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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