1000 Flowers Bloom

Explicit vs. Implicit Data and the Wisdom of Crowds

Harrison Hoffman has an interesting article up on CNet about the Wisdom of Crowds failing. The phenomena that he's really observing though is a gaming of the system at IMBD. People are voting the Dark Knight movie up and the Godfather down in order to influence the rankings.

Explicit information where people take an action to rate or vote can be wonderful and create fantastic resources. However, it doesn't matter if you're at IMBD or Digg or Yelp it can also be gamed.

At Aggregate Knowledge we have found that Implicit information where systems look at what people are naturally doing tends to be much more reliable.

It's not what you say - it's what you do!

Albert Lai launches Kontagent

My friend Albert Lai just launched his new company Kontangent. It's a viral analytics tool that seems pretty neat! I am going to get the demo soon I hope. Albert is one of the few people who has started more companies than I have!

TechCrunch has the writeup.

Fresh ID gets it wrong

Kristi Colvin at Fresh ID has a rant about recommendation engines that I think really gets it wrong.

Kristi believes that recommendations don't serve users but in fact only serve the retailers or the publishers that use them. How can that be? You can't force someone to buy something just because you show it to them in a recommendation window. The only reason someone buys something is because they ultimately want it.

Kristi - where's your data that users don't like recommendation engines besides your individual subjective experience?

The true measure of how well a recommendation engine works is by seeing how many people find things they want through it, not the subjective measure of whether you think it looks good or not.

What comes after Search?

It's clear that Search has been a dominant force on the Internet and that Google is has won. According to Compete, Google had a 71.5% share in search in May 2008.

Interestingly though - time spent searching is going down. Data from the Online Publishers Association says that time spent searching dropped 15% from June 2006 to June 2007. Time spent was 4.5% in June 2007.

We need to help people the other 95% of the time that they're online!

Friendster hacked?

I got a couple of complaints from people saying that I had been sending them spam messages from Friendster.

Oddly enough I started to get spam from my brother as well:

I looked in my sent folder and it was empty. My brother's sent folder was empty as well.

I changed my password but it looks like this is widespread...

YouTube gives up user histories and profiles

I just found out through Techmeme that YouTube is being forced to give all their user profiles and history to Viacom by a judge.

This is a massive breach of privacy that Google is being forced into and seems crazy to me. Certainly Viacom could get an understanding of what users were watching without the things like user names being divulged.

Recommendation Systems in Social Media

Muhammad Saleem has done a nice write up of how consumer social media sites are using Collaborative Filtering over on Read/Write Web.

The only thing I disagree with is equating Collaborative Filtering with Online Recommendations. Collaborative Filtering is only one technique that one could use to provide recommendations.CF is a good tool but you have to be careful to apply the right tool to the right situation.

At Aggregate Knowledge we actually use a variety of different algorithms types to determine what someone might be interested in. For example taking into account seasonality, recency/frequency and lexical matches to show you things you're most likely to want to see.