June 5 at 11:18 pm
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Steven Kaye, Franklin Pettit, Mark Forman and 35 other people liked this
love that blog title - Adam Kazwell
Discovery, absolutely - Soulhuntre
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It's a 50/50 split for me. - Mike Fruchter
I want the signal in a feed, and I want the discovery in a field. Does that make sense? - Phil Glockner
@Adam - thanks. Sounds like a short order cook barking at you. - Hutch Carpenter
I'm probably more on the signalist side than I think, but I've been slowly migrating toward the discoverer camp as I get used to FriendFeed. I'm becoming more open to subscribing to people than I was before. - Hutch Carpenter
@J. Phil - maybe a little more context for "discovery in a field"? - Hutch Carpenter
I posted this on Hutch's blog: I'm a discoverer according to Hutch's table, but I don't necessarily want to wade thru tons of stuff to discover, at least not all the time. It would be nice to have a discovery filter, though I don't know how that would work. I like the new "best of" filters. But I also think we have to be careful to not equate relevance with popularity (if that's how the "best of" routines work). Popularity depends on who's voting and what they want. If you don't totally share their criteria, "best of" rankings might not help you much. Either that or choose your friends carefully :-) I've noticed there's no "best of" option in rooms, just in the general friends feed. It might be interesting to apply the new "best of" filtering to rooms in addition to the general friends feed. That way, you've at least chosen to share some specific subject with the members of the room. - Tom Landini
@Tom - you bring up an interesting point. People with large subscriber bases will exercise a large amount of control over each person's "best of" listing. There's a good argument to be made that people with large followings know what they're doing, and thus are good sources for determining "best of". But good content that misses the attention of those with large followings may suffer. - Hutch Carpenter
How bout have both, Hutch? Setup 2 FF accts. One where you are very narrow with your subscriptions limited only to feeds you are interested in, and also use it for primary communications, and then set up another where you just add like 1000+ of random interesting, or just whatever so that you can poll the spectrum of friends of the feed while still remaining more narrow than the "everyone" tab so you can actually catch content - - Anthony
Sorry Hutch. If I compare it to radio it suddenly becomes a very simple analogy: Signal is signal, and discovery is the entire AM/FM range of wavelengths.. all I need is a tool to find what I like, and the signal comes through. - Phil Glockner
just reposted Hutch's chart in this post - Why Online Noise is Good For You http://www.readwriteweb.com/ar... thanks for the useful visual Hutch! - Marshall Kirkpatrick
No no no lads and lasses! This is far too civilised a discussion for a bitchmeme. - Matt Harwood
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@Anthony - that's an interesting idea. I find myself not using the "best of" features a whole lot yet. But maybe setting up something with people that fall outside my current subscriptions would be interesting. I know Colin Walker was contemplating something like this as well. - Hutch Carpenter
@Hutch. Thanks. I had the idea one day, and found out FF makes it really easy to do that if you start subscribing to people at once when FF offers you the option at setup. I started just hitting subscribe on all the people with the most services added, then just started going for everyone that posts in English, lol. Also a good idea to set up a daily poller, or discussion generator account that people can watch for the best of one type of news...even tho FF offers you that option now... - Anthony
@Marshall - great post (and not just because my chart's in there). "Why Online "Noise" is Good For You" really does a good job outlining the "why" and joy of discovery. And you're speaking Robert Scoble's language! - Hutch Carpenter
@Matt - LOL! Someone's got to thrown down the absolute POV in here. - Hutch Carpenter
@J. Phil I like your radio analogy; we need tools to find what we like and it'll come to us. And we all want that. But it's the stuff I might not know I like until I'm exposed to it that I don't want to miss. - Tom Landini
del.icio.us recomends that I tag the blog post 'noise' - Ashton
If I hang out with the same folks all the time don't I just learn the same things over and over. I love friend of a friend - just wish it were easier to track bios - mcwflint
@Ashton - Ha! Really? Well, the recommendations come from whoever previously bookmarked it. Guess that's the category for it. - Hutch Carpenter
Hutch: re your Definition of Noise, I think that in addition to Signal, Discovery, and Noise you should also consider another factor - Too Much Signal. I think this could easily have the same effect on the user as Noise, but in this situation it's harder for a user to (a) realize this is happening, and (b) feel the need to do something about it in order to allow for more Discovery or exposure to other Signals of interest. - Aviv
@Aviv - that's a really good thought. When do you need to stand up and get away from the signal? Marshall Kirkpatrick's post http://www.readwriteweb.com/ar... has some perspective along those lines. - Hutch Carpenter
Hutch: great points in your post - I like the "Discovery" idea. Reminds me of the pie wedges: Things I know; Things I don't know; Things I don't know that I don't know. It's what bothers me about twitter -- so hard to catch the signal due to the noise. - Arthur Germain
I've saved this for my students. I think I am mostly a signalist (given these definitions) though I do have some discovery tendencies. Maybe we need a few more categories though ... for me, the issue is largely time. I don't have a lot of it. So I have to be strategic about my time online. I imagine I'm not alone in this criteria ;) - Mel "Friend of Marco" McB
Very cool Melanie. I'd be interested in other categories you (and your students) would come up with. - Hutch Carpenter
To some extent, takes me back to searching class in library school and precision (articles right on target, but you might be missing some) versus recall (getting a lot of articles, but too many to wade through/some might not be relevant). - Steven Kaye
I want both and sometimes what was noise in the begin morphs into signal via discovery. - Mark Forman
