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Collaborative Filtering: Lifeblood of The Social Web - ReadWr...

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Collaborative Filtering: Lifeblood of The Social Web

Written by Muhammad Saleem / June 30, 2008 2:48 PM / 4 Comments

Collaborative Filtering (Wikipedia definition) is a mechanism used to filter large amounts of information by spreading the process of filtering among a large group of people. Unlike mainstream media where there is either one or very few editors setting guidelines, the collaboratively filtered social web can have infinitely many editors and gets better as you increase the number of participants.

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Collaborative Filtering (Wikipedia definition) is a mechanism used to filter large amounts of information by spreading the process of filtering among a large group of people.

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This, of course, relies on the fact that people's interests, preferences, and ideologies don't change too drastically over time.

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This user profile helps the site recommend content that has been submitted by users

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What this means is that by collecting enough information on how you interact with the site and with other users, the (CF) system can recommend content to you. The system finds the content and deliver it to you rather than it requiring you to scout for it.

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The important thing, one that not many social sites realize, is that a (CF) system that doesn't automatically match content to your preferences, is inherently flawed. The reason for this is simple: Unless you can achieve perfect diversity and independence of opinion, one point of view will always dominate another on a particular platform. The dominant point of view on the social web is a left-leaning one, and without the ability to get the most appropriate pieces of content to the people that care most about them, the right-wing point of view gets buried almost every time.

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more you use the recommendation system and vote up or down, the better it becomes with its recommendations.

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A filtering system with preference-based recommendations, in essence, is the future of the social web.

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The best implementations of a Collaborative Filtering (CF) system along with a preference based recommendation/discovery system that I have seen are always on music streaming and discovery sites.

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As you can see from above, it is certainly possible to have a good collaborative filtering system without a recommendation engine

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