Vander Walhas an interesting post that's in reponse to another interesting post byMatt McAlister. Both seem to suggest popularity scales may be overrated.Many websites rank items via some sort of popularity. Digg.com uses voting mechanisms, everyone seems tohave some sort of "Tag Cloud" going, some measure clicks or email forwards orpage views. The thought is, the more popular an item on the web, the higherquality of that item.
But what about niche topics? Is coverage on these sites being "normalized", asMcAlister writes? On the face of it, popularity is relative to everything else.If I'm really into pet rocks, a really popular pet roc
k page isn't going tobe popular in relation to, say, Chinese kids singing like a boyband. If I'm searching out specific information within a somewhat obscuretopic, ranking things by popularity would only seem to make it harder tofind.
Vander Wal writes that popularity gets in the way of information seeking.Maybe, but it would seem that keywords intermixed with popularity would helpmake results more relevant naturally. After all, Google seems to handle mysearch for "petrocks" just fine, and they rank largely on popularity (in fact, thats kindatheir whole gig ;). On the other hand, digg.com might not provide the bestmeans for searching out a topic, but is it supposed to? Seems to me digg is asite that allows you to see the most popular information floating around rightthen and there. Sure, it's collecting meta-data, but, I mean, does digg evenhave categories or tags? It's category is "Technology", and it's tag is"popular." The rest of the meta-data is decent, but suffers from occasional lowquality (as opposed to tags, which would balance themselves out if properlyimplemented).
Still, there's plenty of information that I'm sure is thrown to the waysidebecause it's not showing up on the popularity radar. Is there a way to judgeit's content in a way other than popularity? Sure, subjectively by an editorialteam, but that's simply infeasible on a large scale as it would require expertsin a ton of different catagories. Wikipedia meets dmoz maybe? I donno.
Anyway, I think proper search mechanisms in tandem with popularity measurementis a solid approach. Either without the other doesn't quite cut it in terms ofinformation (re)location.
But what about niche topics? Is coverage on these sites being "normalized", asMcAlister writes? On the face of it, popularity is relative to everything else.If I'm really into pet rocks, a really popular pet roc
k page isn't going tobe popular in relation to, say, Chinese kids singing like a boyband. If I'm searching out specific information within a somewhat obscuretopic, ranking things by popularity would only seem to make it harder tofind.Vander Wal writes that popularity gets in the way of information seeking.Maybe, but it would seem that keywords intermixed with popularity would helpmake results more relevant naturally. After all, Google seems to handle mysearch for "petrocks" just fine, and they rank largely on popularity (in fact, thats kindatheir whole gig ;). On the other hand, digg.com might not provide the bestmeans for searching out a topic, but is it supposed to? Seems to me digg is asite that allows you to see the most popular information floating around rightthen and there. Sure, it's collecting meta-data, but, I mean, does digg evenhave categories or tags? It's category is "Technology", and it's tag is"popular." The rest of the meta-data is decent, but suffers from occasional lowquality (as opposed to tags, which would balance themselves out if properlyimplemented).
Still, there's plenty of information that I'm sure is thrown to the waysidebecause it's not showing up on the popularity radar. Is there a way to judgeit's content in a way other than popularity? Sure, subjectively by an editorialteam, but that's simply infeasible on a large scale as it would require expertsin a ton of different catagories. Wikipedia meets dmoz maybe? I donno.
Anyway, I think proper search mechanisms in tandem with popularity measurementis a solid approach. Either without the other doesn't quite cut it in terms ofinformation (re)location.
