Dylan Hunter

Was an excellent post on O’Reilly Radar by Nat Torkington reminding us in the course of designing social suggestion-based sites / software to not forget one of the most critical reasons for in the first place - serendipity / new discovery. Sometimes this is best accomplished by “more like this,”‘es and/or “people who viewed this purchased..” kinds of things, (i.e. narrowing / refinement goal-oriented) and sometimes best accomplished by purposely broadening / adjusting the scope to introduce some new variance and seeing where things progress from there.

Many years ago there was a little search startup called Direct Hit here in MA, (who earned $500M on a cheaper version of what I wanted to do, but that’s another story) who really was the first entity to hang their hat on social suggestion-based search results, knowing full well that most folks only look at results 1-3, and almost no one beyond 10, so that those results that it initially presented as 1-3 would almost always tend to stay there, whether they were the best results or not - i.e. for anyone who’s ever used Excel, an infinite circular error.

As we all took this kind of click-through analysis / adjustment functions in to become one of the ranking criteria we used, (and / or at least used to internally evaluate how good a job we were doing in delivering relevant results - with all of the appropriate mechanisms for negating bounce - i.e. clicking through on a link, saying “this isn’t what I wanted” and hopping back to the search page, etc) the import of regularly introducing different results into the mix to make sure we were actually doing a much better job of delighting folks became more and more clear then, and still holds true today.

But enough of me babbling, Nat does a superb job of describing, so go read it from him!

For anyone who’s not keeping a close eye on the O’Reilly Radar, (and if you’re not, you should be! ) looks like they’re looking for speakers for their Web 2.0 Expo in April ‘07. Given the tracks suggested, looks like they’ll be talking about just about everything, so am sure it’ll be an excellent conference for both speakers and attendees!

Tracks:
- Strategy & Business Models
- Marketing & Community
- Design & UI
- Web 2.0 Fundamentals
- Web 2.0 Services & Platforms
- Workshops

More here.

Now here’s hoping that the registration costs will be something we normal humans can afford, (am sure an Un-conference it is not! )

After seeing this post from Tim O’Reilly, decided to order the two books suggested for myself. Currently reading Juicing the Orange, and one of the things they point to in the book is this mental beatdown of 127 questions that they use to diagnose a client’s situation to figure out what to do for creative campaigns with them.

Obviously won’t be able to, and don’t need to answer / use all in the normal course, (we all have actual progress to make, Man! ) and definitely seems to be oriented toward much more mature companies, but still looks to be a good source for thinking about the kinds of things that are, or will be, important when launching / relaunching your own company, product, etc.

A nice primer from Tim O’Reilly on what Web 2.0 is, (at least in concept). Honestly, my favorite part is their "meme map":