Del.icio.us recommendations
I was thinking about reading lists and book recommendations, something like last.fm for books. Danah boyd wrote about this some time ago, how it wouldn’t work because you’d have to enter and maintain your profile manually and there’s no way to get a critical mass of people to do this.
Then it dawned on me that reading recommendations for the web would be pretty great as well. Of course it’d be a privacy nightmare to have all your browsing tracked and i doubt that many people would opt into something like this. But there are already lots of social bookmarking services with large amounts of data about what people like to read. Building a recommendation engine on top of something like that shouldn’t be too difficult.
When you add a bookmark on del.icio.us, you get a link to other people having bookmarked the same page (e.g. these are all people who bookmarked Eric Meyer’s emergent semantics presentation). You also get a list of common tags associated with the link.
Why not take this to the next level by finding similarities between people’s bookmark repositories? Something like “people who bookmarked these articles also bookmarked …”. This could also utilize tags associated with your links, looking for domain-specific similarities for recommendations. Ambiguous tagging (some people might use “coding”, others “programming” to tag the same article) makes these domains fuzzy, but for deriving recommendations from a large data set this shouldn’t pose a serious problem, we’re not talking matters of life and death if things go awry after all. It’s not all important how many similarities you miss as long as the similarities you find can be translated into relevant recommendations.
My own experience in this area is limited to del.icio.us, so i don’t know how other services like wists or spurl handle this. Do you know of any services or hacks that do this already? Any thoughts on why this would rock/suck?
Also: while i’m on the topic of del.icio.us, congrats to Joshua for getting funded and going full-time with del.icio.us.
Furl does exactly what you are asking for. See also, my “what I’m reading” (Furl bookmarks) RSS feed running on the bottom right hand side of my blog http://marshallk.blogspot.com
Social bookmarking plus RSS gets me so excited!
Comment by Marshall on Apr. 3rd, 2005, at 1:33 #
Hi,
there is a plugin for WordPress which adds a “Bookmark on del.icio.us” link to every post. Very useful!
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/21/delicious-bookmark-this-wordpress-plugin
Simon
Comment by Simon on Jul. 3rd, 2005, at 4:51 #