Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Collab filtering at alexlit.com

Author:Dori Smith
Posted:11/10/1999; 4:07:58 PM
Topic:Collab filtering at my.userland.com?
Msg #:12971 (In response to 12941)
Prev/Next:12970 / 12972

You can compare our system to NetPerception's implementation of an active CF at Amazon.com and the Firefly system at barnesandnoble.com, and I think you'll see how the botched user interfaces on the other two systems has a huge effect on the utility. (Note, the "people who bought this bought that" thing at amazon is NOT the active CF system.)

I've had good luck with the Amazon system myself, although I've spent a lot of hours training it. It's found a number of books for me that I've bought, based solely on Amazon's recommendation & then looking at their online reviews.

For example, the *average* number of ratings entered by a visitor at our site is about 200. Because it's so easy and fun. We're approaching two million ratings total, and those are direct patron opinions, feedback from inside their heads. We still don't have sufficient diversity of users to be useful to everybody; SF readers are much more likely to get "psychic" level predictions than Western fans. Nevertheless, even when the system's only somewhat helpful, it's often a valuable adjunct to other sources of advice, and the more people use it, the better it gets.

Do you have some way of telling how many *active* users you have?

For instance, I checked AlexLit out based on Anita's recommendation a couple of days ago. I spent the time to give my ratings, and then looked at what was returned to me. One of the books it recommended was "Snow Crash". Good book, says I, and I tried to figure out how to tell the system that I thought it was great but didn't want it see it as a recommendation again.

So far as I could tell, there wasn't any way. This is either

  • A limitation of the system
  • A UI that didn't make it clear how to do this
  • A problem where my browser wasn't refreshing the page properly

    But no matter the cause, I found AlexLit to be frustrating and not useful to me because of this. I won't be back, which makes me wonder if you have some way of knowing how many of those patrons are active.



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