Chris Brogan, one of the web's leading thinkers on social media, writes "We Still Need Better Filters."
He says:
With billions of blogs and hundreds of thousands of podcasts and with Flickr and with site after site after site worth of data to consume, we have the “get it to my desk or phone” part of the problem fairly well managed. With services like Google Reader and Friend Feed, and del.icio.us to a lesser extent, we’re starting to find ways to collect all this information in one place (or a few places).
But what’s missing are filters. Twitter has no filtering mechanism, nor even a “bubble up the good stuff” mechanism. Google Reader lets friends share what they think are good blog posts, but obviously this works out that what YOU think is a good post and what I think is a good post might not always match up. There needs to be another layer of filtering such that I can choose to read your promoted posts, but I should then get the opportunity to bubble my best (and by “best,” I mean most closely informationally aligned) sharing sources to the top of the heap.
It’s all still too linear. Too boolean.
Who’s making the right kinds of filters to promote the best stuff? Who’s helping us suppress the drivel?
How would YOU like to see filters work?
What a way to state the problem. Particularly "we have the “get it to my desk or phone” part of the problem fairly well managed." There is a digital divide, but it is shrinking - and once on the web, access to information levels out for everyone (putting government censorship on the shelf for sake of argument).
Access is less and less the problem. What we are faced with is too much information and not enough media literacy.
By reading Chris' post I began to wonder about what exactly it is that needs filtering. Chris mentioned Google Reader and Friend Feed, both great services, but hardly "social news" sites. Both allow me to easily track what my friends are reading, but there is no collective wisdom. When I wake up in the morning and open up Google Reader, I view the articles Robert Scoble has shared and I trust them only so much as I trust Robert Scoble's ability to recommend good technology news. But this method just means I have to keep track of individuals as news recommenders, a task that doesn't scale up. Still - this kind of filter (human filters) is a good start if you feel confidant about the individual.
One step up from that is creating a social news site, like Digg or NewsTrust, where you are essentially aggregating news recommender and finding a way to weigh everyone's recommendations against each other. Of course, this opens a whole new can of worms, but it is scalable - assuming you get enough people with enough interests, you'd have an expert to recommend and review stories around every possible topic.
Is there a magic filter for the web? Of course not. But we are inching in the right direction. Sites like Twitter and Friend Feed will continue to empower individual news recommenders like Robert Scoble and we hope NewsTrust.net is moving towards a more powerful way to find news you can trust on the web.
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