Enter Into The Age of Recommendation
It wasn’t that long ago I was trying to convince people that the internet would one day be a large part of everyone’s life. It was the dawn of the information age.
Today we’ve been there, done that – even though many still think we’re in it. We’re not. A new era in online connections has begun whether you are aware of it or not. The new era has been dubbed ‘The Recommendation Age’.
It’s all part of the way Web 2.0 solved the troubles of the information age. As the web grew so did the overwhelming volume of information on any given subject, product or service. Search engines were bogged down, searchers were frustrated. Like a home that has too much stuff, the clutter was overwhelming.
Some of us learned how to use the search engines better for faster results. The majority of people just gave up. Those in the wise learned to share links of quality information – and services were born to facilitate that ‘content share’.
Sifting through tons of information to get to what we want is a bit like weeding the garden. We have to look at almost every blade of grass to get all the weeds out before we see the right result. And usually we miss a few patches.
What if we had someone helping us weed? Like a tennis umpire overlooking the landscape and directing our attention to important areas within our focal length. Moving from the Information age to the Recommendation age, the collective wisdom of the crowd is the new connoisseur. More and more people spend time writing reviews and recommendations, creating blog posts about everything, posting comments, writing forum topics and replies — these all serve as beacons for searchers by highlighting areas of interest through filtering. Filtering out the junk, the filler, heck even the marketers, and recommending the cream of the crop to both human and search engine spider.
Filtering transcends search and browse behavior. It is amplified through word of mouth. Sites like Facebook are huge filtering engines for recommendations and collective sharing. The ‘linkers’ and ‘bookmarkers’ of the world?build massive lists of tagged links – the numbers of clicks to those sites are like endorsements, showing us where to click next.
With monstrous data crunching technology more and more sites are able to measure consumption patterns in real time and make changes just as quickly. This is a grand shift entering the Recommendation age.
Google Adsense filters immense volumes of keywords to bring quality ad content to any web site. Amazon Associates are easily able to place recommendations and reviews on their own web sites.
Sites like Rhapsody, MySpace, Netflicks, and Commission Junction are the modern day factories. The workforce has been democratized so that any individual anywhere can produce hard or soft products and services for anyone to consume. All of these sites offer sophisticated filtering through recommendations, reviews and statistics. Still other sites like Digg, Reddit, Folkd, Shoutwire and Care2 are aggregators of opinion on any given topic and filter information based on democratic consensus and democratic publishing.
Bloggers filter niche market information providing direct access to relevant data. Blog comments are like fine tuners and direction finders helping us hone in to our personal interests without reviewing every option ourselves.
The age of information is over. We have entered the age of Recommendation.
