I think this is cool

[stakebait]

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.

Comments

[rosefox]

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make constant updates to ideas of what users want (rather than computer predictions of user behavior from necessarily outdated information), is easily the biggest revolution in data organization since, oh, I would say the Dewey Decimal System.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?

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

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.)

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

(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?

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

*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.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

(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.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

(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)

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

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.