News You Can Bruise for 2005 August 16

del.icio.us has a recommendation engine now. Looking at the results it gives, I think I can guess at its inner workings. It feels a lot like the "related pages" you can get from a Google search, which makes sense because it's got a lot of the same constraints: it needs to give recommendations given a URL or a small number of URLs, and it doesn't have a way of keeping any recommendation feedback. Like the Google recommendations, it could use a good dose of the Indie Rock Peter Principle; many results it gives me just because they've been bookmarked by thousands of people and are somewhere near this URL in the graph. The IRPP can be applied without introducing a per-user scaling factor, unlike a lot of other ways of improving recommendations.

I just know I'm gonna turn into one of those crotchety computer geezers who had an idea back in 1972 and spends their whole life complaining that nobody Gets It.