[Air-l] maybe a silly question.. but

[Jonathan Cornwell]

IMHO, all of the aforementioned represent social navigation systems given at
least one research team's definition:

"The term Social Navigation captures every-day behaviour used to find
information, people, and places - namely through watching, following, and
talking to people."
[Social navigation of food recipes;
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365024.365130]

The recommender features so common to Amazon, et al, represent the early,
relatively primitive first step. Consumer-side "fad waves" (if I may be
allowed to offer an ad hoc term) seen in myspace and similar environment
represent another, more complex development but are not unlike word-of-mouth
phenomenon in realspace. Marketers, however, are busily working on
manipulating these fad waves, either through simple information gathering to
guide traditional marketing methods [e.g. Deriving marketing intelligence
from online discussion;
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1081870.1081919#abstract] or by more
direct attempts at so-called viral marketing.

"Taste Fabrics and the Beauty of Homogeneity" by Hugo Liu, Glorianna
Davenport, and Pattie Maes introduced me to the wonderful (IMHO) phrase
"taste fabric". The first part of the abstract reads:

"The quintessence of an individual's taste is her aesthetic sensibility and
system of preferences. Online social network profiles, such as those
appearing on Friendster and MySpace, are a veritable "show and tell" for
taste-allowing individuals to perform acts of taste by declaring their
favorite books, what music they love, and what their passions are. By mining
these social network profiles en masse and analyzing how each taste instance
(e.g. a book, an author, a band, a cuisine, etc.) is meaningfully correlated
with every other, an underlying fabric of taste common across individuals
can be inferred." [Taste fabric and the Beauty...]

To me, all of these phenomenon center on the underlying processes of
consensus building/social control that are the bread-and-butter of our
social lives in realspace and projected into Internet space. I suspect,
however, that there are other, Internet-only dimensions to all of this that
I'm missing... it's too easy to get fascinated/centrated on looking for
realspace analogs on the Internet.

Sorry for the ramble...

Jonathan Cornwell

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Nancy Baym
Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2006 7:29 PM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-l] maybe a silly question.. but

>A more complex question are these sites social navigation systems or 
>do they have that potential? Are these better than the simple 
>"recommend a book" or "what others have bought" systems like at 
>Amazon.com

I'd say they have that potential. Thinking about my own experience 
with last.fm, it offers me recommendations based on algorithmic 
analysis not unlike "what others have bought" (in this case "what 
others have listened to"), but I often prefer the recommendations 
that were sent person-to-person because an individual looked at my 
taste and thought I'd like a particular song or artist.


>If a music group can become a hit on myspace does this mean social 
>navigation was how they did it?

No. But it probably didn't hurt. I find it interesting how music 
groups who become hits on MySpace often seek to distant themselves 
from MySpace ("it was the touring that did it!") as if to make more 
'credible' stakes to their fame.

Nancy
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