I stumbled upon this site about apml a few weeks ago from a post on the Sig-IA mailing list.

When i saw this diagram

I immediately began thinking about how a browse could be created through these interest clouds. If we took the interest clouds and mapped the information to a critical mass of users you could get a collaborative filter that would allow users to browse interest based on their own. If we want to add reputation we could remove anonymity as well (of course this would be voluntary). In essence it would be a creation of Interest networks from ambient attention data. Passive behaviour = a very cool user driven browse.

So it’s been a few weeks since Netscape released its ‘Digg’ style news portal. Verdict? Very interesting. I think what we’re seeing is that Digg is effective because it caters to a niche market. When we bring the same innovation to a mainstream level we get a front page that lists top headlines such as:

• Kitten survives trip through wood chipper
• Brandy to replace Star Jones on The View?
• Poll: Overweight America does read labels
• List of July TV premiere dates
• Guide to Fantasy Football Defensive Players
• Paris Hilton Wants to Reproduce
• Keith Richards to be in ‘Pirates’ movie
• The Sopranos Cast Is All Signed, Clearing Path to Eight Episode End Run

Of course I’m being selective in showing you titles but the amount of Entertainment news dominates at least 50% of the top headlines on Netscape. Kind of reinforces the reasons newspapers adopted a top down approach to begin with. Of course it’s still early and Netscape news may turn into something unexpectedly good. But as of now it’s pretty much what I expected: an Entertainment news portal. I’m curious if Netscape feels their initiative is successful…

It’s interesting when the big boys start seeking parody with the startups. A lot of sites have embraced Digg’s style of community selected news. Cnet being one of the largest who have included “digg this” buttons on all of their stories. This is true of del.icio.us’ social bookmarking as well.

Now Netscape is trying to get in on the action allowing their users to populate their top news stories. What does this all mean? I like to relate it to the big grid – small grid dilemma. The big grid (accessible, mainstream whatever you want to call it) likes to mine the small grid for gems that they can take to recreate and make accessible. We’re seeing this a lot now in Movie and Music. Where a few years ago nobody cared about Broken Social Scene or the Decemberists and now they have a strong mainstream following. The same can be said about films like Rushmore and Magnolia vs Napoleon Dynamite and Crash.

I’d like to be optimistic and think that this generally elevates the level of the medium. There is level of authenticity which needs to be apparent for those in the small grid to accept big grid items who have adapted their craft. So what does this all mean for Web 2.0? I would hope all this IS elevating the web. Social software seems to be a very prevalent and reoccurring theme, allowing users to link to each other in various passive and active ways. These web toys are slowly moving out of the alpha geek circles and absorbing other demographics. This allows for new and interesting opportunities in other movements such as continuous computing. When the proficency for tools like Digg and Del.icio.us goes up so do the opportunities for creating another generation of tools.

The only question is if we are actually laying the correct foundation for innovation on the Web. Although the beautiful part is that the web is very much an accelerated society. Memes live and die in a matter of days. Experimenting and the web go hand and hand and as we begin to have other pieces of hardware singing the same tune a whole new world of opportunities will emerge.

This fun app lets you draw on Google maps. Simple concept, but marry it with some social software and you may very well get yourself something very interesting!

Pandora definitely isn’t as fun as it use to be BUT a new toy they recently added is backstage. Very similar to AMG but you get to see all the metadata that pandora has applied to each individual song.

I’ve been loosely following Flock since Garson Kwan brought it to my attention over a year ago. Although I wasn’t really sure or convinced of what added value this browser would bring. After reading Wade Roush’s article which coined it “The New Superstar Browser” I thought I’d give it a spin.

Since it is a gecko based browser there are a lot of functionally similar elements to Firefox. The set up takes about 5 minutes of your time but I’m not really sure it’s worth it. If you have a blog you can synchronize your account so you can blog about newsworthy pieces on the spot! Unfortunately for me I couldn’t even sync my account providing all the information it asked for. I simply keep receiving an error message.

You can also upload your Flickr or Photobucket pictures. If you’re a heavy user of Flickr/Photobucket it’s a useful app to have. But the feature I was most looking for was a seemless RSS reader. Flock integrates a reader into the browser but the news reader gives precedence to the browser. If you select a news item it opens it into a full browser window and closes the news reader module. This eliminates the ability to browse titles quickly (the beauty of RSS!).

Flock reminds me of those technologist who thought it would be smart to make a cellphone, tv, mp3 player, camera, video camera, pda device all in one with minimal consideration of how the actual interaction would take place. To be fair though, I only really looked at Flock for 30 min so my assessment is probably a bit premature. I’m sure there is a lot of great functionality I’ve yet to discover with Flock and as conventions in social software occur Flock may be well positioned.

In time Flock may convince me otherwise but for now I’m flocking back to Firefox and my Feedreader.

Lately I’ve been playing with a neat product called Trendio. You get $10,000 in play money and purchase words for your portfolio. You are banking that the words you purchase will be on more headlines among the top news agencies. If the word is perpetuated more your stock increases. It’s interesting to see how much words such as Bush, Oil, Gas, Iraq are really ingrained in our current media.

Another fun tool I’ve come across are Google Trends. No play money involved but you can type in words and see a how many people have been searching for it over a given timeline. It also shows you what countries people are searching from and allows you to compare upon various words. Very interesting to see things such as technology and design being more heavily searched upon in India than the States.