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In recent weeks I've been considering the difference between the implicit and the explicit -- in how we interact with information and and exchange attention online. I'm curious how meaning and pattern emerges from our actions, experiences, and designs. I credit last month's Defrag conference in Denver, and David Weinberger's thoughtful opening keynote with inspiring this line ot thought.

So, I was interested to see this topic come up a few days ago on a blog post conversation between two very smart people I work with, Bradley Horowitz and Gordon Luk.

Here are some tasty bits that caught my attention, but read the whole thread for your own illumination:

GetLuky: My personal viewpoint is a bit more nuanced. I believe that one day, web platforms will also be able to efficiently cluster their users based upon interests or tastes, similar to how Flickr can cluster tags to disambiguate meaning. These clusters will probably be designed not around user surveys or self-reported demographics, but instead will most likely be extracted through efficient methods of recording implicit participation information over the long term. There may well be a cluster (which I would belong to!) of folks that do enjoy Kung Fu monkeys, and there is almost definitely a cluster that find it degrading and offensive. The difference here between traditional preference filtering and clustered audiences is similar - one requires a great deal of potentially inaccurate user feedback about their preferences, whereas the latter acts more on implicit activity, and is thus more likely to produce the desired effects.

Bradley Horowitz: But in a world where “anyone can say anything to everyone at once”, our most precious commodity becomes attention.

I think my thesis is simply that in democratizing the creation of content, we’ve created a high-class problem… There’s too much “on”… 500 channels, maybe. 500M channels? Never. The flip side of this wonderful revolution in publishing, destroying the hierarchical pyramid of participation, is that we (our industry) have a burden to provide people the means of actually getting to the content they want to see… (Perhaps sometimes, even before they know they want to see it.) This ought to keep us busy for a lifetime or so…

GetLuky...In the short term, I think we’ll see some of these broad brush groupings of Internet users, and in the long term, perhaps we’ll get closer to the ideal of completely personalized information.

It does raise some interesting issues about all of our attention potentially getting stuck in ideological mindsets by design, if we don’t attain escape velocity from efficient subdivision of our population into lowest-common-denominator markets. But that’s a bit outside of the scope of this discussion.

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