Expecting the Unexpected, But Not Finding It
Here's something I just came across that stopped me in my tracks:
Homophily makes you stupid.
I get kind of buzzed when I find something that excites me, but I might not have found it before. A web site, news article, book, podcast - almost any bit of information can surprise and delight me when I'm not expecting it. I end up liking it, but wouldn't know that I did before I somehow stumbled across it.
Jon Udell talks about this in a recent blog post. But what I like most here is the idea that you don't too much find these sorts of things when you rely on recommendations from like minded people.
That's a problem for me in Friendfeed and other social sites these days. I liked the flow of stuff from the early tech adopters who hang out on these sites - at least, for a while. But it gets old when the range of subjects posted and discussed doesn't change that much from day to day.
Sure, it's easy enough to filter out stuff you don't want to be exposed to anymore. But how about filtering in stuff you might like to be exposed to? I don't know how to do that, and I'd like to.
Not much encouraging news here, at least not from Udell:
Recommendation systems don’t help me much. They only suggest things similar to other things I’ve shown interest in. Increasingly that just frustrates me. The most delightful recommendations are those that connect me with things that interest me in unpredictable ways. That happens serendipitously, and I haven’t yet found a reliable way to manufacture the serendipity.
Me either. I do like Stumbleupon, a web app that takes you to random pages with the press of a button. It sometimes works, but not enough to feed my appetite for serendipity.
Anybody have some ideas here?
