That problem was one of the main reasons I wrote The Filter Bubble. And today, I’m launching Upworthy, a new website I’ve co-founded with Peter Koechley (formerly of The Onion), to try to do something about it. Every day, we’ll be searching the Internet for the best online content that’s highly shareable and clickable and actually important. Hopefully, we can… CONTINUE READING:

Jeremy Keeshin over at thekeesh.com got curious about Facebook’s Edgerank, the algorithm used to determine which friends you interact with – and so appear most often on your news feed.

In the process he wrote a nifty little script that lets you see your own personal friend ranking.

As Jeremy writes, the results shouldn’t be too surprising, but may be embarrassing. I’d also add that they are a bit off. For example, there are two people in my top ten who I almost never interact with. I’m assuming Facebook has them high in my Edgerank because they recently posted vacation pictures that I scrolled through – so, yes, I clicked on a lot of their pages recently, but that’s an anomaly. Should Facebook infer that they are good friends?

Try it out… CONTINUE READING:

Over at Yahoo, according to FastCompany, quite well. Since setting up their crack personalization team in 2009, clicks on Yahoo’s “Today” box have increased 270%.

That’s saying personalization makes us four more times likely to click on a link. Whether you believe personalization makes the internet more efficient, more fractured or more mind-numbing, that’s a pretty impressive number.

For those concerned about the self-looping and fragmenting effects of the filter bubble, the good news is that Yahoo’s algorithm is not entirely human-free. Editors are in charge of curating the 50-100 versions of the “Today” module that could pop up on your Yahoo home page; the bots just guide them to which stories work best and, ultimately, which take on “Today” you’ll see.

Humans are also, thankfully, still in charge of deciding when… CONTINUE READING:

-Reed Hastings, October 2010

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In the book, Eli writes at length about the troubling combination of Peter Thiel’s extreme libertarian views and seat on Facebook’s board of directors.

Peter Thiel is entitled to his idiosyncratic views, of course, but they’re worth paying attention to because they increasingly shape the world we all live in. There are only four other people on the Facebook board besides Mark Zuckerberg; Thiel is one of them, and Zuckerberg publicly describes him as a mentor. “He helped shape the way I think about the business,” Zuckerberg said in a 2006 Bloomberg News interview.³¹⁶ As Thiel says, we have some big decisions to make about technology. And as for how those decisions

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That’s what Google’s latest transparency report provides — a detailed look at who’s asking for data and how much Google gives up. They even have an nicely arranged website for those interested in the stats.

The newest report was released today, detailing the six-month period of  July-December 2010. For curious individuals in the US — Google has received 4,601 user data requests from the US Government over the most recent six-month period and has complied with 94% of those requests (the highest compliance rate).

Other countries making full use of their information request power include: Brazil, France, the UK, and… CONTINUE READING:

Companies like Google and Acxiom track your clicks, purchases and likes, converting them into a personal profile they can then sell to targeted advertisers.

Up until now that profile has been fairly static. What online advertisers know about you – your location, gender, purchasing preferences, favorite news sources – doesn’t change much from day to day, let alone from hour to hour. Your profile is also largely based on (semi-)conscious choices – what you click on, like, etc. – and advertisers can only infer so much about your physical and emotional state.

But that may all change in the next year or two, according to Tim Ferris, one of a growing number of “Self-quantifiers.”

Like other entrepreneurs profiled in the Financial Times this month, Ferris uses gadgets and automated spreadsheets… CONTINUE READING:

Schmidt later claimed he was kidding about the whole name-change thing, but his comment was a troubling indication of Google’s tendency to shirk responsibility for its role in creating an online world in which everything is “recorded by everyone all the time.” After all, as Chris Williams at the UK Register pointed out, Google has “profited handsomely from the fact that society doesn’t understand the consequences” of posting oodles of information on the Internet.

Lately, though,… CONTINUE READING:

Less reported in the media, however, were the study’s findings on possible filter bubble effects of Facebook. Are online social network sites (SNS) narrowing our information streams, leaving us less exposed to a diversity of views, as Eli warns?

The good news is that SNS’s are not, according to Pew, making us more… CONTINUE READING:

Recently, an attendee at an Internet Society conference in New York asked him about the filter bubble. Here’s a (slightly cleaned up) transcript of how he responded — emphasis mine.

The filter bubble phenomenon, I think that noun is applied to the idea that a search engine can get to know you and so it can get to know the source of things it thinks you’re interested in. You will end up in a bubble because you will reward the search engine — you will go to the search engine — it feeds you

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Intel’s clever marketing team has created a visual experience that, after sucking in your friend network, posts and likes from Facebook, lets you walk through galleries of your life.

If you can stomach the solipsism, wait til you arrive at the final gallery, which morphs into – yes – a bubble of all your chattering friends with you right at the center.

If, however, that sounds like too much navel gazing, here’s the clip from some guy Steven’s museum: