Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Brad Feld summarizes much of the ongoing discussion about user-generated content into three points, in a recent post. Here’s a recap, with some additions:

1. Trust
2. Attention
3. Relevance
4. Authority (added in a reader comment)
5. Intent (added by me)

These are recurring themes for the current generation of collaborative, intent-capturing, tagged, social-network-based, “web 2.0″ applications.

It’s interesting to look at the difference between Trust and Authority. As an example, Wikipedia is clearly not “Authoritative” on any subject, yet people ascribe “Trust” to the content there. Topics that are strongly subjective or open to interpretation can sometimes be organized based on Trust more easily than through Authority. The “disputed content” mechanism on Wikipedia allows for a little of this, but part of the confusion comes from the underlying model of an encyclopedia, which is generally intended to be authoritative.

Attention is a big deal because communications and information technology is providing easier access to more and more information content, but there are still only 24 hours in a day, and human cognition isn’t increasing exponentially. This creates a scarcity of attention, and makes the ability for a 3rd party to steer a viewer’s attention more valuable over time. New tools and interaction models can help allocate attention (cell phone conversations while driving, mobile messaging while in meetings, multiple windows and displays on the desktop), but these don’t scale very far.

One of the reader comments also suggests Priorities as a fifth concept, although I think this might really be captured by Relevance. Time and Place are also important, but I would put them with Relevance as well.

I’m adding “Intent” to my augmented list. One of the challenges with keyword-driven search is trying to guess what the user is trying to ask. Social software applications tend to increase relevance and trust of information shared among users, and implicitly create alignment of intent among the participants. If you have better information about what the user is trying to accomplish, search queries and other interactions become much more effective, which is one of the reasons AdSense works so well.

At the end of his post, Brad was fishing around for acronyms using three letters - “TAR”. With my list of five items, it’s no longer a TLA, but “TIARA” or “TARIA” might work.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2005 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Search Engines, Blogging, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.