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<title>Haaze.com / BeekQueeste / Published News</title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com</link>
<description>Test Web 2.0 Content Management System</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 May 2011 07:10:04 +0000</pubDate>
<language>en</language>
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<title><![CDATA[A look at Windows Phone 7 Marketplace for Mango]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=a-look-at-windows-phone-7-marketplace-for-mango</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=a-look-at-windows-phone-7-marketplace-for-mango</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 May 2011 07:10:04 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>BeekQueeste</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=a-look-at-windows-phone-7-marketplace-for-mango</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Microsoft has shared more details about the upcoming refresh to the online Windows Phone Marketplace application store that the company first teased yesterday in a blog post to developers.The screenshot below was internally labeled as a final version of the new design, which is scheduled to launch when Microsoft releases its Mango update this fall.The Mango update will include this refreshed online app marketplace (green border our addition).(Credit:Microsoft)The new Windows Phone Marketplace features a sharper, darker interface, with greater use of black and a new section to spotlight select apps. In addition to browsing and searching the app catalog, a new feature will enable Marketplace shoppers to share favorites through e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter, and via an embedded link for articles.Mango's Marketplace online will also be able to trigger apps to download over the air (OTA) to your phone. We initially heard that installations would happen via an e-mail or SMS link sent to the phone. However, Microsoft has revised the explanation, saying that the Web store will push apps to the phone similarly to the online Android Market, which has offered OTA Web-to-phone installations since February. However, being sent a link instead of enabling direct downloading will still be an option should you want it.As with other online app catalogs, Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace will also track your history so you can more easily reinstall apps if you switch Windows phones. Parental Controls will be onboard as well.Marketplace will tie into Bing searches and visual searches in some markets. Tapping an app result will open up details in the refreshed Web store. From a user perspective, it might be more convenient to see app details within the Marketplace app on the phone, so we'll withhold our judgment to see how this affects the browsing and downloading experience with the Mango update. Update, 1 p.m. PT: We've added new information from Microsoft that corrects an earlier statement about OTA app installations.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[At 10, highlighting Wikipedia's past and future]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=at-10-highlighting-wikipedias-past-and-future</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=at-10-highlighting-wikipedias-past-and-future</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 14 Jan 2011 08:10:15 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>BeekQueeste</dc:creator>
<category>Gaming</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=at-10-highlighting-wikipedias-past-and-future</guid>
<description><![CDATA[With just 20 simple words and two entries, it began: &quot;Hello, world.&quot; And &quot;Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.&quot; Written by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales on January 15, 2001, those four sentences ushered in one of the most widely used and important reference projects in history, let alone on the Internet: Wikipedia. Tomorrow, Wikipedia turns 10 years old. It's hard to imagine that a tiny, user-created project founded by two unknowns behind the online expert-written encyclopedia Nupedia could have grown into a project featuring more than 17 million articles in more than 270 languages, including 3.5 million in English, and more than 100,000 each in 32 other tongues. But Sanger and Wales, who had previously started Nupedia, which was having trouble getting off the ground, saw the virtues of a fairly new Web editing and creation tool called a wiki and decided to run with it.Now, all those years later, Wikipedia is the fifth-most popular Web property in the world, attracts 410 million unique visitors a month, is used by 42 percent of American adults, according to a Pew Internet study, and has made Wales--currently a member of the board of trustees of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia--a household name, at least in technology circles.Along the way, the project has gone through no small number of ups and downs. It has had its share of controversies, including the departure of Sanger in 2002 and subsequent public disagreements between him and Wales over whether he was a founder, and the infamous &quot;Seigenthaler incident,&quot; in which the article about former Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler was edited to include a baseless suggestion that he was involved in the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers.As well, there's been no shortage of consternation over Wales' role on the Wikimedia board, and about whether Wikipedia is a real research tool or if it promotes laziness among students unwilling or unable to search for primary sources to cite.But for the most part, the story of Wikipedia's first 10 years has been one of steady growth, a rise in stature, and a place among the most impressive user-created projects ever built.Hits the 'sweet spot' To Andrew Lih, the author of &quot;The Wikipedia Revolution,&quot; deciding to study Wales' and Sanger's creation came from his realization that the project hit a &quot;sweet spot&quot; and addressed what he called a &quot;gap in human knowledge between news and history books.&quot;With Wikipedia, Lih continued, Wales and Sanger, and the community of thousands of authors and editors they inspired, were taking on that gap, having created a &quot;continuously updated, changing state of human knowledge [that is] an archive living in front of our very eyes.&quot;It's hard to argue that. In its early days, Wikipedia was seen as a poor-man's Britannica. But it has long since surpassed the size and scope of that venerable project, which has &quot;hundreds of thousands of articles.&quot; Indeed, where content on Wikipedia was once seen as having questionable accuracy, given that it can be created by anyone, expert or not, a 2005 study by the journal &quot;Nature&quot; laid that notion to rest, concluding that the free, open-source encyclopedia's accuracy was on par with that of the for-profit, expert-written project.In 2005, in a bid to explain Wikipedia to his readers, &quot;Esquire&quot; magazine writer A.J. Jacobs came up with an imaginative approach to demonstrating the way that the site's volunteer editors clean up inaccuracies. First, Jacobs wrote an error-plagued version of a story about Wikipedia. Then he posted the text to Wikipedia, letting loose the community on the article. Eventually, having had the story cleaned up and fixed by Wikipedia users, &quot;Esquire&quot; ran both versions--illustrating its evolution.Was Wikipedia inevitable With the tremendous growth of the Internet in the late 1990s, as well as the emergence of numerous and powerful online communities, not to mention the development in 1995 by Ward Cunningham of the wiki, an obvious question is whether someone else would not have come up with the same idea as Wikipedia if Sanger and Wales hadn't gotten there first.To Joi Ito, a well-known Internet investor and the chairman of the board of Creative Commons, the answer isn't clear-cut. Ito said that he thinks Wikipedia as we know it today may well have only arisen due to the set of specific circumstances that gelled around the site back in 2001. &quot;The core community back...when it started was really, really special,&quot; Ito said. &quot;I called them 'bookworms for the common good.' I think that a community isn't a single person, but it really was like the Ocean's 11 or whatever Mission Impossible-like metaphor you want to use.&quot;As Ito put it, serendipity certainly had a lot to do with it, but he suggested it's hard to argue with the fact that the decision by Wales, Sanger, and other early decision-makers to keep the project free and open-source, helped make it what it is. Had someone else come along and created an online encyclopedia, they might well have tried to make it commercial, and that might have limited its size.Lih agreed. &quot;I don't think it could be what it is today without the free license,&quot; Lih said. &quot;It [was] so important to grab the attention and passion of so many volunteers. If a project like that [had been] started by Microsoft or even Apple...if you are going to labor that long [to create or edit an article] on something owned by a for-profit, you're not going to have as many volunteers as if the mission is pure. That is something that is quite unique, and was a way to attract a lot of volunteers in a very small amount of time.&quot;Further, Lih argued, Wales' personality had a lot to do with the project's success. After Sanger's departure, Wales was the unquestioned face of Wikipedia, yet Lih said that Wales found a smart balance between knowing when to stay out of the way and let the community do its thing and when it was necessary to assert his authority.Ito suggested that this was a difficult balance to strike.&quot;I think the face of the organization has a huge impact on how the public perceives it,&quot; Ito said. &quot;It's very difficult to have a project without a face. On the other hand, it's very tricky because leadership of open-source and online [communities] is really different, and most community members will feel that leaders get too much credit or that leadership is overrated.Of course, the question of leadership of Wikipedia, at least in the early days, was in dispute, and likely led to the departure of Sanger from the project.Wales was not available for comment for this story. For his part, Sanger, who has been critical of Wales and Wikipedia in the past, told CNET he has no regrets about having left the project. &quot;I've had plenty of opportunities to get back involved in Wikipedia,&quot; Sanger said. &quot;And as I've gotten farther and farther away in time from when I was involved and farther in psychological distance, I've had less and less desire to be involved.&quot;These days, Sanger said, he rarely uses Wikipedia.But Sanger, who is currently working on online educational video tools for children called WatchKnow, also said that he nonetheless has advice he thinks Wikipedia needs to take as it moves ahead.First, he suggested that the site's board of advisors must begin to take the amount of pornography that can be found on the site more seriously, and find a way to label it so parents can filter it. And second, Sanger, long a proponent of expert authors, thinks that Wikipedia needs to &quot;adopt a system whereby they allow experts to be...identified as such, and to give comment and ratings of versions of articles.&quot;Limited growthFor any project that's grown as big as Wikipedia, there inevitably comes a point at which the trend line evens out.To Lih, Wikipedia has reached that point, and those deeply involved in the project are only just starting to accept that fact. One problem, Lih said, is that the opportunity for new volunteers to come to Wikipedia and create great articles has long since become rare. That, of course, is because, with 17 million articles, most subjects of human knowledge have already been broached. What's left is largely pop culture and current events, Lih said, meaning that the main impetus that drew so many of the early power users is harder to come by. And at the same time, existing editors are more protective of the site than ever, keeping watchful eyes on favorite articles and regarding newcomers with what might be seen as suspicion.&quot;That kind of viral rush of [creating or] editing an article is hard to capture today,&quot; Lih said. And longtime volunteers &quot;are not slapping newcomers on the back and saying, 'Welcome to Wikipedia.' It's, 'Hey, what did you just do Unless you're doing something useful, go away.'&quot;That could lead to a problem finding the next generation of power users, Lih worries, a dynamic that threatens the site's future growth. &quot;Where are the next 3.5 million articles [in English] going to come from,&quot; Lih said.The next 10 yearsBut Lih doesn't think Wikipedia is in any way finished. Quite the contrary, the &quot;Wikipedia Revolution&quot; author thinks that the key to the project's next 10 years of growth lies in its ability to attract significant new sources of content.And that's why he thinks it's crucial that the Wikimedia Foundation be successful in outreach efforts to cultural institutions like government, libraries, archives, and museums, that can provide the site with new material. Another big effort will likely be a push to add large amounts of multimedia. But before that can happen, Lih said, tools must be created that allow for collaborative creation and editing of video and audio. As well, despite being available in more than 270 languages, there are still many more to go, and that's something that seems like an obvious growth area for the project. Indeed, Wales told the Washington Post that he wants to see Wikipedia reach every language on Earth. It may take some time before Wikipedia reaches that point, but then, the site isn't going anywhere. With 17 million articles and a still-loyal stable of thousands of authors and editors, there's plenty of horsepower to keep the site vital for the foreseeable future.And what is its legacy, after 10 years. To Lih, Wikipedia has turned conventional wisdom on its head.&quot;There's a famous saying,&quot; he said, &quot;'Winners get to write the history books.' This is no longer true. [Now], the people get to write the history books.&quot;<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[MySpace mulls layoffs, with potential sale looming]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=myspace-mulls-layoffs-with-potential-sale-looming</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=myspace-mulls-layoffs-with-potential-sale-looming</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:10:10 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>BeekQueeste</dc:creator>
<category>Marketing and advertising</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=myspace-mulls-layoffs-with-potential-sale-looming</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ MySpace--the long-troubled social-networking site turned social entertainment hub--is in the midst of planning that could soon result in significant layoffs of its staff, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.  That number could be as much as 50 percent of the 1,100 employees at MySpace, largely based in the U.S., but also in international locations. While the decision of what cuts to make to its employee base have not been made yet, nearly the entire MySpace staff was given the last week of December off from work to save money.  Sources stressed that management was still working out the details of more drastic cost-cutting measures that owner News Corp. has been wanting from MySpace, as its revenue and traffic have declined. The layoffs are also part of a larger rethink about the future of the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based company, which has had many difficulties in recent years, including several leadership upheavals and a talent drain, as well as stagnant growth. Among the many options contemplated has been the sale of the MySpace unit, as has been widely reported. According to sources, Jack Kennedy, EVP of operations for News Corp. Digital Media, has been tapped to explore the sale of MySpace.  Until now, both large-scale cost-cutting and exploration of an acquisition were on hold as MySpace launched its redesign as an entertainment hub, which was rolled out about six weeks ago.  MySpace also recently started user account integration with former foe Facebook.  And the company also revamped its mobile offerings and signed a new search advertising deal with Google (at which time MediaMemo's Peter Kafka predicted layoffs were around the corner).  But, according to many inside and outside the company, the redesign and strategy moves are not expected to result in a major turnaround of MySpace. Meanwhile, the piles of money the company once got from its Google relationship have also gotten much smaller. It's not much of a surprise that News Corp. is moving to remedy the situation now.  In fact, during News Corp.'s earnings call in November, COO Chase Carey called attention to MySpace's ever-weakening performance and said &quot;current losses are not acceptable or sustainable.&quot; He added: &quot;We judge in quarters, not in years.&quot; At this point, a sale would be the likeliest save for the media giant. One juicy rumor that has been going around suggests Facebook game maker Zynga as a potential acquirer of MySpace. While the two companies had discussed closer ties in the past--back when Zynga COO Owen Van Natta was still CEO of MySpace--those talks went nowhere. Several sources said a private equity buyer for MySpace is now the likeliest outcome if the online property is sold.  MySpace declined to comment on layoffs or acquisition talks.  (Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns All Things Digital.) Story Copyright (c) 2010 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Dell replacing employee BlackBerrys with its own phone]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=dell-replacing-employee-blackberrys-with-its-own-phone</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=dell-replacing-employee-blackberrys-with-its-own-phone</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 05 Nov 2010 07:11:03 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>BeekQueeste</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=dell-replacing-employee-blackberrys-with-its-own-phone</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Dell will hand out its Venue Pro to its employees who currently carry BlackBerrys.(Credit:Bonnie Cha/CNET)Dell is looking to market its own smartphone as an alternative to the BlackBerry and is starting the push with its own employees.The PC maker will give its BlackBerry-carrying employees new Venue Pro smartphones in return for their existing phones. The transition is expected to save the company around 25 percent in mobile communications costs, mostly by getting rid of its BlackBerry servers, Dell's chief financial officer Brian Gladden told The Wall Street Journal.The 25,000 employees who currently have BlackBerrys will receive Venue Pro phones with both voice and data plans' remaining employees (about 71,000) will also get Dell phones but only with voice plans.Dell spokesman David Frink confirmed to CNET that this program will start shortly and take several months to complete.RunningWindows Phone 7, the Venue Pro will be the first phone provided internally, but Dell will eventually offer its employees Android phones as well, according to Gladden. Dell just hit the U.S. market with the launch of its first smartphone, the Android-based Aero.&quot;Clearly in this decision we are competing with RIM, because we're kicking them out,&quot; Gladden told the Journal.The internal move also opens the door for a new service that will try to convince other businesses to switch off their current smartphones in favor of a Dell device. According to the Journal, the company will start marketing this service to business customers within the next couple of weeks. Dell couldn't provide CNET with any details on this new service, but a company spokeswoman said that &quot;obviously we believe over time we can demonstrate the value and benefits of Dell smartphones to our commercial customers.&quot; The move is part of Dell's overall strategy to carve off a bigger slice of the business smartphone market, particularly against Research In Motion. Dell is also eyeing the new service as a entry point to sell its customers more than just low-margin phones. The company is aiming to set up networks and manage assets as part of an overall wireless package, Gladden told the Journal.&quot;I'm not sure I care as much about the devices as the services,&quot; Gladden said in his Journal interview. &quot;There's a services opportunity that we think is even bigger.&quot;<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Nielsen: RIM, Apple vying for smartphone lead]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=nielsen-rim-apple-vying-for-smartphone-lead</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=nielsen-rim-apple-vying-for-smartphone-lead</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:10:16 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>BeekQueeste</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=nielsen-rim-apple-vying-for-smartphone-lead</guid>
<description><![CDATA[(Credit:Nielsen)Research In Motion and Apple are duking it out for the top spot in the U.S. smartphone market, according to the &quot;Global Smartphone Report&quot; released yesterday by Nielsen.Among the 13,243 smartphone owners polled by Nielsen, Apple's share has grown steadily over the past year, with theiPhone grabbing 28 percent of them all in the third quarter. On the flip side, RIM has seen its share for the BlackBerry drop to 30 percent for the same period. Those numbers include all people in Nielsen's panel who own smartphones.The difference in demand between the two platforms also breaks down by age, according to Nielsen's numbers. Apple has the highest number of smartphone users under 44, while RIM has captured the most customers 45 and older.In terms of sheer momentum, Android is the one heating up the market. Though still in third place among all of those surveyed who own a smartphone, Google's mobile OS has grown from a 4 percent share in the fourth quarter of 2009 to a 19 percent share in the quarter just ended, according to Nielsen. Among customers who picked up a smartphone over the last six months, Android did take the top spot during the quarter, said Nielsen, with BlackBerry and the iPhone battling for second place.Other recent reports also point to Android's growing popularity. Another Nielsen report, from early October, found that 32 percent of the smartphones purchased from January to August were powered by Android, compared with 25 percent for Apple and 26 percent for RIM. And reports this week from NPD Group and Canalys showed that among people who bought smartphones just in the third quarter, around 44 percent of them opted for an Android device, leaving Apple and RIM with figures hovering in the mid-20 percent range.Among other mobile operating systems, Microsoft's Windows Mobile has declined in demand over the past year and is now hanging onto a 15 percent slice of the market. The company is hoping to recapture some of that lost share with its new Windows Phone 7.The Palm OS, now owned by HP, has also shed share over the past year. And Nokia's Symbian OS, though still the worldwide smartphone leader, has failed to take hold in the United States and has hung onto the same small share of the U.S. market since last year.Smartphones in general continued to carve out a bigger chunk of the mobile phone market. As of the third quarter, 28 percent of all U.S. mobile phone subscribers own smartphones. Among consumers who bought a new mobile phone over the past six months, 41 percent of them chose a smartphone over a standard feature phone, up from 35 percent in the second quarter.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[The Myth Of&nbsp'Serendipity]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-myth-ofnbspserendipity</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-myth-ofnbspserendipity</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>BeekQueeste</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-myth-ofnbspserendipity</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Editor&amp;'s note: Henry a4AHanka4 Nothhaft, Jr. is the co-founder and CMO of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for Web content still in private beta that was incubated out of SRI and the CALO project (as was Siri, the conversational search engine bought by Apple).One of the most interesting concepts to emerge in media and tech lately is that of a4Aserendipitya4a4&quot;showing people what they want even if they didn&amp;'t ask for it.Despite its seemingly ubiquitous invocation, however, the concept of serendipity remains ill-defined and put forth as some vague panacea for a slew of emerging innovations hoping to attract new users in droves. a4sWhat is needed is a closer look at what we actually mean when we talk about serendipity.From Search to DiscoveryEric Schmidta4a4s recent remarks about Google as a a4ASerendipity Enginea4 (and Facebooka4a4s quick reply), emphasize an important shift in our daily interaction with the Web and how we use it. a4sGoogle-driven search provided us with an expectation of finding what we are looking for with increased precision. a4sBut the rise of Facebooka4a4s social relevance algorithms brought about more personalized content discovery based on the human grapha4&quot;who we know and what they are reading, watching, or passing along.In fact, Ia4a4d argue that wea4a4re seeing the dominant portion of our interaction with Web content shift from search to discovery.Jeff Jarvis has perhaps most succinctly defined the concept of serendipity, arguing that serendipity is simply a4Aunexpected relevance.a4a4s His explanation opens an entirely new can of worms, however, in the recognition that relevance is relative.In seeking to achieve serendipity, the individual reader becomes both the target of content delivery mechanisms and the genesis of what that content may be. This is why serendipity is so closely associated with personalizationa4&quot;it requires a high-resolution understanding of the user.Serendipity and personalization are in fact two sides to the same coin. a4sPersonalization merely acknowledges intimacy, whereas serendipity pretends to have happened on it as if by accident.Of course serendipity is not, in fact, at all random. In reality, ita4a4s quite scientific. Good serendipity is a slight of handa4&quot;it requires deep and granular knowledge, and the fact of its seeming to happen by accident is an artifact of naivety, if anything.Serendipity is really just an informed calculation based upon any number of our individually unique interests, habits, location, the time and date, and prior knowledge. This level of relevance is, of course, what the emerging personalized Web hopes to achieve for each user, whether for recommendations (GetGlue' Hunch), marketing and ads (Rapleaf' Facebook advertising), or news and content (my company, TrapIt).Below I run through four different kinds of serendipitya4&quot;each has its pros and cons. I end by talking about them all taken together, and a4Athe myth of the sweet spota4.Editorial SerendipityEditorial Serendipity is the first and oldest form, the process of combining articles that we know we want to read (the daya4a4s headlines) with unexpected stories (features, profiles, restaurant reviews). Yet the editorial voice and direction of a paper or aggregator is hardly serendipitous' it is a calculation of demographics and readership, whether youa4a4re the New York Times, the Drudge Report, or TechCrunch.On the plus side here, the human element of editorial serendipity (someone making decisions on what content to deliver) provides an effective flexibility of interest. The downside is that editorial serendipity is delivered by anothera4a4s interests, or at best their perception of their audiencea4a4s interests. Though the contenta4a4s relevance is targeted to a certain demographic of readers, it is a necessarily broad sweep of potential readers, and the level of interest is based on the editorsa4a4 perception of what is most in tune with those readers or what she thinks they should be interested in based on her own judgement.Examples: Newspapers/Magazines, Curated AggregatorsSocial SerendipityMuch of our content discovery now comes from the virtual watercooler of what our social circle is sharing directly online. The social aspect of staying informed with what our friends are discussing is valuable, not only for keeping a4Ain the loop,a4 but also simply for the notion that what our friends like is parallel to our own interests.The benefit of social serendipity is that our social groups have always been a primary indicator of how we choose to define ourselves and our interests. If something is important or relevant to our friends, there is a high likelihood that it is also relevant to ourselves, as well. The con is that social serendipity is therefore largely public by necessity, and thus a projection of ourselves we would present to others or like to be seen. The propensity to amplify the echo-chamber of like-mindedness is also exaggerated, whereas the goal of serendipity largely lies in the surprise and delight of unexpected content.Examples: Facebook, TwitterCrowdsourced SerendipityBridging the gap between editorial and social serendipity, the notion of crowdsourced relevance really only delivers a broad, lowest-common-denominator level of content discovery. While not without its usefulness to the degree that we want to be aware of what is most popular and most talked about, the trade-off is the lack of personalization.The pro here is the viral component, which makes up a great deal of our online content-discovery routines. Crowdsourced serendipity provides a tier of distribution in touch with a larger zeitgeist, from trivial cat videos to important broad-based news. The downside is that the lowest common denominator lacks any precision and therefore has limited utility.Examples: StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg Algorithmic SerendipityOpposite editorial serendipity, the notion of algorithmic serendipity is the hardest to do well, but the most promising for future innovation.  (Bias alert: this is the approach we are trying at TrapIt)Based-upon any given set of data points, content is personalized to provide both the relevant, need-to-know information of news and content correlating to our interests, with varying degrees of flexibility through both active and passive inputs.The best aspect of algorithmic serendipity is that it places the user back at the center of defining relevance. Content delivery emanates from the user, whether consciously or in the background based on habit. It also provides for a level of adjustability and fine-tuning based on individualized input and how narrowly or broadly a user may want the information delivered to him.The con with algorithmic serendipity is that we need to be careful not to completely lose the human element of engagement, no matter how accurate the algorithm is.  Of course, the biggest hindrance is that unlike the other forms of serendipity, a finely-tuned algorithmic Serendipity Engine has yet to be effectively realized.  Still, it needs to only be the starting point rather than end point of achieving personalized serendipity.Examples: Genieo, My6Sense, TrapItThe Myth of the Sweet SpotThe challenge for any conception of serendipity, regardless of type, is the prevailing notion of a mythical a4Asweet spota4 for users.In all of the forms of content delivery outlined above, there is a notion that we can hone in on a usera4a4s interests and find the right balance of relevance.a4s Presenting any such balance as stable or definitive is pure folly. We humans have no a4Asweet spota4a4&quot;our interests are evolving and fluid in realtime.To some extent, this recognition is obvious.  Our interests change and evolve over time. Yet for the kind of precision that seeks to provide consistent serendipity in the ways we have been discussing, the indicators need to be equally sensitive.The content that I want, and better yet, the content that I dona4a4t even know that I want, is an ever-changing proposition based on any number of factors. To achieve that level of sophisticated customization requires a sensitive understanding of context for any proposed a4Aserendipity enginea4, both a context of the content and the user.In the end, relevance is a goal based on context. The impossibility of fully understanding every intricacy of context at any given moment makes achieving the mythical, consistent sweet spot of serendipity impossible. Recognizing that serendipity is a constantly moving target of context, the best we can hope to achieve are fleeting moments relevance.Photo credit: Flickr/Jennifer KonigCrunchBase InformationTrapitTwitterStumbleUponNew York TimesInformation provided by CrunchBase<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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