Gathering info from the crowd in the cloud-is this collectively smart?
It seems that every couple weeks there is a new service, site, or app whose goal is to help me gather information and then share it with various groups/tribes of people I know. This has gotten me to wondering if we’re helping ourselves find info or just building stronger walls around our electronic tribes.
In the past few weeks I’ve been introduced to Twine, Microplaza, the new PostRank beta, MyAlltop, and Glue all of which want me to gather, tailor, categorize, and then share.
I enjoyed Twine for a while, but I’ve begun to feel that I wasn’t following the right people or subscribed to the right groups/twines because it’s proving less useful for me. Granted, it is easy to bookmark something to Twine and then tweet it out. I don’t go back to Twine and check those things I’ve marked.
Microplaza is even less useful because the shear number of links shared by the shear number of people I follow, which forces me to again build up a “tribe” to glean the wheat from the chaff.
MyAlltop I’ve found far more useful right out of the gate and the only one I’ll visit a couple of times a day to check for new information. However I think that is because I picked the news sources I wanted but wasn’t asked to share or follow others to make the site “work”.
Glue I haven’t played with much and only installed this morning. Glue’s premise is like Medi.um in that I’m supposed to be able to see which of my friends and colleagues have been to a certain site/page and what they thought of it (no chance of embarrassment there, no not at all).
So we note, bookmark, select pieces of information to share with friends so our friends can benefit from what we’ve found. Likewise we benefit from what our friends have, collectively, found so that we can find more cool sites, useful information, or just plain old news. Okay, great.
Which gets me back, finally, to my premise. We follow groups of people. People we know and trust. Often those people do the same/similar things we do. Collectively we have a lot of similar interests, so it makes perfect sense that we’d share a lot of the same stuff.
I think we’re not leveraging the “cloud” in the right ways to find more, better, new information and ideas.
(Yes, yes blinding flash of the obvious. Hush.)
We assume that if “our cloud” (that is our network of friends and people we follow) is large enough we’ll find a lot of the information we need/seek. I’ve found that premise has worked pretty well for specific bits of information. Asking a direct query on Twitter generally nets me the info I was looking for. Again that’s a specific question, what about just general stuff? For general stuff I think “our cloud” fails us, but would “the cloud” be better?
I think if we rely too heavily on our close-knit cadres of people for new info, we’re just going to hear a lot of the same stuff. The more services we build based on the friend-follow model (especially ones that use existing networks for your friend-follow list) we cement ourselves more deeply into our own echo chambers. Echo chambers we know are terrible at challenging the status quo or providing real critique of ideas.
Solutions?
Would algorithms to find people more based on your preferences alone help?
Would throwing a dash of “random person to follow” work?
Personally, I’m looking at the broader list of people I follow, adding more RSS feeds, and even getting back into the habit of doing topic searches. I noticed that since trying Nambu I’m getting pickier about setting up focused following groups. My “News” group is cake, it’s the “Friends/Favourites group that I’ve found interesting.
I’m also playing with Yahoo’s new Sideline app for searching all of Twitter more easily maybe searching for topics within the larger Twitterverse will bring interesting tidbits my way.
Before you start labeling me as an anti-sharing person, I do like to share links and I do like to get links from people. What I think we need is a way to expand our nets to gather more info, while still filtering to some degree to keep out the dreck.
Okay, tag, your turn. Are you finding the new crop of info finding tools helping or just “meh”?
