I just followed the trail from John Battelle’s note about Yahoo’s launch of Mindset to Greg Linden’s post comparing it to Google Personalized Search and MSN Search, then to Greg’s company Findory.com and his history at Amazon helping develop recommendations and personalization features there.
Personalization of search results, news and blog stories, product recommendations, or anything […]
Clay Shirky posted a great essay on social tagging vs. expert categorization. Tagging is a particularly interesting example of “stuff about stuff” being valuable, because it includes two extra ingredients: social network effects and the ability to address the “long tail” of both content and meaning.
In a system like del.icio.us where each person can […]
I recently attended a Rails meetup here in SF with David Hansson and some other folks in town for the AJAX Summit. I wanted to try to get more of a feel for Rails, AJAX, and the current Web 2.0 mentality (and look for potential hires). I took away two lessons: (1) these technologies really […]
I’ve been trying to wrap a clear definition around an interesting theme that seems to be emerging in the world of software and the Internet: that “stuff” is increasingly less central to economic activity than “stuff about stuff.”
For example: advertising is more economically central than the content that it supports; in the open source […]