I've already discussed the power of the Wikipedia's Recent Changes list, and how one can derive a fair bit of power from the information that's one gets from it. I made an analogy to RSS feeds as a way to find the newest information.
The problem is (and this is an issue I've been wrestling with for a while) is that you don't always want the latest-and-greatest. RSS solves many problems, but it definitely doesn't solve all of them.
(continued ...)
If you got here recently--and speaking probabilistically, you did--you missed out on some past posts:
The rise of the "quickie" as a modern institution must also be understood within this [temporal] context. -- source
There are 3250 walk buttons. 2500 of them don't do anything. 750 of them do. There is no visible difference between the sets. There is no clear way to know which one they are. And if it works, it has a 90 second delay. -- source
It would be a real shame to see a distributed denial-of-service attack hit that server. Fortunately, Guido here is an expert in preventing those denial-of-service attacks, and for a strictly nominal fee, he'll be glad to help provide it. -- source
That's fine. I don't blame you for not reading my whole archive--I certainly haven't read your whole archive, unless you started blogging today, and told me about it. But it's out there, and you maybe even would have wanted to see it, had you known about it.
(Indeed, often you don't know what you want).
If you know what you are looking for, it's easier. Part of the answer to this is search: want my resume? Type in a few words to Google. Are you wildly popular, and so people are nice enough to categorize stuff for you? Again use Google the Brad DeLong way1. Similarly, if I have it locally, there are projects like "Stuff I've Seen": http://research.microsoft.com/adapt/sis/ and Keeping Found Things Found
Wikipedia, unbound by temporality, has the nice feature that you can dig out stuff that you are interested in because you know how an encyclopedia works: it's alphabetical, easily searchable, and we have social conventions for this sort of thing. (We expect, say, "Washington" to be in Wikipedia, but "experience as a microsoft intern" not to be.) Which means that we don't know what sort of cool things are out there at all.
But what about thinigs I don't know exist? What are the orgnaizing principles behind all the cool stuff that I don't know where it is?
Metafilter and BoingBoing and all sorts of other blogs partially try to bring things to your attention -- but those, too, are phrased in terms of the newest and greatest.
StumbleUpon is a slightly different take: a method for reccomending other stuff that might turn out to be of interest. It takes a collaborative filtering approach of one sort (as does Amazon's reccomender); a different sort of collaborative filtering comes from the collective tagging made visible by deli.cio.us and flickr
A few sites seem to have automated, or semi-automated generators that link to other stuff. (I haven't looked into this for a while, but I kind of like the idea that a page might suggest other things of possible interest.)
1 At this point, the phrase "Danyel Risher resume", in quotes, on Google, finds Brad DeLong echoing me -- but not me. I find this funny.
September 2, 2004 09:44 PM | TrackBack | in Temporality