<![CDATA[Many-to-Many: From Personalization to Socialization:
Wednesday night a bunch of bloggers and media executives attended a Yahoo! briefing on Personalization. Susan Mernit noted:
Yahoo’s potential to own a huge piece of the blogosphere via distribution, tool sets and content acquisition did not go unnoticed by media companies in the room—just the perception they can dominate could possibly spur progress by online newspapers (I hope.) Grassroots media folk and search companies present at the event took notice as well.Yahoo has blended personalization and RSS to form the most widely used aggregator on the planet. Keep in mind that the vast majority of traffic goes through a handful of portals (and an oligopoly of carriers) and mainstream attention follows the power-law. Most users do not enjoy the diversity or serendipity that blog readers do. Blog writers who want to make impressionistic returns will feed off of major portals. Somewhere in middlespace, the bottom up will be incented by the top down. A new editor is rising and it isn’t your blogging client, nor branded aggregators, its an algorithm that supposedly will grow to know you better than people can.
Read the whole article, Susan’s posting, etc. My short comment is that, “yes, this is what is happening” and “no, algorithms that find similarities among people’s interests are not sufficient proxies for editorial judgment (in the non-professional sense of ‘editorial’).”]]>