Data data everywhere…..
May 14th, 2008
One major concern I have about the burgeoning amount of data and information flowing through the ‘tubes these days is how we as users/consumers actually process that amount of data, what’s relevant to us, what’s ‘good’. Take a comment is free post from the Guardian. Great content, great responses, but bleeding loads of them (163) running at a word count of around 22,000. That’s great from a participatory basis, but not from a usability perspective, do I just read the first few comments, what if I stop reading at comment #50 yet number #54 is really really relevant to the article and my opinion of it, maybe extending it in an important way. Take it one node up, how many news outlets will produce similarly titled news items, how do sort those.
I think we need better mechanisms to filter the long tail, sure we have the Diggs, Googles etc that do a fantastic job of organising content and serving it to us. But what about relevance? What is ‘good’ what is ‘relevant’? Who decides, and are they right? Algorithms, Voting, Ratings, Popularity, Emergence??
One nice solution I saw for comments is contextual filtering. Display the comments where they are relevant, only a small thing but start’s to at least place comments next to bits I may also find interesting or take issue with.
As for deciding what’s ‘good’ in the first place then it will always come down to individual perception, the aggregation of those multiple perspectives is where it gets really interesting, and there-in lies the challenge.
