesting point– customized personalization– smart, self-adjusting, filtered system–limits discovery (think EPIC).
Ross insists that the new new thing is the social exchange of info–that I read something hecause Doc Searls wrote about it, or Mary Hodder, or my friend Lisa Williams–and that has a higher value than some machine filtering me.
He’s right again, but organic, web-like organizations don’t fit corporate structure, so we’ll see those networks grow outside and around the new tools as they’re fitted into the mainstream–and see additional tools (maybe FOAF?) radiate out from their hub.
Side note: Jere my Zawodny had a post on all this as well, but I wasn’t able to leave a comment–I checked the MT Blacklist, and I’m not there–anyone have any ideas why leaving a comment might not have worked?