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I think this is cool

www.veryshortlist.com

Mostly, I'll admit, because I like the name. The Very Short List has one item on it (per day). It's cute, and I can't fault their labeling skills.

But also because of something the spokescritter said in the article where I found it:

"People feel they’re drowning in choice and are desperate to go into curated space"
-- Michael Jackson, IAC president of programming, in "The Way We List Now," Wall Steet Journal, 9/29, (I hate it when the attribution is longer than the quote)

I don't know that I'd go so far as "desperate," but yeah. In essence I think most of the hand-wringing about the Role of the Newspaper in the Era of Citizen Journalists or the Role of the Publisher in the Era of Self-Publishing is because people aren't focusing on that part of the job which is not about being an information provider but an information filter. Because that part has gotten much more in demand.

Being an editor, I think of this as editing, but editing is a workhorse word with a lot of other stuff to do already. Curated is a good choice, if a little highbrow. You could just as well call it DJed space.

It's partly about rejecting the junk and picking out the good stuff that I'm looking for. But I could probably do that myself, if I had time. It's also about picking out what I don't know I'm looking for, contrasting it with other information in a way that's surprising and causes me to make new connections, or putting a frame and some whitespace around it. Even if it's the exact same stuff, that treatment causes me to look at it with a more critical eye, to give it that weight.

I signed up for the email. I don't know if I'm actually going to like it -- I wasn't the right girl for Daily Candy, and I might not agree with what these folks think is interesting either. But I like the concept, a lot.

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Thanks for the link-- and hi! Hi! Nice to see you. :-)

It's pretty interesting, this unprecedented glut of information we currently have to deal with. I *do* feel like I need help managing it all, and I definitely respond to the idea of "curated" (or DJed! I like your term!) space as well. BUT! At the same time! It always makes me nervous to think that someone out there is picking and choosing on my behalf, for me. You know? I mean, Very Short List isn't exactly Rupert Murdoch. But it's a really powerful tool-- when I think about what % of books I read come from Bookslut, it becomes clear *how* powerful. It's just...hm.

Okay, but having said all that, I can't wait until I can RSS VSL. So far, I like what I see. ;-)

Similarly, I was wondering the other day if the surge in megachurches and "fundamentalist" ideas -- and, I add now, the determined affiliation with just one news source -- is simply another way to deal with option paralysis. It's not that folks don't want to have to think, but that there are so many choices available that folks can't make up their minds, and default to having someone else make them up for them.

God knows I'm drowning in choices, and I'm theoretically an information filter for hundreds or thousands of others. ("Can you recommend a good book?" is one step along that path.)

Good thoughts and questions. Many thanks.

i think you're right. i know that the day after i got back from russia last summer i went to walgreens, and i nearly curled up into a ball gibbering, there were so many choices. from my midwestern american point of view, i could get anything i needed in russia. (i was only there for a week; my opinion may or may not change upon longer viewings. ;) came back here to my friendly local drugstore, and there was the choice between with fluoride, with baking soda, cool mint, fresh mint, whitening, for sensitive teeth, for kids, gel, paste, and a partridge in a pear tree. did i mention the gibbering?

i mean, that's *stuff*, not information, but i think the concept is the same.

What about Daily Lit?

Overall, I am in complete agreement with you; the web boom has generated oodles of opportunities for creation and propagation of content, but no fundamentally new techniques for filtering it. Google does the same thing WebCrawler did, only more efficiently and effectively. But even the most effective and accurate search engine can't solve the problem of having upwards of a hundred near-perfect hits to your search, and none of them being exactly what you want.

Human editing (or curating) is one solution, but... Is it just me, or does that sounds like the technologists basically looking sheepish and saying "sorry, we thought this was going to be easy, and now we're giving up."?

Some alternatives to human-driven selection are emerging, but they're still in the very beginning stages. There was an article on personal search engines that Wired News ran, and, in a display of traditional search engine inadequacy, I can't find it. The closest I could get was this. The main contender seems to be RollYO, standing for Roll Your Own [search engine]. You select the sites you want the search to go to, and those are the only ones it tries. Your results are much fewer in number and, if you selected the correct sites, exactly what you wanted. But really, this isn't a search engine -- it's a memory aid. I wish I had one of those for my apartment, but to me, the whole point of the web is about finding *new* information.

VSL seems to have that covered, and offers new information. I can't tell how well it will work, since the only part of the site I didn't get a massive database error from is today's pick. But from what I see, how is VSL different from a newspaper column, only moved to the web? I'm not sure how well the "your own list" option will work; ColdFusion hates me today, it seems.

As a side note, I am amused by the income field in their subscription form. Who exactly are they targeting this to? The second-lowest income bracket is $100,000-$500,000! Of course, they don't indicate a currency, so for all I know it's in Yen.

Whoa! Can you tell me where I can get toothpaste with a partridge in a pear tree? I would totally get that one!

but no fundamentally new techniques for filtering it

I would disagree: the concept of user-created user-applied user-updated realtime tags, a system that relies on users to make constant updates to ideas of what users want (rather than computer predictions of user behavior from necessarily outdated information), is easily the biggest revolution in data organization since, oh, I would say the Dewey Decimal System. It is human curating, but in a form that maps extremely easily to computerized data systems and to user searches thereof.

I suppose a case could be made for amazon's recommendation algorithm, but that's half advertising and half Smithsonian tiles*, neither of which is terribly novel. The combination is intriguing and probably makes amazon a lot of money, but it's not nearly as new or interesting as tagging.

* There's an apocryphal story that the folks at the Smithsonian Museum wanted to know which exhibits were most popular, but polls consistently showed that people rated the most recently seen exhibits highest, regardless of what they were. Finally someone said, hey, where do we need to replace the floor tiles most often?

At the same time! It always makes me nervous to think that someone out there is picking and choosing on my behalf, for me. You know?

Yeah, I do, especially if I'm giving over a fair amount of my decision-making power to them *and* I'm not exactly clear either what criteria they're using or what stuff they're rejecting. My ideal comfort zone is when I know enough about the total universe to be able to compare their picks to what my picks would have been, and see that they're very much the same, and that where they aren't the same I'm glad to have been exposed to something I might have passed up.

But since part of what I rely on these things to do is expose me to stuff where I don't know the whole set and don't have time to find out... yeah, there's the "what am I missing?" factor. But I figure since I'd likely miss much of it *anyway*, at least this way if VSL shows me some random thing and I like it, I might start chasing down related content on my own. It's like the tasting menu.

That makes sense. I think it's long been a role of religion to be a sort of overarching decision structure, so that each choice doesn't have to be made individually. It's a form of specialization, relying on a pastor who is basically aligned with your values and interests, and who the community can afford to subsidize to look into all the complex choices and come back with an answer. Political parties and labor unions can play a similar role -- obviously you don't join any of those if there's not *some* degree of opinion overlap, but it's like the fixed price dinner option -- pick once and then you get everything that comes with it. :)

That said, I'm majorly creeped out by megachurches. But then I've never been a big fan of the one-size-fits-all option, and I want a lot of accountability and transparency in anyone I'm delegating such things to.

Then again, I come at the same issue another way, which is just as offputting to (some) others as megachurches are to me -- I think a big part of the appeal of submission is the ability to give my choices to someone else for a little while.

The beauty of "can you recommend a good book?" is that it doesn't need to be completist. As long as you know of *a* good book, it doesn't matter if there are thousands of other good books out there that you haven't read yet.

I'll have to check out Daily Lit, thanks!

Roll Your Own sounds like a great search tool for a known subuniverse, which could be very handy indeed, especially when I need a particular slice of stuff repeatedly, and it is not the same as the way such things are generally categorized (I don't want all college libraries, I want only those with science fiction collections, and also convention programs and editors' blogs.)

But yeah, it's not a substitute for a comprehensive new info finder. Part of the problem is that I can't think of keywords that adequately express what I want (I'm getting better but at some point it ceases to be expressible that way) and partly it's the complicated fuzzy logic of human brains compared to computers.

I was thinking about this re: house searches the other day. They do great on the non-negotiable stuff -- it must have a bedroom. It must allow pets. But they don't do well with stuff like "I like charm *and* extra space *and* great location. I can't afford all three, so I'm willing to go beyond my normal parameters on any one criteria for true fabulousness on the others." Hence why realtors (and travel agents) are still in business.

I suspect the technology will get better as we start being able to choose weights.

Tagging *is* human curation, sort of. In a very distributed way. Which maybe points us at where we're going -- not replacing human judgment with tech, but finding cleverer ways to integrate the two.

(Rating, too, in theory, but in practice people don't tend to bother rating stuff unless they feel strongly about it, so it's not as reliable.)

*nods* Especially since at the store stage, it mostly is information that makes it overwhelming -- the difficulty of juggling price with pleasure with long term benefit with side effects with environmental impact, etc., for each of thousands of items.

Of course, there are plenty of areas where I wouldn't give up my choice for anything. But there are times when I wish I could turn it off for a while -- and sometimes the choices where I care the least are the hardest, because there's so little to choose between them. Is baking soda better than peroxide? How would I know?

(Rating, too, in theory, but in practice people don't tend to bother rating stuff unless they feel strongly about it, so it's not as reliable.)
The Amazon rating system problem: If you follow the advice of someone's negative review and skip the book, how will you ever know if the reviewer was right or not?

(Continued) I'm not saying there hasn't been progress. Hell, Google PageRank is an incredible improvement over the old search engine algorithms! I did some SEO work for a while, and let me tell you, you could game AltaVista in the old days like nobody's business. But the progress has failed to keep up with the astronomical growth in the amount of content available. And while you're right, tags and tag-clouds are interesting, that's all they are at the moment -- interesting. There's still a lot of work before they become actually useful, and more yet before they're indispensible.

(This is just not my HTML day. Sorry for the notification spam)
I adore the Smithsonian tile story -- that's brilliant design, even if it was accidental. The same approach was used by a Russian architect when a new neighbourhood was constructed in Moscow -- his design had no pedestrian trails. Instead, he waited for a few months, and then had the builders pave trails where the pedestrians stamped out the grass.

Having said that -- notice that both our examples use unconscious user feedback? Now consider something massive and popular that relies on conscious user-controlled tagging. The only one I can think of is a service I've been using for quite a while, Blink List.

Choosing a tag that's likely to be fairly popular (it's present on BL's front page), we get this. Which, by itself, is great. Except... Suppose you're looking for stories on people defrauding the Google AdSense program. What exactly are you looking for? Is it fraud, clickfraud, click fraud, Google ad fraud, Adsense fraud, AdSense fraud, or is it cheating AdSense? All are valid, potentially relevant tag terms. I've yet to see a system that recognises their similarity. An even worse example of the fault used to be Engadget. Despite the fact that the blog was entirely edited by a hired group of professionals, it was searched by random passers-by. Thus, tags had to cover every eventuality, both with spaces between words and without, with capitalisation and without... At least they didn't try to cover common misspellings! It seems that Engadget found this method didn't work, however; the recent site redesign has done away with tags completely.

I'd love to see visualisations of tag clouds, with similar tags being grouped together, the way Music Plasma does it for bands. But that works great in specialised, narrow areas (like music) and much less well when transformed into a generic, unspecialised system. In music, there are very specific ways an expert can define similarities. In the free-for-all that is the internet, no such clarity exists. Pandora exploits (and in my opinion, quite well)these rigidly structured similarities, whereas all you can count on Gnod Books to produce is a fairly expected listing of popular authors, most of whom you've already heard of, and the cloud itself representative of the common average, not at all tied to your personal tastes.

I've touched on the problem of popularity, but I want to expand on it.
Here's a challenge: Try finding a listing of albums released by Muse. No, not the annoying alt-rock hoarse-male-voice band. The Scandinavian all-instrumental group. That's all I know about it, and I have yet to find even a bio in English. Oh, what would I give for a button that'd tell Google to exclude all references to the alt-rock one!

This isn't a new issue -- it's the problem with peer-reviewed scientific journals, and is being talked about quite a bit nowadays. The likelihood of truly challenging, revolutionary papers being published in the best-known journals is quite low. They don't want to take the risk of being wrong or even of offending the majority of their readership, who of course hold to the prevalent views.

You get the same thing with tag clouds and even the choice of tags. How many people you know are likely to correctly tag something as a simile as opposed to a metaphor? How random web afficionados are likely to correctly distinguish between genetics and genomics when the very first definition Google brings up is incorrect? Step off the beaten path for even an instant, and you're lost forever, wandering through a maze of dead Geocities pages and vaguely-funny 404 errors.

(continued above)

I'm looking for a car right now, and I so very much understand what you're talking about. Yes, I'm willing to consider a car over $6,000, but only if it offers truly outstanding value! What do I mean by "outstanding value?" I'll know when I see it! And by how much am I willing to exceed my limit? That depends on the extra value!

If I were the programmer having to design a search for people like me, I'd jump off a very tall building right around that point in user surveys.

There is a promising technology that I just came across on MIT Technology Review. The video you want is this one (and it was a pain, to hotlink, too!). Evolutionary design as implemented through software is really neat, and I'd really like to see it in common use rather than only the specialised industries that have it now.

*sigh*
Please disregard the comma in the second-last sentence. I just woke up and am still groggy.

*nods* Really what I'd have to do is check that reviewer's reviews of stuff I *have* read, to see if I agree with them often enough to trust them on books I haven't read. But given how many reviewers there are on Amazon, this turns out to be more trouble than reading the book.

Oh, what would I give for a button that'd tell Google to exclude all references to the alt-rock one!

I hear you. There's just no way, yet, for us to teach the search engines to recognize context and learn from what we select to improve the next page of results. (And it would need to be able to tell the difference between a click through and retreat and a success, which might mean feeding back more info on how long we stay than we're comfortable with -- as well as privileging the pages visited by slow readers.)

In the meantime it would help my life a lot if Google would create an option that allowed searches for word strings with particular punctuation only.

Speaking of unconscious user feedback, there's a test underway for big stores to track not just what people eventually buy, but where they go and what they look at in the store with technology -- infared, I think it was, but I don't have time to track the reference down.

Not a problem. My dialup choked on the video but I will check it out the next time I've got access to broadband. Thanks!

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