Social Network Context

One dimension with which to drive Personalization.

Tim Bray on various Meta Data issues around Folksonomy. He also asks the meta-question What am I doing categories for? What is anybody doing categories for? What is everybody doing categories for?

  • To me this whole thing does seem rather pointless. A lot of this Social Software, I think, needs to let me focus (Attention Management) on the members of my Social Network. (And also narrowed to my Creative Network, for even greater Context.) Between TypePad's use of FOAF to track Blog Roll-s, and various other groups' use of OPML, it seems it should be possible to automatically import lists of stuff. But you'd need to agree on some form of identity of authors, which could be messy (a blog often has multiple URI-s, esp if the server is case-insensitive, and multiple feeds each of which could end up with multiple URI-s, etc.).

I can't help but feel like part of the current tag-happiness is driven by being at a certain sweet-spot in traffic/use. If you start thinking about all blog entries and photos having tags, then you drown in matches.

  • so you're back to the previous issues in wanting to cross-reference this content-based filtering with person-based filtering to give you a manageable-sized stream.
  • note relevance to MetaWiki use for discoverability

This can also apply to Product Review and other filtering. But, does it make sense to assume that your Social Network's taste will match your own? Collaborative Filtering might make more sense...

Jul'2012 data cluster

  • I currently follow 439 people on Twitter
  • Yesterday, according to News Me, they shared (linked) 555 stories
  • Of those, News Me gave me only 1 story linked by 3 people, and 4 linked by 2 people.
  • is the clustering that thin, or is News Me do some other filtering?

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