February 25, 2003
Flattening the Power Curve
Much has been said about The Power Law. Much has to be done to flatten the curve.On the steep end, the recipients have a very different experience than the rest of us. They've already got the advantage so they are already being slammed by feedback. They don't have a need to market themselves so they have freedom to make whatever idiosyncratic choices they want in terms of who to follow. These idiosyncratic choices should be encouraged. However, they are also already very plugged in to the scene (given that they are the ones creating the scene). It's among this class that there is the most inbreeding - popular sites reinforcing the popularity of other popular sites. So to be responsible citizens, they could do a service to the rest of the population by working together to decrease redundancy and working hard to find new sources.
The medium edge can be served well by Technorati's new "Recent Interesting Blogs/Entries" lists and other services that watch the popular-blogging stats and turn them on their heads to reward sites that are quickly rising rather than just massively popular. However, this still rewards popularity rather than quality (a sometimes correlating but wholly noncausal relationship).
On the flat end, this requires a service like the one I've been musing quite a bit about lately. Consistent with my Conjectures On Truth And Quality, there needs to be a service where people can submit their news items and have them be rated and then recommended (using collaborative filtering?) to other interested subscribers. (muse: decentralized kuro5hin?) Perhaps this service could watch for these particular entries being mentioned on blogdex/daypop/technorati and dump them when they get too popular, and also dump other entries that get too high a ratio of negative ratings. It could rate both quality and newsworthiness. It could tie into RSS clients. It could give an excellent but unconnected writer a deserved shot at an audience.
Posted by Curt at February 25, 2003 03:10 AM
Sounds like you are describing something like what newsmonster http://www.newsmonster.org/ seems to be trying to do. (Warning - you can't uninstall Newsmonster!)
Posted by: David Brake at February 26, 2003 12:01 AMYeah, the "upcoming features" list for newsmonster does have some stuff that is in line with what I hope would exist. Too bad newsmonster is so rude. Not ideal.