The Web Means the End of Forgetting. Content Is No Longer King: Curation Is King. Why Social Media Curation Matters - Technorati Blogging. Over the past few weeks I've raved about the current raft of social media curation start-ups. I've rambled on and on about all of the new features that are being added to sites like Curated.By, Storify and Keepstream. What I haven’t explained to my friends, family, Twitter followers and just about anybody I engage in tech conversation with for more than a couple of minutes, is why it all matters. With registered Twitter users numbering somewhere in the region of 150 million, their fire hose is pumping out tens of millions of tweets a day.
Granted, not all of this data is worth capturing. So, how do you decide what’s worth keeping? Is it worth spending time on creating tags and categories? Beyond content lists. The other day, Gary Shapiro, the guy who runs the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, dropped by and left a comment here. There were a few problems: 1. My commenting system caught his comment in moderation, so people didn’t see it posted until I took it out of moderation right now. 2. No one probably knows who Gary is and thinks he’s just another random commenter. How do you fix this? How did I know who Gary Shapiro was? Anyway, I’m interviewing Tim O’Reilly this afternoon (leave questions I should ask him here on this FriendFeed cluster) and I’ll definitely ask him about how we can improve our interaction systems on the web to better expose those who have real impact on all of our lives.
Thanks Gary for dropping by and defending trade shows and I’ll see you at CES. It's Filter Failure. Federate or Aggregate? Inventor and tech philosopher Dave Winer Twittered tonight that federation is the hot thing, pointing to a New York Times article about Facebook Connect. And just like that, he touched upon the third rail of our increasingly social web. The big question facing the social web depends on the direction it needs to take. A sharp increase in the number of web services and social networks has many of us yearning for a single sign-on, which has led to the idea of “federation.”
On the flip side, we also want one place to manage our diverse web services in one place — in other words, aggregation. These two diametrically opposed views of how we are going to come to grips with our social web are going to face an intense debate until consumers vote with their clicks. United Federation of the Social Web Federation, as explained on Wikipedia, “describes the technologies, standards and use-cases which serve to enable the portability of identity information across otherwise autonomous security domains. The Problems With Friends Lists. I’m trimming a few of my friends in Facebook. Not a ton, but a few folks who are wonderful for wanting to follow me, but who I haven’t really interacted with in well over a year.
(Quick note: none of the people in the picture to the left were being trimmed. I just took a snap of where I was in the list.) The Emotions Around the Data What strikes me is that this is a potentially emotional exchange to what should be a simple choice of data management. Think about it. If you remove someone as a friend, it says something more than just a line of data, doesn’t it? It says you’re not important. And yet, the decision is almost always unemotional in nature to the person doing the trimming. Right? So there’s a disparity between what the act means to the person removing versus the person who feels removed. Clustering and Other Sorting Mechanisms In a way, Facebook is flawed in this way. What about proximity (as per my other post)? It’s All A Strange Synthetic There’s more to this. You? Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008) - "Dave, stop. Stop, will you?
Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. Curation to save media.