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The Green Slider, a nifty piece of usability engineering

In part 2 of his 'State of the Blogosphere' (part 1 here), Technorati's founder and CEO David Sifry illustrates how Blogsphere growth contributes to information overload as one of the big challenges of our times.

Then he introduces new Technorati tools, including a nifty usability feature, The Green Slider, which offer views to conversations in the blogosphere through filtered levels of "authority".

His point about information overload may be somewhat blasé, but is therefore absolutely spot-on:

"(...) In a world of over 50,000 postings per hour, and over 70,000 new weblogs created each day, keeping on top of and in tune with the most interesting and influential people and topics is the new frontier beyond search. (...)"

While I keep entertaining the opinion that collaborative filtering or some other form of artificial intelligence will be the key to hyper-personalized news selection, the logical evolutionary step towards this ideal is currently taking shape as a combination of tagging, social bookmarking, link popularity, rating and ranking.

David articulates conventional wisdom when it comes to filtering information:

"(...) People often ask, "what blogs should I read?" And often times a good answer is, "you should read the posts from the leading blogs in topics that of interest you. Blog Finder and Explore make this possible for the first time on a wide variety of topics--- and in so doing we hope will the blgosphere more approachable, useful, and comprehensible to more people than ever before. (...)"

Actually, I find the authority filter that David introduces much more interesting than Technorati's Blog Finder or Explore features. I fail to see how the latter are much different from regular tag or category searches, with results ranked by link popularity and chronology.

But yes, the authority filter seems promising. As David describes it:

"(...) [It] is a tool to fine tune results, and its a great way to zoom in on the voices that are commanding the most attention, and then zoom back out and listen to the whole diverse medium that is the blogosphere. (...)"

"(...) I've found this great for searches on highly trafficked topics, like "George Bush" or Olympics, or on topics that are known to get a lot of spam, like mortgage or refinance," David adds. "I find that it often helps me to also answer the question, "Who is the most influential blogger talking about XXX this week, and what did she say?" (...)"

If nothing else, at least it's a rather nifty little usability feature, that green slider!

[UPDATE, Feb.15, 07:42 Finnish time:]
Couple of interesting comments on David's post:

• Easton Ellsworth sees the green slider as a better advanced search: "(...) Rather than make users go to an "advanced search" form to enter a given threshold number of links, you just let them slide up and down between blogs with more and less incoming links. (...)"
• George Nimeh asks: "(...) As defined, doesn't the "authority meter" reinforce the status quo and favor the existing A-list? (...)"
• Editor B: "(...) The current slider prejudicially favors "authoritative" blogs by including them at all the lesser levels.  I can't filter them out (...) [W]hy not offer the option to see *only* posts with "little authority"? (...)"

[UPDATE ENDS]

Somewhat related on www.josschuurmans.com:

• Are half of the blogs that Technorati tracks dead? (February 14, 2006)
• A business model for collaboratively filtered news? (February 8, 2006)
• Does Technorati see Blogosphere growth slowing down? (February 6, 2006)

Technorati Tags: Technorati, Blogosphere, search, authority, information overload, filtering, usability

A business model for collaboratively filtered news?

SUMMARY: Amazon.com has demonstrated the power of collaborative filtering when it comes to selling books. But how about a hyper-personalized, collaboratively filtered news offering? The main challenge may be the business model. Would ad revenue be able to cover the cost?

Via 'Wink Search', an entry on Zeevveez's QTSaver blog, I found an interesting review of 'New Ideas in Search (Wink, Gravee)', on Business 2.0's B2Day blog. Erick Schonfeld writes:

(...) Wink is very much a social search engine, since results are based on how other people previously rated and tagged things. The question is: Will a search based on public tags turn up substantially different results than a regular Google search based on link popularity? After all, at their core both are based on humans making their preferences public (one by explicitly tagging a Website with a descriptive keyword, the other by linking to it). (...)

I agree with Erick that one might wonder if Wink can do a better job than Google, considering that both engines rank search results by popularity. (And by the way, when it comes to tagging and searching, del.icio.us does a very good job, too.)

My interest in search is inspired primarily by one use case: hyper-personalized news provision. When it comes to search relevance, I'm convinced that artificial intelligence is the Holy Grail.

So I've been wondering if anyone is working on an Amazon.com for news. RSS feeds rule, tagging is the tool, Google is gool, but the best way to filter news by relevance is by looking at the news preferences of like-minded users.

Think about a collaboratively filtered news offering. If you and I have had very similar patterns of news consumption in the past, and you have already read and rated a particular piece of news, chances are that I will be interested in reading it, too.

There is an important difference between link popularity and collaborative filtering. Link popularity tells us which search results are considered most relevant to a particular search query by "everybody" (that is, anybody who ever published a link or tagged a piece of published content). Collaborative filtering, on the other hand, sorts search results on the basis of what is know about me, compared to people like me.

That's the power of Amazon.com when it comes to selling books.

So perhaps the main challenge with collaboratively filtered news is the business model. It can only work given a critical mass of users. Which means that the service should probably be offered for free on the Internet. Does that mean ads would have to pay for it? And could they?