Subscriber-driven publishing at more granular levels (topic-led and person-led) would effectively mean less need to separate the general content from specific, there are twitterfriends who are cricketfriends and others who are cookingfriends, I’d prefer to read the posts on their subjects of expertise. But even with the best graphic equalisers and result visualisation tools, there is a corresponding need for tailored data-mining algorithms – at its simplest level perhaps just correlation matching that attributes scores to various combinations of friend criteria and content criteria.

Actually, that rambling paragraph probably just shows you were right to neatly split the general principles into those 8 areas. The point about advertising is important too, a “majority” clickthru rate should be the target measure that shows you’ve really added value to the average ad viewer.

“JP-talking-seriously-about-social-networking” is not the same person as “JP-talking-humorously-about-cricket”. So I may want to subscribe to one person and not the other.

The telecoms analyst Martin Geddes wants to speak to his wife if and only if she isn’t putting the baby to sleep. I think this falls under the same general class of requirements.

See my blog at http://rvsoapbox.blogspot.com/2008/12/subscribe-and-follow-towards-complex.html

But the payoffs are great, as true personalisation emerges, with the empowerment and the choice-making capacity to go with it.

I don’t particularly like ads, but they can fulfil a useful purpose in aiding discovery. What I deeply dislike is the cowpath-paving from analogue to digital ads, where people are settling for things like 1% clickthrough conversions to sales. What nonsense. We should have real quality personalisation of ads, with 75% click throughs.

The best of these will be the ones that users form an emotional bond with, the app becomes the window to their favorite things. They get to see, and interact with everything they want to, easily and pleasurably. A highly customisable stack of simple controls for the equalisation. This also creates a unique signature of preference data.

I believe that a combination of this data, and that from search, transaction and location will form it’s own currency on mobile. I’m looking forward to the day I can advocate a music artist and get credit to purchase more music from the same publishing channel for doing so. This is something my musical peers and myself have done informally for a very long time. Mobile will vastly expand these peer networks.

This will go way beyond subscription once customers begin to understand the power they hold, and are rewarded with true value for making their preferences publicly available.

The commentators above and below on both posts (complete genius by the way), are by people like ‘us’.

You know what happens when you run this stuff by the people who control most of the commercial companies.

Technologically there is a major challenge – but I believe the over-arching issue is emotional.

I mean that in the very literal sense of each and every word.

Another possibility is to have the ability to “stumble” in your own aggregator, have the ability to surf your own space much like you would with StumbleUpon and the Web.

Looking back at my original post I suggested that the solution would be server side and identity centric, but if we turn things around to be subscriber focussed then once again we’re faced with a need for some client side magic (in JavaScript [using GreaseMonkey or similar?]).

* http://thestateofme.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/the-interest-feed/