I would like to discuss your thoughts more. My name is Frank Urro. I am a principal and cofounder of Vanquish Inc, and the inventor of Personal Value Control™.

Personal Value Control is applicable to every form of electronic interpersonal contact and is designed as an Open Architecture enhancement. It brings value to the consumer and adds value at the network provider level. It will eliminate all forms of unsolicited nuisance interruptions and will invite well targeted legitimate contact.

You can learn of my thought process here: Respect101 and of the company here Vanquish

I look forward to a detailed and engaged discussion.

Best Regards
/fju

Also there are people working on personalizing PageRank.
In this case, an interesting paper is
“An Analytical Comparison of Approaches to Personalizing PageRank”.

The problem with running a local trust metric is that you have to run it once from the point of view of every node. This means that Google shold run a different pagerank over the complete Web graph for every (!) user!!
My take is that in the (short?) future we will run local trust metrics for ourselves on our devices, a mobile or a laptop. Instead of a big corporation running a locat trust metric for everyone, we will have everyone running a lot trust metric for herself. I guess we will see how it ends …

From what she said, it is clear that Memeorandum doesn’t suit Shelley’s personal desire for more diversity. I didn’t mean to imply that she said that it wasn’t personalized enough. I made that judgment myself…

And so I agree: personalization doesn’t equate with diversity. In fact, many people I know go so far as to shun diversity in the information sources they seek.

And yes, of course, things that we find personally valuable will very often include many things that others find valuable.

Thanks for keeping me straight.

That exactly right. If people want their writing to appear on sites like Memeorandum, they need to write more often, more clearly, and more insightfully. And they need to publicize themselves in some way, and get people to link to them. We all know how this game works, and it ain’t that un-linked, isolated sites somehow get magically noticed by spiders.

Also, it’s wrong to equate what you say at the beginning of this post–that there’s not enough diversity represented in the aggregation space–with what you say at the end–that people complain Google and Memeorandum are not “personalized” enough. Personalization != automatic diversity. Maybe I mis-read your argument here?

“…personal value, not average value.” Not necessarily. Both are important; it’s not an either/or situation. I *do* want to know what news is relevant, on average, to most people. I *do* want to know about things like top ten lists, or most-linked to, or bestselling. Knowing those things, even if I don’t like them, or agree with them or seek them out, means I am a member of society. If anything, hyper-personalization can lead to *less* diversity.

Del.icio.us can be used for part of this, too — I can look to see who else has bookmarked the things I have, or used the tags I have, and see what else they’ve done. Del.icio.us now recommends other users or other URLs to me, and near as I can tell, these recommendations are not based on who is on the blogger A-list.

I often squirm when I read the “where are the women” posts. Sometimes think they make valid points, and sometimes I think they are just noise. One of the best I’ve seen recently was by David Weinberger — on his giving up a spot so organizers could invite someone else, a woman. I liked his post because it was about taking action to make things different. That is what women who blog are doing. And either we’ll get picked up by sites like Memeorandum, or we won’t. I’m busy, and I have better things to worry about.