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The change in the architecture of the media
is completely connected to a change of the control
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With the broadcast system you have one person in one station
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deciding what gets put out over the airwaves.
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When you have distributed network like the internet everybody can be a server.
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There's no distinction between the broadcaster and the receiver:
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every computer does both.
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You can take your home laptop and run a server off of it that can distribute movies and music
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and webpages and email in the same way that the biggest computers at google can.
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there's no fundamental difference between the computers they have in iraq in their server rooms
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and what you have on your desk
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In the old system of broadcasting,
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you were fundamentally limited by the amount of space in the airwaves
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you could only send out 10 channels over the airwaves in television
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or even with cable you had 500 channels.
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On the internet, everybody can have a channel;
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everyone can get a blog or a MySpace page;
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everyone has a way of expressing themselves
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and so what you see now is not a question of
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who gets access to the airwaves,
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it's a question of who gets control
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over the ways you find people.
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You start seeing power centralising in sites like google,
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these sort of 'gatekeepers' that tell you where on the internet you want to go
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the people who provide you your sources of news and information.
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so its not only certain people have a license to speak
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now everyone has a license to speak,
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it's question of who gets heard.
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So one of the biggest questions we're facing in a world of many speakers
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how do you find what's good?
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Are we gonna go to a system like the old media where you go to CNN
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and they pick a handful of people to focus on
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and you read what they say
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or are we going to go with something more like the internet
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where everybody has a chance of being heard, a more democratic system.
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One of the most interesting technologies for doing something like that
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is a system called collaborative filtering,
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where everybody expresses their opinions on what they like and what they don't like
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and the computer tries to match you up with other people who have similar preferences
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and recommend you things that they also like that you didn't know about before.
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It's the same kind of system you see on Amazon
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where people who bought this book also bought this book
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people are trying to experiment that not only with books
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but with blogs, web pages and news stories all across the internet,
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they're trying to find ways and things that you've never heard of before
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and bringing them in front of you
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Mass media had this fundamental paradox
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because it was aiming at a huge audience
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but it wanted to convince everybody they were an individual
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you see all these ads on television all the time like
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'buck the trend, buy these jeans' right!?
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and it's on a show that 4 million people are watching,
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you're not going to buck a trend by doing what 4 million other people are.
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Now that the internet is actually making these nitch things possible
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the mass media is incredibly threatened
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no longer this idea of bucking the crowd and being your own
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it's no longer just a theory you can actually do it on the internet
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And what we're starting to see is tools that take power away from the big conglomerates
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and start to distribute it to small groups.
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And so there are a bunch of issues in a system like that there are questions of funding you know,
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how will these small groups get paid and how will the random blogger be able to live
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in a way that an investigative journalist can now
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because there's one giant source of advertising
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you know there are question finding people, how will I be able to find the stuff I'm interested,
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and the stuff that's trustworthy and reliable
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and so for each of these there are new technologies
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people are trying all kinds of different things
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and all of these say different things about the internet
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there is still experimentation in this, since everybody can just go up and start a website
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with a new piece of technology that try and solve one of these problems
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We're seeing lots of different possibilities, lots of different funding models
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lots of different recommendations systems and who knows what will work best
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we have a chance to try it all and see what falls out
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So there are a couple of interesting funding models:
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One of course is this standard model of advertising,
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you go to a bunch of big corporate sponsors and instead of having them fund a television show
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you have them fund your webpage
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but a more interesting one is you do the same thing with nitch groups
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instead of going to IBM/Ford or a big company, and having them buy a banner on your website
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you go to people that actually care about the readers you have
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if you're a design weblog you go to design companies
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if you're a political blog, you go to other politicians
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you have a very targeted narrow group of people who are really interested in the subject,
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thats an audience advertisers really love
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another possibility is to turn directly to your readers for support
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you see blogs say, I wanna go to a trip to New Hampshire
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to cover the american political conventions
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will you support me?
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and the readers pour in money
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these people are very dedicated they feel like they have a personal connection
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with the person writing
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they are eager to spend money to support it!
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Another thing is that you simply work of volunteer labor
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you have people that have a day job thats an expert in a subject
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and they just enjoy talking about it so they rate stuff in their free time
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and publish it on the internet
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or they have readers who read their site and contribute stuff
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and it gets compiled into one exciting source.
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So I think there are lots of interesting experiments,
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people are trying lots of different ways
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One of the errors you had with television, right, could only provide one level of interest
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it was funded based on adertising not on how much people cared about the programme
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advertisers were going to pay the same no matter how exciting or how compelling
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or how interested an audience was in a show
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so what you ended up with was fairly boring shows that appealed to lots of people
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because that's what advertisers wanted
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they wanted lots people watching the shows
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whereas in a normal market economy what happens is
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if you really want something you pay more for it
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you just can't do that with television.
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So one of the interesting things about broadcast is that a lot of what you like
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depends on what other people like
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there are only so many shows out there
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they are all kind of bland
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so what happens, you have these megahits
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like American Idol or lost, where everybody at the water cooler is talking about this show,
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so you have to watch it because otherwise you can't keep up with them
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whatever social factors get involved
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you have this sort of process of rich gets richer
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one thing takes off because thats what everybody else is doing!
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One nice thing about the internet is that it allows for so much more variety
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that nitch products can get so much more attention and interest
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So they've the run the numbers and this this proven mathematical fact
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that as long as some percentage of what you care about is whether other people
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like it or now you're gonna end up
with this patterns of hits and failures
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if you have two things which are equivalent in quality,
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one of them is liked by one more person
than the other one,
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you're going to go that one
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there's some small chance that you're going to go to that one
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and everybody's going to start going to that one
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and all of a sudden you have harry potter
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this one book plucked of nowhere that suddenly becomes this massive mega-hit.
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not because it's a hundred million times better written than every other book
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but simply because everybody's reading it
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and putting stuff on the internet doesn't change that,
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you still care about what your friends like, still wanna read what everybody else is talking about,
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ou still wanna do what's popular because you think maybe other people have a valid opinion
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and maybe you wanna talk to them about it
maybe you want to join part of this community
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but whatever your reason is,
as long as you care about what other people opinion
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you're going to end up with these hits.
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You just have this social signifier that everybody cares about
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You just have this social signifier that everybody cares about
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everybody's watching American Idol
doesn't matter how good the show is
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I mean it has to be somewhat decent so people watch it,
but once everybody's watching it,
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talking about it, you know,
it suddenly becomes this megahit for no real reason,
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right, just because it's a social phenomenon
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and what television does, it chops off the tale and it throws away all the other shows
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people would like but don't care enough about to be megahits
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and instead pours all of its money into these cheap produced shows
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well you can't get rid of hits, right
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it's a fact that people would wanna do what their friends are doing
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you can't avoid that but what you can do is say
there's the whole rest of the world out there
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there's a whole rest of what people care about other than what everybody else is doing
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Everybody has their own particular interests everybody has something that fascinates them
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and what the internet does is it allows them to 'do' that
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to get involved and find other people who share these things
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one of the exciting things about Wickipedia
is that it doesn't just have articles on
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you know, 100 most popular things or 1000 most popular things
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you can pick the most obscure subject in the world
and there's an article about it
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Because for EVERYTHING,
there's someone who cares a great deal about it
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and that's what television,
that's what radio doesn't provide, but the internet does!
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it provides a way for you to get in touch
with those other people who really
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care about this completely obscure thing
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It doesn't just go into the direction of topic,
it goes into the direction of time
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You can go back in time and find all the shows that have been canceled
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find all the articles that have been deleted
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you can go back and find everything that has been lost in major culture
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and it's got a place on the internet
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Youtube music videos from the 70s and the 80s
that you can't find anywhere these days
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you can watch at your leisure
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I think lessening the power of the hits
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bringing down the things from the top
and making it more egalitarian
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is the something we should always strive for
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it may be really difficult it may not be super possible
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but it's something to hope for, to drive for
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and what that means is
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throwing away as much as possible all the things that give you hints about
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you should do this because other people like it
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it's very tempting
when you're building a website or programming system
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is to start sorting things that are really popular at the top
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but all that does is, that it makes it less democratic and less fair
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you have to have continual pressure,
to try and pull things from the bottom from the tale up
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give everybody a chance to look at everything and if you do that
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maybe, you won't get completely rid of hits,
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but you can start to ???? some of their problems
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I mean that's one power of data mining
is that construct to find obscure subjects
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that you wouldn't have found
simply because they are not popular
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you know one of the tools of recommendation
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can be to pull you to the less popular stuff on the tale
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The random article button on Wikipedia
is really cool in this sense
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you can just wake up every day
and read about some completely random topic
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that you never heard of except for the fact
that there's an article on the Wikipedia about it
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and boy are there some completely random topics on Wikipepdia