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Rashmi Sinha — The perils of popularity

• In: Resources
• By: Maxine
• September 29, 2007
• No Comments

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.

Can web-​​based social sys­tems with their wide reach, user-​​generated and user-​​filtered con­tent har­ness the wis­dom of crowds? Duncan Watts’ recent exper­i­ments reveal how pop­u­lar­ity based web social sys­tems can throw up fickle, ran­dom trends that are essen­tially unreplic­a­ble, and only tan­gen­tially related to qual­ity. However, pop­u­lar­ity as a way to fil­ter infor­ma­tion con­tin­ues to rise in pop­u­lar­ity — replac­ing hier­ar­chi­cal menus, over­tak­ing tags, and even used in lieu of rel­e­vance. Rashmi will link decades of psy­chol­ogy research on group deci­sion mak­ing and social influ­ence to what is hap­pen­ing on the web today. She will dis­cuss dif­fer­ent mod­els of pop­u­lar­ity based fil­ter­ing such as Digg and YouTube. What are ways to avoid the Watts dilemma — includ­ing Google’s model of social­ity, tag-​​based social sys­tems, and object-​​based social net­works. She will present some prin­ci­ples for the design of web social sys­tems and how there were used in the design of SlideShare and dis­cuss how SlideShare as an evolv­ing social sys­tem han­dles popularity.

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