I like the points you’re making in your response. As you are explaining, these viewpoints might just be perspectives on different aspects of cultural change that are not entirely inconsistent. In fact, it creates a strong opportunity for information providers to intelligently include social context in information ranking. In addition to aggregate behavior metadata, there is the personal “social distance” component that one can include to individually customize ranking based on a user’s network or group affiliation – thereby revealing interesting babies that are related or interesting particularly to you. It does sound to me like everyone is on the same page about that, and that it will be a problem that perhaps does not get solved well even within our lifetime.

I’m guessing that there’s a middle ground between a super-specific (and expensive) personalized ranking component, and simply taking advantage of aggregate information. Aggregate boosts have a tendency to self-reinforce as communities that take hold in a corpus of information or “stuff” will feel more welcome than outsiders to that community, thereby creating websites that tend to serve one market above all others. In the short term, I think we’ll see some of these broad brush groupings of Internet users, and in the long term, perhaps we’ll get closer to the ideal of completely personalized information. The most obvious example of this I can think of is right-leaning vs. left-leaning political content on the web. Although very few people I know would agree that these capture all shades of lifestyles and opinions, they match expectations well enough with products to sustain audience attention.

It does raise some interesting issues about all of our attention potentially getting stuck in ideological mindsets by design, if we don’t attain escape velocity from efficient subdivision of our population into lowest-common-denominator markets. But that’s a bit outside of the scope of this discussion.

Thanks again for keeping the subject alive. This conversation encapsulates a lot of recent reading i’ve been doing about current cultural changes and social software’s role, and i’m glad to be getting a better grasp of the concepts at play.

My argument is not so much that Kung Fu monkeys = bad, or that they should be “buried.” But in a world where “anyone can say anything to everyone at once”, our most precious commodity becomes attention. I remember sitting at the Harvard Cyberposium Conference a few years ago when someone said… “It’s getting to the point where every moment of our life can now be digital recorded and preserved for posterity…. [pregnant pause...] Unfortunately, one doesn’t get a second life with which to review the first one.”

Coming up with the right tools to help me get to what matters to me becomes essential. But I don’t want to get prescriptive – what matters to the fans of Kung Fu monkeys is… Kung Fu monkeys! And we should be providing tools that help that community as much as any other…

Another way of putting it… I’m disinclined to subscribe the a Flickr feed for the tag “baby”. Just not interested in seeing random babies, thank you very much. But my brother’s baby? My neice? Cutest baby ever! I want to see every picture of her that exists!

Death to the monoculture and long live the long tail! Long live low-brow humor, stupid pet tricks and mentos and diet coke! And Ze Frank…

My point is that tools like Flickr interestingness allow us to leverage aggregate attention for the benefit of each user. I love interestingness, and use it as a sort criterion for just about every search I do on Flickr… But Flickr also uses a social graph with varying coefficients (me, family, friends, contacts, public) to provide another dimension that helps direct my attention to the right babies.

I think my thesis is simply that in democratizing the creation of content, we’ve created a high-class problem… There’s too much “on”… 500 channels, maybe. 500M channels? Never. The flip side of this wonderful revolution in publishing, destroying the hierarchical pyramid of participation, is that we (our industry) have a burden to provide people the means of actually getting to the content they want to see… (Perhaps sometimes, even before they know they want to see it.) This ought to keep us busy for a lifetime or so…

I think you captured my view pretty much in your closing paragraph. I’d guess Ze Frank agrees with us mostly too.