Collaborative Filtering George Dafermos has a good essay on collaborative filtering:
- Sandeep Krishnamurthy's view that Amazon's success is based on its customer-centricity, highlighting its version of contained collaborative filtering.
- Malcom Gladwell's view in The Tipping Point that ‘collaborative filtering’ gives the chance to under supported (in terms of traditional marketing promotion) ‘outsiders’ to beat the ‘blockbuster’. It gives the opportunity to the ‘no-brand-name’ to outperform the established brand.
- Chris Locke's Gonzo Marketing view that “Collaborative filtering works bottom-up by feeling out the edges of emergent micromarkets based on personal tastes and interests, in effect defining potential online communities.”
- Andrew Sullivan’s Unfit to Print Weblog use of a Book Club as collaborative filtering by weblog.
What George doesn't cover are the reasons I have a book problem:
- I can always search with Google to find a book, but the results are out of context and impersonal
- I can turn to AllConsuming.net to find a book, in context, but with impersonal results.
- But since I am enaged in blogging and not just reading, the people I am getting to know with these communication tools are presenting me book reviews in context. Like Adina's Book Blog.
- What's worse, so many of the bloggers I meet are authors themselves so Im compelled to read their books.
The most powerful forms of collaborative filtering are the ones with the strongest ties, like Sullivan's Book Club or the groups that emerge naturally or exist and are served by blogging as a collaboration tool.
But in honesty, my book problem is less how these books keep emerging in my possession, but that having a infant that wants to stick books in his mouth is not condusive to absorbing macro-content. Its actually easier to produce micro-content than consume macro-content for me.
7:43:47 AM 
|
|
