It is thrilling to hear about Web 2.0 these days. There is so much energy and buzz that you just know we are going through another phase transition. In this next phase the information consumers become information producers.
Blogs, podcasts & RSS enable anyone to jump onto modern media wagon. Undoubtedly this is a good thing. Out of all of this, we are likely to come out faster, smarter and, of course, cooler.
While we are excited with the possibility of everyone becoming a media voice, we also need to consider the consequences. Here are simple insights based on a network topology.
In the ‘old’ world we had a few distinct large information hubs. In the ‘new’ world we have essentially peer-to-peer network. The new setup has on the order of magnitude more connections and that means that each person is going to be handling much more information.
In short, we are on the brink of huge personal information overload. In the race to make all sorts of information available we need to race at least as quickly to build filters for relevant information.
But wait, do not we have RSS? RSS allows us to subscribe to exactly what we need, right? Yes, that what RSS does but it is not the kind of personal filter needed in today’s day and age. What we need is intelligent, adaptive filter that evolves together with person’s interactions and tastes.
RSS is too crude. RSS is still all or nothing. We need an algorithm that continuously learns from the content that user is accessing and is then capable of filtering new content.
For example, a person who is subscribing to news about Java may not be interested in every article coming from a particular feed. An intelligent algorithm needs to be able to sift through 10 different Java news feeds and compile personalized, essential subset that is aligned with specific interests of the user.
And of course this has to be built into the browser. No single site will be successful in doing this simply because the site looses control once the user goes to a web page on another site. A browser plugin that can continuously monitor users content will be to do the job.
And it follows then, that the entire filtering and personalization solution needs to be part of the browser. We will be seeing some interesting solutions over the next few years. Firefox and its commercial branch called Flock have already started down this road. Microsoft is likely to follow with IE 7.X
- Alex
