Nick asks about RSS and Attention
by crankygeek ~ June 27th, 2005. Filed under: Politically Motivated, Software.What’s the point of an API and data storage and retrieval system if I can’t get to the data? That architecture stuff is over my head, but I can’t believe the system wouldn’t expose the information. Do I want to be able to use it and repurpose it, heck ya.
But something Nick doesn’t touch on is that I’d also like the ability to turn the suggestion completely off.
I like the fact that, currently, every Google search I make starts fresh. There is no (to the best of my understanding) existing bias that will pre-refine my search for me. Just because I was searching for Barney junk for my niece last week doesn’t mean that I want info about purple dinosaurs this week.
It’s funny that Nick cites Amazon as an example of your attention data at work for you because I’ve yet to get a useful suggestion from that site. I once ordered a textbook for my wife for one of her business classes. Now whenever I login, I get suggestions related to college texts and business books. I don’t want it, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make it quit using that as suggestion criteria. I view everything on the Amazon homepage as advertising and basically ignore it.
So, yeah, let me make use of my attention data, but don’t forget to give me the option to decide when it’s used on my behalf.
June 27th, 2005 at 9:53 am
Excellent point, Jack, and one I should’ve brought up. Beyond not wanting to share certain pieces of information with the service, I might want to exclude items that I don’t want to be used for recommendations. For example, I’ve bought books for friends and family on Amazon.com that shouldn’t be used to recommend other books to me.
June 28th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
“every Google search I make starts fresh. There is no (to the best of my understanding) existing bias that will pre-refine my search for me.”
In fact, they just started doing this. It’s called Personalized Search.
http://www.google.com/psearch/help.html
June 28th, 2005 at 5:41 pm
At least it appears to be off by default. :)
July 5th, 2005 at 8:11 am
I think a personalized search would certainly be useful as I do seem to ‘google’ the same topics on a frequent basis. However, this would only be useful if links that I clicked on that turned out not to be useful, were later not returned or somehow moved to the bottom of future query results.