Eli Pariser, former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, is a smart guy who knows the Web very well. His most recent work takes on the movement toward services that adopt algorithm-driven personalization to provide you individualized content - which he calls "The Filter Bubble", matching a book he recently wrote by the same name. His summary, as eloquently stated during a TED talk in March, is that we as Web consumers are going to miss being exposed to information that challenges our views, that we will self-select our sources and content we wish to consume, and the services will comply. The result? A dangerous world, he argues, that is bad for democracy, and no doubt bad for knowledge as well.

Spending considerable amount of time thinking about the impact of machine-driven personalization as VP of Marketing at my6sense, as well as being an early adopter of many other tools that adopt various factors of personalization, from The Cadmus to Zite, Flipboard, Hunch, Cascaad and others, it is important to think about the impact of our efforts to bring personal relevance to the fast-moving Web and if we are indeed pushing people instead to a house of mirrors where most things look the same and the comfortable world agrees with our world view.

First, the argument that people prefer to associate with like-minded individuals and listen, read and watch news and commentary that agrees with their worldview is pretty well accepted. In politics, conservatives may prefer Fox News for their media, while liberals prefer CNN and MSNBC. This is exacerbated dramatically further on the Web with niche discussions becoming even easier to find. Way back in February 2006, when this blog was pretty new, I talked about how people don't usually want to mingle with people of opposing views, but instead that views become polarized as communities flock to the edge, where they are comfortable.

Quoting my 28 year-old self:

"To measure credibility on the Web, visitors are looking for people who already agree with their opinions. They're not so much looking to be changed or to gain information from other viewpoints, but to instead become more hardened in their positions."
(See: Blogging Bifurcation - A Web Divided from February 23, 2006)

No matter the media, be it online or offline, we self-select what we consume based on a vast number of criteria.

We first self-select the source of our content - for example (in a world of dead tree papers) the New York Times, instead of the Washington Post or USA Today. Then, we choose how we are going to consume the content, be it to skim the front page first, or to dive into the business section. Perhaps we always read Sports first and then go back to the front page, and finally settle on the Features section. What we don't do is read every single story from beginning to end starting at the top left and moving to the back. Similarly, on television, we have our favorite shows, and again, we have preferences. We don't tun the TV on to channel one and hit the "up" button on our remote control until we find something we like. Instead, we choose our watching behavior based on our interests, and in a world of DVRs, we watch our favorite shows and limit our options to even be exposed to commercials highlighting other fare on the same network.


What new tools like my6sense and others are doing is recognizing that this capability of accurately divining the order of your preferences is largely missing in a new world of real-time streams. No man, not even the cyborg tech bloggers among us, can read every single tweet, Facebook update, Techmeme headline or news story that crests The Drudge Report. What my6sense and others like it are trying to do is eliminate the noise which you will never be interested in, while at the same time, surfacing the content which is deemed important to you based on your interests. No two people consume content in the same way, so presenting the content in the same way to each person (as has been done for centuries) doesn't make too much sense any more. It makes more sense, both for the user and for the content producer, to bring the best and most relevant content to the right people who want to see it and engage with it.

The concerns raised by Pariser are absolutely valid if the services being personalized don't offer any way for content that has not previously shown interest to come into your sphere. If the only signals that you've given to a service are that you like Apple computers and NBA playoff scores, and that's all you'll get, you'll have a poor understanding of the 2012 presidential election race and probably might not have noticed the fluctuations in the price of gas.

In my6sense, there are two critical ways that make sure you don't stay in your bubble forever:

1) There is always the option to view your streams sorted "by Time". Always.

Every single application that we have provided, from our iPhone and Android applications, to the NOOKColor application with Barnes and Noble, and even the Twitter extension on Chrome, offers a "relevance" tab based on your interests right next to the traditional chronologically-ordered view. There's no winner take all algorithm that erases the time view, because we know you should always have the option to see what your connections and feeds are saying "right now".

What's being discussed in the "Time" column could be anything. It could directly fall into your interests, or it could be something completely random, and that never will go away.

2) Collaborative filtering, while not the dominant signal, is still a signal.

If I have trained my application to know that I have a strong liking for technology news and consume this most of the day, it's unlikely that I will have previously given information that signals any interest in Osama Bin Laden's death or the earthquake in Japan. That said, if an event occurs that gets the attention of many of my social connections who begin to discuss it or share items on that topic, the system should interpret that as a strong social signal and surface this content in the application, so that alongside my regular Android ecosystem updates, I retain the option for breaking news.

In November, I wrote that "The Third Wave of the Web Will Be Uniquely Personal", as services adapt to my preferences and history to bring me a unique experience. We see this happening with Gmail's Priority Inbox, Google News personalization, the Facebook news feed and many other tweaks to our Web consumption experience. This doesn't mean that we are going to opt ourselves into a bubble by which we are never exposed to opposing viewpoints. Instead, it dramatically hones our signal to find us the best of what we want to see and leaves the door open for the real world to impact us.

As a member of the management team on a service that offers aggregation and multiple sources of a content, we often talk about how it's not a great user experience to deliver many articles in a row from a single source, or many articles in a row talking about the same event, even if it happens to be the event that is most critical for you to know. It is also not a great user experience if you feel that you are isolated, in a place where no other ideas enter and no other viewpoints get a chance to cross your screen.

The trend of personalization is a great thing - not bad at all. Every day you are self-selecting your news based on who you follow on Twitter and Facebook. Every day you are self-selecting your news based on the RSS feeds you read and the social networks you visit. This is something you are already doing. What apps like my6sense and others help to do is get you the best of what you want and free up the time you'd usually spend looking for that great stuff to go off and do something else - maybe start your own product... or even read other viewpoints where arguments are welcome.

For more on Eli's thoughts, see his interview with Time.com here: 5 Questions with Eli Pariser, Author of 'The Filter Bubble'. He is on Twitter at @elipariser, where he has personalized his news feed with 460 hand-picked people to follow.

Disclosures: I am vice president of marketing at my6sense, who delivers personalization of streams. my6sense can be assumed to be competing with multiple services in this piece, including Cadmus, Flipboard, Zite, etc.

After a semi-private 10 week incubation period kicked off in mid-February, XYDO is ready to bring its social network to the public. Focused on news to bring socially-endorsed content from your streams to you, finding the best content powered by your connections, XYDO wades into a crowded field of news consumption apps - many of whom have opted to focus on mobile or iPad instead of the Web, where they argue the majority of people still go for news.

In a detailed brief released alongside their unveiling at midnight Eastern time tonight, XYDO says, "iPad reader apps, while theyʼve gotten a lot of attention, represent a tiny fraction of how online news is consumed," taking aim at products including Flipboard, News.me, Pulse and Zite, most of whom have made the iPad their launchpad. XYDO also highlights the availability of their content by dedicated social streams, such as those on Twitter which lead with an "x_", such as "@x_startups".

In February, when first encountering XYDO, I highlighted its similarities to the much discussed Quora. It seems this has resonated, as the company's founders see it as Quora mixed with Digg. You get the ability to engage with shared content on the site, but the numbers continue to drive the highlighted content, with shares on social sites pushing numbers ever higher, which they call "social endorsement", as opposed to "non-prioritized, purely reverse chronological order", common from streams like Twitter and Flipboard.

Like the vast majority of sites that talk the personalization game, XYDO appears to be leaning heavily on social collaborative filtering to divine the top news for you, tapping your social connections to surface interesting content, and organize it by topic. You can then filter the content based on your interests.

Its debatable whether this social news network can surface interesting conversations on the shared content, as Quora has, but it does serve as a curated alternative to the single sourced Paper.li and other personalized newspapers that grew like mushrooms last year. If you didn't get into Xydo a few months ago, you no longer need an invitation, so go to it. You can find me at http://www.xydo.com/users/978/submissions.

Disclosures: my6sense, where I am vice president of marketing, presents personalized streams on mobile devices and offers an API for users. Theoretically, this means we compete or could partner with some elements of Xydo, Flipboard, Pulse and News.me.

Practically everywhere I turn these days, new products are cropping up to help you find content relevant to your interests. In addition to my6sense, who I covered yesterday, we've seen a fair share of Twitter applications, iPhone apps and Web sites looking to find signal in the noise, and each takes a unique approach. The latest to join the scene is a service called Zite, which bills itself as a personalized Web filter, leveraging your social profiles to guess your interests. You can improve the filter by grouping keywords you are interested in, and can dive down by domain to see what different sources are saying about your interests.


Upon entering Zite (and you can use one of 50 invites with this code: http://zite.com/?code=louisgrayorg), you are prompted to enter your user name for Twitter and Delicious. Zite analyzes the content you share on those sites, and delivers two things: recommended articles and keywords called your "Follow List".

The recommended articles are split into two: first being today's recommendations, and the second being older items you might like, going from 1 day ago to as much as a month. If you like the articles you see, simple click the star to the left of each article, or you can read it. Zite intends to improved based on your feedback, so the more stars, the more you get to tailor it to your interests.

The "Follow List" at first is a quick stab at what Zite thinks you are most interested in. But the power of this list comes from your own edits. You can add new terms to follow, and interestingly, drag and drop topics into groups. This lets you have a set of results for "Startup, VC and Venture Capital", or another group for "Branding, Marketing and Public Relations", for example. You can also set up groupings for multiple domains, for example "louisgray.com and scobleizer.com", if you wanted to.


The Editable Follow List on Zite

Once the follow list is created, you can click on any of the groups and see recommended results on Zite from those terms. Zite tries to guide your exploration further with related topics, called "Parents" which are higher level topics, or "Siblings" which add more terms to those you're currently viewing.


The ability to parse through RSS and other news sources by topic is something I like a lot, and you could see that from my feedback on Lazyfeed. Zite lacks the real-time updating element and cool UI that Lazyfeed brings, and doesn't clearly respond to implicit feedback, working on the explicit nature of your own activity. But if you want to see recommended articles from the Web on topics you like, you should check it out. You can get in to Zite's closed beta with one of 50 invites using this code: http://zite.com/?code=louisgrayorg.

Disclosure: My6sense is an assumed competitor to some aspects of Zite, and My6sense is a Paladin Advisors Group client, where I am managing director of new media.