Simple idea: A personalised techmeme based on blogrolls

As an fund administrator, I need to keep up with the latest developments in the industries that I am responsible for. Hence, I always on the lookout for good blogs to follow as well as new ways to keep myself updated. Recently, because of helping a team in the ebook sector, I have been following on the developments in the book publishing sector. Yesterday, I stumbled upon a book publicity blog that has these relevant links on its blogroll.


Currently, I need to read those links, one at a time, to assess whether I should follow them. There are a host of problems with this approach. Firstly, it is too time consuming. Imagine I have to repeat this process for every new industry I need to learn and the problem becomes magnified. Also, there are a lot of dead links. Finally, I don't know which one of these links are the most visited by the blog author.

There is service called blogrollr that I think solves part of these problems. What they do is to track your browsing activity and create a dynamic blogroll based on the most visited blogs for that day. Go to Fred Wilson's site if you want to see it in action. It elegantly solves the problem of dead links and lack of recommendations.

However, I still need to read the links one at a time. I need a service that takes all these links as inputs and create a personalised techmeme for me to read and browse. Maybe blogrollr will evolve that service or maybe they can have an API for others to build it.

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The context for real time search

Vertical search used to be a hot topic in 2006-07, with search being applied to horizontal industries like travel, B2B (see this article for a big list of such search engines), products, health, people etc. Read this 2006 readwriteweb article for a good refresher. In 2009, many of these vertical search sites are still around and are in fact, prospering.

Now, with real time expanding the perimeters of search, will we see similar verticals being pop up? That was the question I kept asking myself after talking to a couple of entrepreneurs who want to build alternatives to Twitter search. They argued that real time search shouldn't be confine to what Twitter provides. There is room for different forms of search that build on real time conversations.

This sounds reasonable to me and is worth supporting to explore how real time search will evolve. Currently in the real time search arena, we have general search companies like Topsy, Collecta, Crowdeye as well as vertical search like Twitseeker (for people search), TwitterJobSearch (for job serach), PicFog (for image search) etc. There is no clear winner yet but it is informative to watch how these services evolve.

The big challenge to me is to think about the context of which real time matters and therefore how real time search matters. Emergence plays a big part. When you want to know emerging thoughts, patterns, trends etc, real time search becomes critical. Think about reactions to product launches, about the spread of virus, about unfolding of events like sports, weddings, disasters etc. All these are context where real time matters.

I am sure there is more context surrounding real time search. What are your views?

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Why social tags are more powerful than tags

I think tags started at the wrong foot. When early services like Flickr and Del.icio.us began the tagging movement, it was primary used as a organising tool. Unfortunately, it never took away. The tags were too inconsistent to be useful and you need critical mass before aggregation provides any sort of value.

Right now, I am seeing tags evolving into social tags. On Facebook, people love to tag photos which their friends have appeared in. Similarly on Twitter, people like to use the @ tag to send message, links, comments etc to their social network.

The evolution of tagging as an organisation tool to a social gesture mechanism is an important one.

As a social gesture, tagging has become more viral and people centric. Its communicative nature has open up new ways which coordination can be done. Consider the following scenario for open source development:

- Instead of photos, imagine being able to tag software codes during development to people who can help you solve particular difficulties.
-Tags can be address to multiple developers who can each contribute their time and effort to solving the problems
-Developers now have a stream of requests through this process which helps them to decide how to allocate their time
- Through this process, coordinating open source development can be more productive and targeted.

This is just some simple thought exercise. I can't see the end game yet for social tagging but I think there is a lot of potential.

Thoughts?
(Note: imagine if there is mechanism here where I can address this post to through tags (e.g. @igniter, @tdavidson), we can have more productive discussions here).

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Search, tags and follow

Organising or structuring information is a key value enabler in this age of abundance. Be it conversations, tweets, data etc, organization provides the key to efficient attention allocation. Currently, I have seen 3 scalable forms of organisations.

Search
The most commonly used form of organisation, search instantly organises information around your stated interest. However, as information increases, the cost of search is going up. Not only that, search itself is limiting in discovery and doesn't fit into our way of uncovering stuff.

Tags
Tags is different from search as it is more discovery based. Interfaces like tag clouds encourages explorations. Now, with the use of tags on Twitter becoming more and more common, we might see innovations in tags related forms of organisation. We are not done with tagging yet.

Follow
Social filters are the latest in information organisation. The breakthrough for me was the invention of 'follow' by Twitter. Before this, we can already bookmark or subscribe to people so that they can act as filters for information. This process however is cumbersome. 'Follow' provides an elegant way for people to easily select their social filters and create their personalised streams of information. What's more, the information tends to be diverse due to the human aspect of such organisation.

What is interesting is when these models are mixed and match. One example is searching through the #tags in Twitter search. That is a combination of tags and search. What other models are possible?

1) Tagging the people you follow and then searching through the people you tag to find relevant answers on particular topics

2) Follow tags from the people you are following to explore the areas they have interest in

3) Follow searches by the people you are following and bundle them with tags

4) Follow people who are searching the same terms or using the same tags


What other combinations do you see? More importantly, what other ways are there to help us organise information?

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Interfaces that enhance serendipity

John Hagel had a great tweet:

maps are powerful interfaces focusing on relationships, not objects - applies to people and ideas, not just places - enhances serendipity

This inspired me to think about interfaces. Serendipity doesn't happen in a vacuum. It requires a medium that conveys the flow of information, the diversity of views and the connections to the edge. The interface, in fact, is a vital point that potentially enhances or limits the extend of discovery. It is the difference between enhanced serendipity and random browsing the Web.

The serendipitous service of the moment is Twitter. Through the 'river of news' style of presenting thoughts, links, conversations etc, one can easily discover stuff that are outside their normal web of interest. The value of discovery, however, depends greatly on the people you follow. If you pick the right ones like John Hagel above, you will find your perspectives being extended in ways you have not thought before. The challenge is, of course, to pick those people and that is why we will recommendation services like ReTweetRank and Mr Tweet becoming more important.

One other interface I can think of that enhances serendipity is the calender view from events companies like upcoming.com. They enhance discovery of events, and in the process, makes physical connections between people. Such interfaces are great for maximising discovery of time based items.

The common thread running through the two interfaces is the diverse source of information and how they are being compressed for easy scanning.
Specifically:

-sources of information are diverse
-information is stripped down to its bare minimum
-display is compact with little wastage of space
-format of display is in time format, either zoom in as in minutes updates to twitter or zoom out as in monthly displays in calender

Using these principle ( I am sure there are many more), we can design for better interfaces that enhances serendipity. Conversely, interfaces that do not do so are limited in discovery. Consider the disqus interface below: (i) information is not compresses with too much space that hinders scanning, (ii) no way to discover comments made on other blogs by the same commentor.




















In summary, interfaces are a great place to uncover new ideas that may form the basis of different products/services. What other great interfaces have you seen that maximises serendipity?

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Opportunities in enhancing discovery (serendipity)

I have find that Singapore is always a generation late when it comes to innovation, especially in the Web area. Hence, I am always 'listening in' to conversations around the Web, especially to people who are exploring the deep fundamental drivers that are shaping our economy and society.

In one of these listening sessions, I picked up on the concept of serendipity enhancement (hat tip to Ethan Bauley). It is different and yet may occupy the same importance as search. While search is powerful when the intention is clear, serendipity enhances social connections as it leads people to connect in unexpected ways. In a economy where social capital is growing in importance, such enhancement can bring tremendous value.

How then can you enhance serendipity? I have no strict answers but here a few thoughts that I am working on:

Serendipity is about flow: It is about maximising your exposure to the flow of connections and information, on your own terms of participation. Think about river of news but add in the ability of people to connect via the social objects being shared and discussed.

Such flow will come from services that help people expose their thoughts and work to where the flow is. Aggreagtors are the first manifestations of creating such values as they bring exposure to your writings. However, the bigger opportunity is in services which are able to move your information around and plug you into relevant flows. I called it SwitchBoard 2.0.



Serendipity is about edge connections: It is commonly known that the greatest value from your network typically comes from the weakest link. Serendipity increases your chance to connect to somebody that is outside your traditional network and hence, potentially bringing greater value to you.

This is why I lament here that current social networks are not meant to enhance social capital. What is needed is a way to let us, as individuals connect to the edge. To do this, we need to understand how social capital is built which then gives us answers on how to better a recommendation service. This is a key challenge and one that is still wide open.



Serendipity is about diversity: Discovering news things (and though that, new connections) needs a certain degree of randomness, and consequently a certain degree of noise. What many current services have done is to pair down the noise though specialised verticals. This has dramatically reduced diversity.

Aggregating across verticals to produce diversity is what we need to reproduce the serendipity that is found in our physical lives. That is one powerful benefit that services such as FriendFeed has introduce.

However, beyond activities, aggregating different perspectives on life, strategies, knowledge, values et al has the potential to really open up innovations. That is a difficult problem and one that I have yet to see attempts being made.


There are many more things to understand about serendipity and the opportunities it represent. This is my attempt to plug into the conversations that are happening. Let's see where serendipity will lead me to.

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