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Tom Landini

Tom Landini's Public Library

Cool Tool: Consensus Web Filters

  • But most important for me is the large volume of very interesting news that will not become "news." This is the kind of material that is more interesting than random pages but which lacks an appealing hook to place it on the front page of a magazine or even a news website. Often these items are timeless; they don't make the front page because they could be run at any time. But they are more valuable than odd curiosities. Because of the voting, tagging, bookmarking process enough people find the item worthwhile that they rise to notice. What emerges for me is a delightful counter-news, or what we used to call at CoEvolution Quarterly, "news that stays news." I have encountered no other process in the world that is better at surfacing "news that stays news" and "news that will be news" better than these collaborative filtering sites.
  • Another set of new websites use shared bookmarks to rank links.
26 Jun 08

5 Excellent Productivity Tips For Google Reader

  • You should have folders for website feeds and tags for particular articles. That way you can effectively manage and search through feeds later.

Seesmic Visual Search by Tiil

  • This is a really cool search interface for Seesmic. Uses the also way cool Flock plug in Piclens. You can search Seesmic by user name, but it looks like that's all now. Promising, worth keeping an eye out on this one. - tommyl on 2008-06-12

Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: How to Better Manage FriendFeed for Relevance

  • One of the profilic Friendfeed posters suggests FF as one of the ultimate content filters you can have, even ahead of Google. After all, you're subscribed to people you've chosen to follow, so searching all thier stuff will probably turn up something more relevant to you than the impersonal Google links from whereever and whoever.

    But the problem with FF is noise; too many profilic posters posting too much stuff. The problem with that is that it buries the new stuff that might not have many likes or comments. (Thi s is based on FF's new "best of" feature that ranks stuff based on likes, comments and other voodoo.)

    Hawk's solution letting the user rank thiose he's subscribed to, giving each a numerical rating. Based on the rating, search results could be weighted and sorted accordingly.

    I don't know about that. You still have the weights from the likes and comments to deal with, and you might not be able to identify the stuff that you might like, but don't know it quite yet.

    Seems to me that any algorithm based on past behavior would be subject to a kind of self-selected bias that narrows the field. Much of it would be relevant, of course. But as they say of social science, you can explain behavior, but you really can't predict it.     - tommyl on 2008-06-12
  • o what's the solution? Allowing users to rank their contacts. So I might rank the girl that I like (in my case my wife mrsth) as a 100 score out of 100 possible. I might rank my brother who I kind of like as well as a 90. I might rank Robert Scoble who is a popular blogger and also a good personal friend as a 75. And I might rank a blog like Engadget, or Gizmodo, or TechCrunch, that I don't always need to follow but enjoy reading from time to time as a 10.
11 Jun 08

As the water rises… hyperlocal reporting

  • A public radio journalist looks at the distinction between traditional news and social media aggregation sites. And he like what he sees in regard to recent flooding in Iowa.

    Mundt draws a distinction between trational journalism and eye witness accounts post on social sites. No one is likely to confuse them, either.     - tommyl on 2008-06-11
  • There’s no “blurring of the lines of journalism” in this instance. Any intelligent human being understands the difference between the work of veteran reporters and editors… and the eyewitnesses with their cameras on the streets of Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, recording what they’re seeing. And any intelligent person knows both are invaluable.

Mind Hacks: Web making us worried, but probably not stupid

  • Looking at Nick Carr's "is Google Making Us Stupid" from the perspective of a researcher. They say Carr's observations are entirely anecdotal, and propose some experiements to test things out. - tommyl on 2008-06-11

Colin Walker » What is the real aim of social media?

  • Indeed we do but the speed, ease of use and range of the connections we can make with social media are adding an extra dimension to traditional means of communication.
12 Apr 08

Quite Content - The Thing About Twitter

  • Twitter is at the moment an echo chamber of "a-list" bloggers and "meme spreaders," with a gigantic signal to noise ratio. In order to ingest enough signal to make it worth using as a knowledge tool, you would have to ingest millions of tons of dreck in the process--and that will only get worse as Twitter becomes more widespread, not better.
  • You would have to aggregate every tweet on a topic for days/weeks and categorize/code them appropriately to get anything more than the viewpoint of who tweeted last, and loudest.
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