Content on content

Robin Good: Brett Sandusky attacks the "discovery" topic with simple, straight logic, analyzing what all the new startups and the new tech fanatics seem to systematically look over.

How can you help me discover new stuff, if you are intentionally limiting your exploratory gathering to algorithms and to, however varied, network of contacts?

She writes: "The discoverability problem in books is a challenge. It’s about connecting users to new and interesting titles, that they wouldn’t normally have seen. This last part bears repeating: …that they wouldn’t normally have seen.

Ultimately, the problem with all these discoverability sites is this: their algorithms (if they are even using an algorithm) are based on aggregate data in a one size fits all model.

The more people who read something, the more often it shows up in your recommendations. But, that’s not discoverability. That’s the NYT bestseller list. That’s Nielsen Bookscan telling you the top sales of the week.

Just because most of my friends are reading bestsellers (because, duh, whose aren’t? In fact, that seems to just reinforce the concept of the term “bestseller”) does that mean I should only be shown these titles?

Obviously, the answer is no. But, how do we get there?"

The answer is that we need a) more expert and qualified human intervention to unearth and pick new stuff, and b) behavioral data coupled with data collected on customer preference to allows us to connect those selected materials to the users in the system.

Rightful. Timely. 8/10

Find out: http://www.brettsandusky.com/2012/10/05/discover-me/

(Image credit: Josephine Wall - Discovery)

When someone needs to find information, the first thing they usually do is search the web by typing in the name of a service, product and/or brand. If you are a brand or an owner of a brand that has a presence on the web, it's good news for you. But lately there have been some concerns with Google's Autocomplete or Google suggest function.

Excerpted from article on TechCrunch:

"Facebook has just begun testing “Collections” — a new feature it says is “unrelated” to Pinterest but could be a competitor. It allows retailers to add “Want” or “Collect” buttons to news feed posts about products. These save and share products to a “Wishlist” on user profiles that host a “Buy” button that can be clicked through to make purchases offsite.

Seven retail partners can now share Collections posts to their fans.

Collections could help retailers score viral click-throughs to their product pages by making things their fans are interested in more discoverable to friends. Facebook isn’t earning affiliate fees on Collections click throughs, but it could get brands to buy ads to get more fans.

The “Want” button adds a product to a Timeline section called “Wishlist” visible to friends of friends, the “Collect” button saves to to a Collection called “Products” that’s visible to friends only, and a special version of the “Like” button will also add to “Products” but that’s visible to friends of friends.

The “Want” button adds a product to a Timeline section called “Wishlist” visible to friends of friends, the “Collect” button saves to to a Collection called “Products” that’s visible to friends only, and a special version of the “Like” button will also add to “Products” but that’s visible to friends of friends..."

Read full article here:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/08/facebook-collections/

Not sure if I agree with everything but Anil makes an interesting case for streams vs pages. He also makes a point when he says that blog feeds are limited because "you can't choose to follow just the music-related posts on my blog, ignoring the ones about technology."

That's another reason why don't need just streams to go faster, we also need to have them personalized according to our interests in a topic-centric model.

Deanna Dahlsad designed this simple decision-tree to help differentiate between different Content Curation platforms and which one you should use as a business user.

I found this interesting as it's one of the first ones I see that made this obvious and simple differentiation between the different platforms out there. I'm not sure I would describe Scoop.it as article-based (we obviously have large pictures, infographics, videos or SlideShare presentations that are not articles) but I can see where she's coming from and her intention: if the content you curate is not 100% image, "image-based eye-candy" is not enough.  

Success and complacency often go hand in hand, and unless business owners and managers make a conscious effort to look into the future, their existing business model may eventually put them out of business.

In the business world, there are many examples of businesses that saw the writing on the wall, but failed to take the required action before it was too late for them to reinvent themselves.

This excellent article, identifies several of these businesses, and it offers two key suggestions for placing your business ahead of the business model curve.

Robin Good: The excellent and insightful Maria Popova has really got me fascinated with this piece she wrote back in June of this year. Entitled "How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read", this writing, inspired by a book by the same name, is good food for thought as it stretches ordinary assumptions about what culture and book readings is in the end all about.

As curation is an effort in meaning creation and discovery, exploring different ways to look at how we build our picture of reality and what role books play into this process is, from my personal viewpoint, a very valuable effort.

In the end, you may likely disagree with the overall logic but personally, I have found this mental stretching exercise quite valuable and I am thankful to both Maria and the author for making it possible for me to poke with it: "The paradox of reading is that the path toward ourselves passes through books, but that this must remain a passage..."

The challenging questions being posed is: "Must we read those from cover to cover in order to be complete, cultured individuals?" and some interesting answers come from the book author himself,  University of Paris literature professor Pierre Bayard, who offers "a compelling meditation on this taboo subject that makes a case for reading not as a categorical dichotomy but as a spectrum of engaging with literature in various ways, along different dimensions".

Prof Bayard writes: "As cultivated people know (and, to their misfortune, uncultivated people do not), culture is above all a matter of orientation. Being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others."

Maria Popova further synthesizes his thought by writing: "Literature becomes not a container of absolute knowledge but a compass for orienteering ourselves to and in the world and its different contexts, books become not isolated objects but a system of relational understanding...".

Insightful. Thoughful. 8/10

Full article: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/15/how-to-talk-about-books-you-havent-read/

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