A Case for Social Discrimination

About a year ago I created my very own store on Amazon. I had a bunch of books I’d never gotten around to reading and just wanted to get rid of them. As each order would come in I would diligently package my books and drop them in the mail. Then I would notify the recipient that their book had been shipped—all on the very day I would receive the order. My customer service was spectacular! The rave reviews started rolling in. A PERFECT 5 STAR RATING! YES! And then it happened. But how could this be? My 5 star rating all of a sudden dropped down to a 4.2? Somebody gave me a 1-star rating and said that they would never order from me again. But why? I mean, I did everything perfectly. I followed up on the orders, made sure they were addressed properly. All deliveries were made in record time. After a thorough investigation, I discovered that the person who gave me a 1-star rating had been maliciously slamming sellers all over Amazon, for no apparent reason. I was just his next victim. I contacted Amazon and requested that the rating be removed due to this person’s pattern of destructive behavior. They told me that there was no way to remove a rating, and that this unfortunately was how the system worked.

In the United States, it’s written right into our Declaration of Independence– “All men are created equal.” I believe in equality for all people, and the American way of life. But beyond the basis of equality, everyone has a particular standing in their respective communities. Everyone has varying degrees of impact or ‘weight’. In your local ‘real-world’ community, if you are a citizen, if you are highly active, if you are popular, if you’re connected, if you are charitable, if you are highly involved and a major contributor, if your contributions are held in high regard– you have impact—you have ‘weight’—your community most likely looks up to you. And if you are an introvert, if aren’t known in your community, if you aren’t actively involved, if you’re not connected, or if your contributions are looked down upon– your voice is virtually unheard and you are most likely not held in high regard. This is how it works in the ‘real world’ right? So why is it in cyberspace we allow inactive citizens, non-citizens (non-members, illegal immigrants?) and even rogues to impact the value of our contributions and reputations? Why is it we give inactive citizens and rogues equal footing with hard-working diligent citizens? To ratings systems we’re all just citizen ‘X’. Regardless of our standing in the community, our impact when rating things is equal. We may be very popular and we may be recognized by our constituents within our respective communities, but with today’s rating systems that unfortunately does not transcend into any kind of power or leverage when rating things. These aren’t popular voting systems; they’re ‘rating’ systems. Shouldn’t these super-citizens be rewarded with some kind of super-delegate status? I mean, after all, didn’t they earn that privilege?

I’ve been a long-time proponent of more intelligent, more relevant online communities. One of my biggest areas of ‘rant’ is in the area of ratings. I want ratings to have more value and I want them to be self-policing. To create value within a system of ratings, a system of inequality must be developed. If a person is highly active in their online community, if they are held in high regard because they contribute often, if they’re connected, and the respective value of their contributions is high, the impact of their voice should be greater—the impact of what they rate should be greater. And the converse– if a person is a schmuck, if they rarely (if ever) contribute, and if the value of their contributions is low, their voice should be little-to-none—and the impact of what they rate should be lower. Anyone new to the system still gets to vote, and they’re voice is heard, they’re just in the middle somewhere. This type of system would reward those who are hard-working and diligent and it would provide incentive for members in a community to be actively involved and to provide more and better contributions—and the ratings and reviews would be far more valuable to the viewing audience. A system like this would also prevent, or at least diminish the impact of those whose only goal is to be destructive. We’ve seen a few folks in the general market playing with reputation scores. Naymz and Rapleaf are two such companies. Admittedly I haven’t explored just how an entire company could be formed around this, and how it might be monetized, but I do see reputation scoring as a feature of any site that has membership and/or community. Besides, we’re all used to this type of a system. If you want to have more credit, be more active and diligent. If you want to have a louder voice and more impact, do good stuff more often. To quote from Orwell’s classic Animal Farm, “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”

State of the Information Economy: “We’re Drowning”

In January 2008 the ISC Internet Domain Survey reported the number of hosts on the Internet at 541,677,360. As of March 2008 Internet World Stats counted over 1.4 billion Internet users globally. As of May 2007 it was estimated that the web consisted of over 19.2 billion documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files. In the 2007 article “The Fight Against Infoglut” Mary Hayes Weier states “ The numbers are barely comprehensible. The amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated last year was equal to 161 billion Gbytes, according to a recent IDC report, roughly equivalent to the contents of 12 stacks of books extending from the Earth to the sun. In 2010, IDC estimates, the info flow will reach 988 billion Gbytes… this year, for the first time, the amount of digital information generated will surpass the storage capacity available.”

The Web is so enormous that we can only find things by using powerful search tools like Google. But with each passing year it’s becoming obvious that even Google is losing the keyword-relevance search battle. Based on the enormous number of results returned, we barely get past the first two pages of results. What value lies in the remaining pages of Google search results that we don’t have the time or patience to weed through?

In the enterprise, and now in our private lives we routinely see hundreds of daily email messages. Mesmo, an email consultancy, determined that three out of every four employees spend at least half of their day sifting through email messages and a quarter spend more than four hours per day. Consider these stats and projections from the Radicati Group cited in a Wall Street Journal article of 11/27/07:

• Over the next four years the number of e-mail users worldwide will approach two billion people
• The average number of corporate emails sent and received per person, per day in 2008 is estimated to be 156. By the year 2011 that number will be 228
• By the year 2009 it is estimated that over 41% of the average workday will be spent managing email

To compound this problem it is estimated that the average percentage of spam in mail traffic amounted to 86.4% in January 2008. On New Year’s Day 2008 it was estimated that spam levels reached 97.4% for that day. It’s been estimated that spam in 2007 reached an astounding cost of over $197 billion in lost productivity. Despite our futile attempts to eliminate or even reduce spam, it keeps rolling forward, hammering our systems with spyware, viruses, and scams.

Web 2.0 only contributed to yet another massive explosion of information consisting of social media—video, wikis, forums, reviews, postings, micro-blogs, livecasting, podcasts, blogs, vlogs, social network postings, etc. etc. etc. In March 2007 Technorati was tracking over 74 million blogs and social network postings. Scarier yet, estimates show that the blogosphere has been doubling every six months.

As for Social Networks last estimates put global social networking subscriber growth rates at 47% year-over-year, expected to reach saturation somewhere around the year 2012. MySpace today has over 55 million subscribers, over 100 Billion rows of data with 14 Billion comments, 20 Billion mails, 50 Million mails per day, 10 Billion friend relationships, 1.5 Billion images (8 Million images uploaded each day), and 60,000 new videos uploaded daily– mostly contributed by a mere 1% of the subscribers. According to the 90-9-1 rule only about 1% of users in any given community actually contribute to any significant degree. Imagine what would happen if that number doubled to a whopping 2%.

The overload of cheap information threatens our ability to function in cyberspace. We’re generating information far faster than our individual capacity to process it. The term infoglut doesn’t give it justice… it’s more like an information tsunami. We spend an inordinate amount of time searching, sorting, and filtering just to find those valuable nuggets of information. At times it feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. When overwhelmed, we simply start ignoring information and search results. It’s the best we can do with our current technology. While the youth are still enamored by the faddish fun-and-game world of social networking, the ever-growing technically savvy professional herd is continuously gravitating toward anything that saves time… anything that provides real, bottom-line value. Time is an individual’s most valuable asset. We have very little time and once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. No one on their deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I spent more time at work.’

Directional Syndication is a concept I conceived and began working on in 2002– and continue to work on to this very day. Directional Syndication describes a collective networked intelligence concept that continuously delivers, high-value, relevant information in a timely fashion, to its intended individual recipient(s). A Personal Relevance Agent (PR Agent), owned and controlled by the recipient learns about the recipient through their profile as well as their behavior. It picks up on things they read, sites they visit, things they belong to, people they are connected to and people they interact with, messages they write and messages they receive, as well as ratings and their personal contributions. Directional Syndication is based on the premise “that which is not relevant, is a waste of time.” Too many people, too much information, not enough time, and things change, continuously. With Directional Syndication what you end up with is in essence a massive distributed intelligent content router. With Directional Syndication, you don’t find information, information finds you.

Whether it’s Directional Syndication or some other new-fangled technology, the time has come for a leap in technology—a technology that knows the receiver—a technology that knows what is relevant and valuable to the receiver—and delivers.