Why Search and Aggregation Work Best with Small Communities
Posted by Mike Bijon January 26, 2006
In response to The Problems With 2.0, pt 345314: I’ve noticed the “getting stupid” results myself after heavy following of Memeorandum. I think it’s largely due to the limited number of topics important enough to rank on their pages. There seems to be less of an effect when using digg, but I tend to stay off the front page there, as the topics that make it there commonly seem to be of little interest to me.
As for the technical aspects of why search and aggregation work best with less content and in smaller communities –
Recent research indicates that search has a reverse effect than is commonly assumed, because it encourages a higher volume of consumption:
in spite of the rich-get-richer dynamics implicitly contained in the use of link analysis to rank search hits, the net effect of search engines on traffic appears to produce an egalitarian effect, smearing out the traffic attraction of high-degree pages. Our empirical data clearly shows a sublinear scaling relation between referral traffic from search engines and page in-degree. This seems to be in agreement with the observation that search engines lead users to visiting about 20% more pages than surfing alone
I suspect that aggregators follow the same patterns and encourage even greater consumption than the input-required world of search terms. If you feel dumber it’s probably a result of the content itself and not the aggregator.
As for the mathematical aspects of aggregation and search, I agree with niblettes that the value of search and aggregators drops as the number of inputs (web pages) and community (user feedback) grows. Instead of following niblette’s suggested attractor model, I think the decreasing value of search and aggregation is due to the nonlinearity of content contributed a big community (like digg’s front page) which results in the creation of unstable bifurcations and the onset of chaos. Nonlinearity may work stylistically for Tarantino, but it’s hard to follow a newspaper if you can’t tell the difference between ads, classifieds, and articles (…also why anthropologists must devote so much time to what they do).
Mike Bijon: I work as senior technology manager and technologist for 
[…] Most jobs are filled with willing employees and aren’t worth spending that job’s entire annual salary just to find and entice “one” perfect candidate. Where should we have started anyway? Most good bloggers are intelligent and discuss a variety of topics, mkaing it even harder to narrow down the search to “the one”. The blogosphere is a big, messy community and even blogger profiles on Technorati (the first place I would have looked) are poor replacements for a resume sent in by an interested candidate. Had I even considered seeking bloggers for that recent employee search, cold-emailing bloggers to see if they’re interested in a certain job - without an accurate measure of the bloggers’ employment desires or location/relocation plans - would just be a waste of time for any job not paying in the top 2%. And, if a job is paying in the top 2% of all jobs out there - then it stands to reason that there are just two or three A-list bloggers who are worth making egregious offers to. […]