In a recent post, I mentioned Facebook’s “Like” button for the web, and wrote about how using the information contributed through all those “Like” button presses is more complicated than just inferring that a “Like” means that someone likes the web page. I recently came across mention of an alleged “censorship” controversy related to Digg.com [see [...]
Posts under ‘social filtering’
an infrastructure of social information
In my last post, I wrote about my reaction to statistical arguments presented in a paper titled “Of Beauty, Sex and Power” by Andrew Gelman and David Weakliem (American Scientist, 97(4), 310-316). My second reaction to the paper has to do with the distortion of the effect size as it moved from journal paper to [...]
“participatory news” descriptives
The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently published a report, Understanding the Participatory News Consumer, that contains some descriptive statistics about the prevalence of what I’ve been calling social filtering or link sharing. The data for this report were collected between December 28, 2009 and January 19, 2010. N=2259 English-speaking adults 18 or older [...]
“getting the most out of twitter”
There was an interesting article the other day on nytimes.com titled “Getting the Most out of Twitter” which essentially argues that lurking (i.e., reading others’ posts and not posting yourself) is the way to go: Even the most prolific users say Twitter has become more useful as a way to tap in to the discussions [...]
adventures in social filtering
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about “social filtering”, or the practice of discovering information by paying attention to what others are paying attention to. Evidence of the attention of others is explicitly captured and aggregated by various social media applications like Digg, delicious, and Twitter / TweetMeme. This is hardly a new concept (see [...]
