What is my most valuable source of information?
Without any doubt, it is the delicious network feature, which lets me directly peep into the minds and discoveries of people I respect most, such as Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, McKenzie Wark and four dozen other people.
I’ve always wished that when I search, I could use some feature that would prioritize the items that those trusted people have already chosen.
So I totally symphatize with the feelings of Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion, in his analysis of the link between search and social networks:
“TRUSTED SEARCH TRUMPS UNTRUSTED SEARCH – Do you trust Google? I do as does most everyone. Do you trust what’s in Google? For me, that depends on what I am searching for and where it comes from. However, I do trust the 1,000 people I have added to my social network on Facebook. In fact, it’s why I limit my connections there to people I have either met or corresponded with. I value what they talk about and share there.
However, there’s a gaping hole in the Facebook experience. While I can search through my friends, find new friends and also groups, I can’t search the content my network creates. In addition, I can’t go a layer deeper to see what my friends’ friends are sharing (as I can on Friendfeed). Look for search to get embedded deeper into the social networking experience and create a split between trusted and untrusted search. “
I’ve recently done some experiments with relevance measures on the del.icio.us links. In general I found that the most interesting links I was getting for a measure that was strongly ‘elitarian’ – that one that was aimed at finding links that were posted uniquely by the people who are ‘near’ me. The links that were just the most popular I had already seen before.