Information Maven: Greg Meyer

I found a very interesting if somewhat geeky piece on social bookmarking today. D-Lib (no, not a rapper but a digital library project) is an entirely online magazine supported by our friends at DARPA. Incidentally, they also published a case study of Conotea, a scientific tool for this purpose.

So why is DARPA interested in “social bookmarking”? The web is full of junk data (our email boxes confirm this, as well as many of the postings on blogs), and we need a way to create constellations of meaningful unstructured data. One way to do this is collaborative filtering, the most famous example of which at one time was Amazon.com. But who needs more recommendations for “people who liked Michael Jackson also liked the Dukes of Hazzard DVD”?

What I’d like to see is a way to take the random stuff I like to find and find the interest groups of other folks interested in those same things. Social bookmarking is one example of how to make this happen, through photos or simply through links. I’m not sure how this concept is better than that of a community blog or even an automagically-generated news page.

I think the answer for this sort of information overload must be a combination between the news that’s out there (a lot) and the kind of news you want to see, with the added ability to have trusted friends or news sources push their news items higher in your virtual queue. Please share if you’d like to noodle about this idea. I’d like to figure out a way to take the flexibility of RSS and the power of a google news and make it relevant for the kinds of stuff I really want to know.