One of the Interweb’s most visited blogs is BoingBoing. My relationship with BoingBoing has evolved over the years. It went from being one of my favorite blogs, to a blog I only cared moderately about (sorry, not interested in steampunk ukeleles). And by now now the only reason I scan it diagonally is to know what I shouldn’t share on twitter, facebook or my blog. Because if it has been on BoingBoing, the whole world has obviously already seen it.
Now you can basically divide the blogosphere (love how by now this word sounds so quaint) into two categories. You have the blogs on which content is created, and you have the blogs that curate that enormous amount of content and present you the “best of”. Some of these curating blogs are niche, they might only be about the best of gadgets or cars, some of ‘em are about everything and anything, like BoingBoing.
Now the reason I liked BoingBoing was because the people behind it, the curaters, where more or less into the same things I am. But, as noted above, that has evolved, and is no longer true. Now it was only a matter of time until someone was going to come up with an algorithm that finds out what kind of things I’m into and curate the web for me.
Well that moment has arrived, and unsurprisingly, it’s owned by Google.
http://www.google.com/reader/play/
Now it’s basically built into Google reader, so the algorithm probably already has a good idea of what I’m into. But you can also star, like or share items. You do this for yourself, but it obviously also helps the algorithm to finetune it’s opinion of what you’re into.
So this would mean that the more you use it, the better it gets.
(Sidenote: I think that star, like and share, are great way of measuring how much I like something. Star is sort of a bookmark thing, so I like it enough to want to be able to retrieve it someday. Like is, well like. And Share basically means that I like it that much that I want to share it with my followers. So by using these features, which I do because they have added value, I’m unconsciously educating the algorithm. Very ingenious.)
Now through using reader/play I’ve learned quit a bit about myself. It’s been showing me a lot of stuff that I really really like and find very very interesting. Now the scary thing is that it’s been a lot of lolcats, silly infoviz and America’s Funniest Animated Gifs.
Google knows me allright. I’m just not that proud of what it’s telling me.
But, as I said, the more I’ll use it, the smarter it’ll get, and I’ve only been playing for a few days.
Now the thing is, the reader/play algorithm has been around for a while, it was always there in your Google reader under the tab Explore.
But it’s only now that they’ve changed the user experience that I started to use it. It’s just very nice: easy nav, big images, autoplay video. It’s really a joy to use.
And it’s obvious what they’re getting at with the user experience of this app: this is made to measure for the iPad.
I can see my son playing with this on his iPad, flipping through stuff he likes and just taking for granted that the iPad knows what he likes.
Without ever having known what a curater blog is.
Tags: blogs, boingboing, google, iPad, play, reader, the future is now
