Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Collab filtering at my.userland.com?
Author: Rich Tatum Posted: 11/8/1999; 8:06:51 AM Topic: Collab filtering at my.userland.com? Msg #: 12809 (In response to 12804) Prev/Next: 12808 / 12810
The A/G Online website used to employ this kind of collaborative filtering on its website (http://www.ag.org/). In the navigation bar at the right was a button titled "related pages" that, when clicked, expanded to show a list of pages readers had viewed immediately before and after viewing the current page. The list was ranked by frequency of incidence (the more connections between any two pages increased their likelihood to float to the top of the list).(We geeks thought it great. But the executives didn't understand it, so it got scrapped, along with the random page generator. [PS, I used to webmaster for this site.])
Anyhow, when users are faced with a glut of information, they need "significance indicators" to help them navigate the sea of data. The source of the "significance indication" could be other users (as in Amazon.com, Profusion.com, etc.), a select group of editors (as in About.com), semantic relationships between key words (as weakly implemented in the results rankings of some search engines), or even their own behavior (as I've seen suggested on some sites, but I haven't seen implemented--if anyone knows of one, please tell!).
Just my $0.02-worth!
Regards,
Rich. rtatum@mail.orion.org
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:23 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.