Yesterday's new thing that I learned: the technical term for the sort of recommender tools I blogged about a couple of weeks ago is “collaborative filtering.”
Today's new thing that I learned: Google Reader is now using collaborative filtering to recommend new blogs to me. Curiously, the top three recommendations that it had for me were all library blogs, despite the fact that library-related blogs are a distinct minority in my blog subscriptions. However, my Gmail account is absolutely overflowing with library-related stuff, because I subscribe to a whole bunch of library-related listservs. So now I'm wondering . . . is Google using information skimmed from my e-mail to suggest blogs to me? The Google Reader FAQs say no, but I remain suspicious—and really curious about the data and algorithms they're using.
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I've noticed similar "coincidences" in other Google services.
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