mediated content, part 1

so we love social networks. or we don’t. or else.

there’s something interesting about social networks: they put us in contact with information and resources that are undiscrenable for us without peer’s mediation.

but until now (in most of cases) peer mediation has existed as a side-effect, as a collateral. most of social networks don’t let peers mediate information or resources, but just channel them.

side-effect i mean with the fact that finding two peers that channel the same information might actuall influence (and inform) our vision of such information or resource.

i might argue that currently (nowadays) some of us strive (and crave) mediation, as in “if would recommend a film, i’d go and see it, cause he shares my taste”. just an example.

now, another (real-life?) example: i love TED talks, but i surely don’t have the time to see them all. some of my friends (colleagues, mostly) have the same lack of time and the same passion for some of the talks. i get some from friends, some from browsing, some from blogs.

what if i could build a social sub-network for TED conferences? then i’d have all my friends and colleagues that like the TED talks on one group, abd they could post all their favourites, and i could browse their choices. boring. i might not like the ones they like (he’s aprogrammer, i’m a designer, whatever). boring.

why boring? cause it is accumulating data. and i think we have the desire (the need) for mediated information. someone that can decide for us on what we might like. like a secretary. like an agent (or better an intelligent agent)

now let’s explore a scenario:

i have my facebook community. i select some people and add them to a channel i just created, the TED channel. i get some videos from TED they promote. i vote on every video i see. voting goes directly to the person that suggest it, but also to what the video is described as, suppose “technology, sustainability”, and also (for the TED voting system, to certain keywords such as “dazzling, informative, mind-changing”. some good old server software analyzes it and throws an answer. the person gets promoted/demoted, the keywords are weighted and added to a scrutinized, hierarchy-driven list, the theme gets promoted/demoted, and so on. at the end i start getting the TED videos i might like.

and where’s the magic? in mixing systems. my friends are my choice, and i’ll keep learning from it (“chris posts too many psychology videos, not what i like” so chris gets demoted in “TED importance” by me) and the rest is the algorythms’ choice (user xxx has seen 12 “technology”, 4 “dazzling”, 9 “funny” videos, this “dazzling, technology funny” video might do him well), and video voting (this “dazzling technology funny” video was not that good, “technology and “funny” are still big, let’s keep them and throw “dazzling” down a notch). and at the end i might get better choices. would i? i bet i will.

facebook already has the api, ted is easy to link and damn interesting, we might as well stop doing little “i hug/puke/bitchslap you” applications…

is it too complicated? 4 years ago we might have said the same to a page ranking system like google has right now. “we’re not google”. sure. but we might get there, eventually.