We Still Need Better Filters

Regarding the notion of human filters being a “control” – well, a good filter (e.g., an editor) brings a depth of subject knowledge to the filtering process that most of us don’t have.

If I were an expert on everything, I wouldn’t need editors. I’m not, and none of us are.

The whole idea that human editors don’t add value becomes really troubling when you apply it general news coverage. The fact that a certain set of stories is popular or grab my attention doesn’t mean that they are accurate, complete, or useful to me when I start making political choices. I’m not suggesting that we place blind faith in someone to tell us what we need to know, but let’s face it; if, say, the political stability of the middle east is an important topic to you when you vote, you are much better off finding out what acknowledged experts have to say – and what sources they recommend for keeping abreast of things – that seeing what story was the most popular on a news site. Or just diving in and deciding what you like, which all too often is what you want to hear.

And remember, it’s not a binary choice. There are critical roles for both human-guided information sources and self-created filters that help you find specialized knowledge that you want or need.

Expertise is meaningful, and most of us only have it in a very limited number of subject areas.

Humans have to be part of the mix, but humans augmented with better tools is where the gravy is. Right? It’s humans inside with tools to move the value up the chain, right?

[sorry, this is long]

Chris said:

“What if you had a way to let in the everything (per Marina’s point), but a mechanism to further elevate the pieces that have even more value than others?”

I’m intrigued by this, although I’m not exactly sure what you’re after yet. Does this match what you’re thinking Chris?

- All the news from my network: Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, etc. etc. all aggregated to one point. Some sort of uber-aggregator.
- A way to say what’s relevant to you right now. A list of search terms, keywords, tags? Always changeable, of course, as your interests change.
- a way for you to read something and flag it as ‘relevant’ or ‘not relevant’. Something like Digg?
- A recommendation engine that crawls your uber-aggregator feed and meshes it with your relevant keywords, fine tunes with your Digg list and serves the most probable relevant content first.
- Go beyond your uber-aggregator to the wider web and recommend content that comes from outside your network. Add the good stuff / contributors to your network, of course.

So the filter is predictive as well as tuneable over time. It changes as your mood/interest changes. And it scans your network as well as the wider world.

Is that close?

Mark- you’re spot on. I was describing this to a friend who’s in the technology meets marketing space and she said, “Oh, like Digg,” and I said “yes, but a nation of diggs.” Hmm… know what?

REDDIT.

Where’s Alexis?

Chris
I am a contributing editor at a non-profit social news site called NewsTrust.net. It’s like Digg, except where “digg” is vauge – ranking a story on newstrust is all about whether or not you think the information is of high quality or not.

Would love you to check it out and give some feedback on where it might miss the spot on what you are picturing in your head.

As a previous commenter noted: This is an important question – how can you filter signal from noise. This is especially true when it comes to news/journalism – how can you filter good information from bad information.

Chris,

Great point.

A perfect place for this type of thing? Friendfeed or socialthing. All of the streams gather up there, why not let us form our own mashups and bubble up rules etc. Yahoo pipes maybe? But that’s more complex than most folks want to go.

@Todd- I agree that either FriendFeed or Social Thing could make this work faster than I’ll figure it out. I hope they can help with such magical things. : )

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.

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.

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.

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.