Two interesting posts today related to social media ( whatever that means ).
Jerry Springer For Programmers: Only A Matter Of Time
Giles Bowkett has this to say:
Advertizing-supported media gains much more from your attention than it does from your edification.
and the below paragraph is the one that ‘inspired’ the header of my post:
Blog ads encourage a fundamentally trashy form of “journalism.” Keep this in mind the next time somebody suggests building a business on ad revenue. To the extent that it functions as an economic incentive to useless, divisive gossip, ad revenue is fundamentally erosive to the communities which generate it. That makes it parasitic, and nothing to be proud of.
Are we building Universities or Amphitheaters? by Reg Braithwaite neatly separates the two extreme types of social media aggregators that can be built.
Such things quickly drive out all useful information, but they bring slavering crowds into the amphitheater to watch the Christians battle the Lions.
Universities of old: places of learning where people shared and debated ideas for the purpose of advancing knowledge.
So, do companies like Nuffnang, Advertlets and others providing blog advertising products and services destroy the social media aggregators like Ping.sg.
I make no reservations when I say that I hope Ping.sg will become more like a university than an amphitheater. So, when I use the word ‘destroy’, I actually mean ‘decrease its chance of becoming an university’.
Hmmm…I was thinking about the posts mentioned above. There is only one way to get attention - provide content that people want. Sadly, a good number of us enjoy lowest common denominator sensationalistic content - this is the reason why Britney Spears must die.
It is easier to provide trashy content than insightful, helpful and intelligent content.
I would like to believe that if you do not like trashy content, then after the first time of being ‘tricked’, the site will no longer have your business. It is the ones providing content that edifies you that will get your business. In this way, it is perfectly alright for individual sites to want to provide trashy content - let them attract their kindred spirits, those who are different can go elsewhere.
The problem is when there is a confluence of these 3 factors:
1. Many such individual sites sprout out because of the ease in providing lowest common denominator content.
2. The marketing of blog advertising companies that make you believe that it is desirable if not profitable to stick ads on your site.
3. Aggregaters like Ping.sg become popular and a community develops around it.
The openness of Ping.sg works against it in this case to becoming an university.
Which brings me to a message I posted on Twitter. The problem with a lot of social media filtering services is that for the service to be useful to one person, many people need to use it - think Digg. AideRSS works to solve this problem by using other metrics (like the number of comments left on a post) not dependent on its own users. The problem is that these metrics depend on other humans which to me seems like a rather big flaw.
Is there a way for social media filtering without relying on human signals. Without explicit human signals?
