We go to eleven!

February 12 2009, 2:36pm

In my previous post, I described OneSpot as a recommendation engine for Web content. While that description is technically true, it is far from complete, just as describing Amazon.com and Netflix as merely product and movie recommendation engines would do neither of those fine companies justice. So to more fully round out my previous description and expand the general understanding of what OneSpot is (and why it’s cool) I humbly submit a metaphor: OneSpot is an amplifier for good taste. That’s right. An amplifier. For good taste. I guess this bears some explanation. I previously drew a comparison between OneSpot, Amazon.com and Netflix as a shorthand way of explaining recommendation engines. I don’t want to overstrain that comparison, but indulge me while I go back to that well one more time to elaborate on something that differentiates OneSpot. I promise to get back around to explaining how this relates to good taste and amplifiers. While Amazon.com and Netflix use their customers’ feedback to shape the recommendations they make, OneSpot uses its customers’ feedback AND the Web to recommend the best content from around the Web. That’s right: we use the Web itself to help us select the best content from the Web. This works because the content on the Web, for the most part, is created by people. Real live human beings with feelings, opinions and distinct points of view. Whether this person is a beat reporter on deadline at a major newspaper, an amateur blogger, or an old high school buddy on Facebook, these people are not just creating content but sharing content. They share content by linking to it. And as a rule, they tend to only link to content that they find interesting, or more precisely they tend to link to things that they think their audience will find interesting. The key is that a link represents, for the most part, a human judgment that the thing being linked to is worthy of attention. The hard part, of course, is not just recognizing that links are valuable, but figuring out how to best use this valuable data. Solving that problem is the “secret sauce” that makes OneSpot tick, and where we spend a lot of our time and effort. Now, back to that amplifier metaphor. I mentioned we use our customers’ feedback AND the Web to make recommendations. The way this works is our customers act as editors, giving our system examples of good and bad content. These editorial decisions tell our system something about what sort of content is interesting, from the perspective of the editor. Given a limited number of editorial decisions, and using link data from the web and a dash of OneSpot’s “secret sauce”, we can extrapolate and apply the same editorial perspective across a vast and ever-growing sea of Web content. In effect, given a sample of editorial opinion we are able to amplify that editorial perspective and apply it to the World Wide Web. Cool, huh? It’s hard for me to roll out the OneSpot-as-amplifier metaphor and write about ranking the web without getting, well, a little heady. It reminds me of my favorite scene from a very funny movie, This is Spinal Tap, when Nigel Tufnel is showing off the band’s equipment and proudly points out that the volume knobs on their amplifiers don’t stop at 10 like most amplifiers: “these go to 11!”