How to understand the (on-line) world…
April 11th, 2007 by marc
Hard as it is to do, a couple of blog entries I’ve recently been reading have distracted me from the operational mindset I’m in these days, improving and communicating blogrovr, and put me in a philosophical mood. That’s a rare treat for me these busy days.
The fundamental question we’re tackling at activeweave is how to understand or contextualize the exponentially growing information space of the web. It could be stated as “what do I trust, what else should I know about this, what does my crowd think about this?” “Crowd” as I’m using it here is a made-up sense of the word intended to mean the sources that I’ve “vetted” or come to trust, whether they’re people or webservices or blogs (blogs are people too!).
That question is made even more imperative because one-size-fits-all search has become debased. Search for something and you WILL find it (and a bazillion other things), whether or not they’re true, reliable, desirable or of interest. Adsense and linklove are a poor proxy for anyone’s real interest in a search result.
Search has led us astray. A better solution may well come from the way we filter information in real life (where we can’t search cause its not free, there’s no google for the real world). We start locally with things we trust and bring in sources local to those. I trust the NYT and my friends, and find new things to trust from there. When I want to find out something, THAT’s the set I want to search.
At activeweave we’re attempting to facilitate that behavior to help with the question in the title.
Stickis brings to YOU information from YOUR socially proximate and trusted sources. Wherever you browse the web, it tells you what your personally selected Crowd of friends, bloggers etc have said. This means that you find things dynamically on the web, not on a portal or through a shared but third party url.
In the blogosphere, similarly, the answer can no longer be to read blogs from beginning to end. That’s impossible. Who is caught up on their blog reading? If one were totally caught up, would it even be desirable?
Instead, we can start from the things we knows and trust, techcrunch, techememe, startupmeme (my new favorite) and use tools which bring related information to us.
Blogrovr does this for blogs. Tell Rovr what blogs you like and as you browse the web, rovr tells you what they’ve said about the page you’re on.
We are in the infancy of this phase of building out personalized meta-webs, but transcendental change in understanding our on-line world will come from using the newly available computing power to create personal views of the web, a 3 dimensional perspective of information grouped according to what each of us cares about and trusts, different from anybody else’s and under our own control. When you get information from only the places you want, there is no SPAM.
“Brave new world that has such [web 2.0 tools] in it.” with apologies to Will S.
I like how you don’t assume the “crowd” is all people.
In fact, I don’t think that I’m as good of a source as my personal cabinet of attention agents, archives, and - of course - my *own* sources.
It’s tricky to get really philosophical. After all, we’re trying to get REAL here, right? But zooming out is an important part of the cycle.
To give my two cents, I’d say that what makes Stickis a best-of-breed killer app isn’t that it’s a social platform for sharing content. Go to startupmeme, flip to any random post, and you’ll probably get one of those.
Stickis is the killer app for socially enabling personalized *versions* of already existing objects. Whether those objects are pages, or - hopefully in the near future - the content embedded in those pages.
well said, Johnny.
Don’t worry that I’ll get too philosophical; I won’t get much time to do that very often.