DISQUS

Ethan Bauley · 2 months ago

I can barely understand most of this blog post ;-) but there's two primary tech-mediated forms of serendipity I've been exposed to:

1. clicking on links in blog posts/articles I'm reading (pre-Twitter era)
2. surfing the "stream of stuff from people I'm subscribed to (Twitter era, also incl FB newsfeed of course)

The primary function here is: trusting the sources enough, in aggregate, to allow them to waste a bit of your time as an investment. The return is finding something that you didn't know you needed/wanted.

So I think that this is getting at the same "attention economy"/info mgmt issues that have been discussed elsewhere, but from a different and useful perspective ("serendipity").

That is to say: I think it's possible to have a stream of 100% serendipitously awesome stuff I wanna click on, with 0% "noise". Or: serendipity doesn't necessarily have to carry the cost of inefficiency. A combination of a reputation score (quality over time) and velocity (what content do most people like right now) would probably solve this.

Just putting this out there.

Taylor Davidson · 2 months ago

Dude, you're one of the few that can understand my tortured thought process :)

And thus, your reformation is spot-on.

Your last point is the best, though: yes, it's possible to experience serendipity without inefficiency. But the question then becomes are you getting enough serendipity? The argument is similar to the discussion we had about privacy and location-based services with Alan: in the same way that people might "overvalue their privacy and undervalue the benefits of broadcasting more info publicly (both on an individual and aggregate level)", we could also be undervaluing the benefits of serendipity (i.e. continuous partial attention, yada yada).

Maybe.

The point about reputation score and velocity is perfect, and I think more metrics like that will help us figure out how to balance our attention and time across showing up and participating online and offline. This is why things like twitter lists, influence scoring (e.g. @tunkrank, whuffie bank), postrank, backtype, Radian 6 etc all matter: because they are trying to figure out all these little decisions we make in how we balance our time and attention and condense them into numbers that help us make informed decisions.

Taylor Davidson · 2 months ago

Or perhaps we could think about relevance, velocity etc. much more
practically: how do we decide between using last.fm v. Pandora v.
Spotify v. Mixcloud v. Soundcloud v. radio v. Hype.fm v. buying CDs
and mp3s, etc. ?

Looking beyond the social aspects, the international limitations, the
device availability, service inertia and the prices (hmm...), and
ignoring that the services above can be complements to each other,
discovery and serendipity (finding new music we might like and love)
is a big part of how and why we choose each service. Each uses their
own set of filters with different uses of algorithms and people. For
many of us, the choiceon how we allocate our time and money comes down
to which delivers to us the best music. In this case, delivering the
right level of serendipity becomes a very practical business question.

Ethan Bauley · 2 months ago

ya

well i'd say basically for all kinds of content there's two axes:

- being able to find exactly what you know you're looking for (fast, easily)
- someone/thing recommending stuff you didn't know you wanted (with
minimum wasted effort)

jimgoldstein · 2 months ago

Personally speaking once you put serendipity into a formula it becomes something other than serendipity.... it becomes strategic planning. :) The intangible benefit of serendipity is the process of discovery and excitement that generates. That provides people a great feeling and a story to share (a la Word of Mouth marketing). While planning or optimizing to maximize serendipitous encounters is a great idea the purest might argue it actually transforms serendipity into a manufactured experience. From a biz dev perspective that might hardly be a concern, but as authenticity and transparency become pillars of new media interaction it should be something to consider.

Taylor Davidson · 2 months ago

Taken to the extreme, yes, optimizing can make it more akin to strategic planning and strip away the joy and the buzz; but this isn't a question of purity, or making binary choices between polar opposites, but of figuring out the balance on a continuum. Check out Ethan's comment for a better formulation of the question.

gregorylent · 2 months ago

what was your traveling camera on this last trip? and, as befits the new era, can you answer on twitter? i never get back to blog posts i commented on :-) ... lol

Taylor Davidson · 2 months ago

done :) http://twitter.com/tdavidson/status/4638885409

David Sanger · 2 months ago

In photography, like in fishing, there are things you can do to improve your odds, such as going out day after day before sunrise to the same spot until something wonderful happens. This is a form of technique, upping the odds.

True serendipity is when something batshit crazy just comes out of nowhere when you are not looking for it at all.

The skill is to be able to recognize it when it appears.


"There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in. "

Anthem Leonard Cohen