Saturday, March 29, 2008

Social Filtering versus Social Routing

And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

from: NYT


Filtering is passive - the use of that particular metaphor shows that the old way of thinking is still there. But the text clearly shows that what the 'friends and online connections' do is an active participation in disseminating the news - it is in fact 'routing' of the information.
My old time 'social routing' metaphor seems more adequate here. But my original vision for it was something even more - it was about building software directly aimed at augmenting the social activity of passing the news. It was about sharing, in a true P2P way, of your information filters and sources and helping others to use them efficiently. It was about personal aggregating and filtering nodes connected to each other outputs that would help us, but not replace us, in directing the news into the outputs. Like interconnected but autonomous personal Diggs.

3 comments:

TunaSandwich said...

I've been using the term "social routing" for year. :)

I even have it as a category on a blog I recently started.

Darcy

Anonymous said...

My blog is generalsocial by the way.

I'm making a specific article on social routing at the moment. You're welcome to look it over if you want. Just email if interested.

Anonymous said...

I just added an article about routing. I'd be interesting in any thoughts you have about it.

My email is darcy at siteware.com and the article is a generalsocial.

Darcy