Bridges and Bubbles

mrG — Wed, 08 Jan 2003 13:28:12 -0500

Matt Jones has an entry today Bridging the bubbles proposing a model for how we find new vistas, and thoughts about what happens when we don't. I'm piqued by it because it's the same issue naively addressed back in the Open and Cola days of OpenCOLA: OC Folders wanted to bridge what you know to what you'd like, to find new favourite stuff (music mostly) you'd never heard before. Seems to me Matt's "bridges" are Cory's "Super-recommenders", so is it possible to gain any useful predictive knowledge from these charts?

Here's one problem: What if these paths are not symmetrical or even bi-directional? Matt ties his story to a Sylloge brief muse on the richness of interaction pathways in social group topologies and this suggests bridges may be rare for very good socio-geological reasons; some other blogroll-context models of the same idea show up (with many good references) in Julian's Synesthesia and Ton's thoughts on who you know vs who knows you in the now blogfamous Mayfield, Krebs and Kaminski study of Ryse.com.

Multidimensional pathways have traditionally and misleadingly represented network sites like ryse.com as just lines; Sylloge says each may be longer in one direction than in another; Ton notes differences in inbound and outbound horizons, and how relationship maps change over time. I might have 13000 names in my rolodex, but how many have me in theirs, and how many even remember who I am? The bubble/bridge chart suddenly becomes a lot more than just another topic-map Kartoo.com who links where blogroll.

I'm not sure where this is taking me. I know where I want to go is into a new glittering cave, but our map is suddenly very complex. Even a "no comment just the links" weblog like 'his blog' isn't really just links, it's implicit commentary, it's a list of recommended links that bridge several bubble horizons; it's the "people who bought this also bought .." marketing idea. His links add associative meta-data, and the added links (and any links to his blog) start to weigh on the Google ranks -- the new paths start to warp old paths exascerbating Ton's dynamic map charting.

Maybe where it's leading is not so much social career development as just a visual model of how blogging works, or maybe they are one in the same. The bridge itself may be an accident of happenstance and bandwidth, but to grow ourselves, we're enticed (or compelled) to test each path for inter-networked recommender bridges out from our own local space (Sylloge says these best-bridges may not be the nearest or even in a straight line). Seeking Matt's glittering cave moments, we cross over those bridges we find, and some of us become (by accident or design) new bridges for others. What's important, the effect we want, arises not from the number of bridge paths, but by their quality, and it's a totally subjective quality, and therefore unpredictable. Far from the networking is everything approach of Thomas Power (although, by sheer mass of numbers, yes, monster-trolling will catch some good fish too), perhaps a more efficient strategy may be a second-order goal to cultivate relationships with connected (bridging) individuals to discover what bubbles they know but also to suss out our personal metrics of the qualities of their knowledge; as with sex, quality beats quantity (just so long as the quantity does not approach zero ;)

Confucius said, "The way out is by the door. Why is it no one will use this method?" but what he didn't say is that some doors are better than others. What I think we're learning here is that the quality is not so easy to see in advance.

The more I think about the knot of this tangle, we have a nice diagram, but are we really any closer to bridging any bubbles or even knowing which path might lead to a useful bridge? That Amazon diagram (shown here) gets so stretched and twisted by link metrics and apparent metrics that we're right back at my earlier troubles with trust. We're back to clicking on pure blind faith.

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Bridges and Bubbles