Chris Saad on Personal Relevancy

Chris Saad of Touchstone jumps off from my post on social networks and attention services to discuss personal relevancy:

...the real attention killer app is something I am starting to call 'Personal Relevancy'.

Personal Relevancy is about letting you choose the sources you subscribe to and then applying a filter to the incoming items so that the most important items rise to the top of the pack.

This can be done by analysing and modelling a single user's behaviours and interests as apposed to aggregating a broad community’s behaviours and interests.

This is the long tail of relevancy and attention - it is not about the top 10, its about the next 100,000. It is not what 100,000 people find interesting, it's about what YOU find interesting.

The wrinkle I'd add is that it's all contextual: Sometimes we're going to be interested in items from our personal Long Tail, sometimes we're going to be interested in items on the global Top 10 list, and sometimes we're going to interested in items derived from some sub-community in between--friends and family, co-workers, teammates, etc. We should ultimately be able to mix and match the sources powering our discovery and recommendation systems to suit our needs at the moment. But Chris is right to note that it all starts with what's personally relevant and builds from there.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+economy attention+data chris+saad touchstone personal+relevancy