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@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Nancy Baym Sent: Sunday, August 27, 2006 7:29 PM To: air-l@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 _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/