The key to knowledge discovery
The web is full of knowledge. More so now than ever before. And it’s only going to get bigger.
That’s largely why, unsatisfied with the common search engine as a discovery tool, community driven bookmarking tools have become the preferred discovery tool for web users.
Sites such as Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Stumbleupon and more provide a filtered stream of the latest web content based on the proposition that if these people found it relevant to a category, I will too.
Twitter too, has become widely used as a real-time bookmarking tool, through which users can quickly syndicate their recommended content to a specific community of receivers.
It’s convenient and more often than not the highest rated content is the most worthwhile to view.
But there’s an inherent problem with relying on community ratings for knowledge that will often help form your own opinions and level of knowledge.
It’s all too easy to put yourself at the mercy of consensus, to only hear one side of any argument. This comment has been made about the web in general. As a rule, the smaller the pool of content we dip into, the more skewed our experience of shared knowledge becomes.
The diagram above illustrates my thoughts on the knowledge discovery process. Items at the top are convenient but skewed. Whereas offline discovery at the bottom, takes more activity but serves to increase the pool of knowledge.
In order to ensure the shared pool of knowledge expands with original thinking, offline research will always be the key to creating that layer of online data for the search engines to index and the people to rate.
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