The Return of the Human

Interesting post from Jason at 37 Signals. I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing interesting, since the tension between human/computer decisions is at the heart of the project I'm working on. In broad terms, it's a product recommendation tool. I'm not at liberty to say more right now. Soon, hopefully. But everything that's out there now, from Amazon on down to niche verticals pretty much makes recommendations based on computer algorithms, human editors, or some combination of the two. What works best in which circumstances?

Well, with Amazon patenting its suggestion/recommendation tools and the more strident members of the "blogs will set you free" crowd insisting that everything you need to know is already out there in the brains of bloggers and commenters and all you need is a good search engine to find/aggregate it, it's nice to know that some companies are rediscovering the value of human judgment.

On a very-much-related note this week, Google, the quintessential "computer brain," launched its finance site which, in addition to lots of computer code, will employ...yup, editors. John Battelle notes the change in direction for the company:

"Google Finance will have a Groups section where stocks are discussed with paid moderators - that's editors to you and me. And that's a shift, a shift that is worth noting."

Indeed. Editors get a bad wrap because the simplistic view of them pits them against the whole notion of the collective wisdom of the social web. "I don't need an editor to tell me what to think," is a legitimate but oversimplified statement. When editors do that in a one-way "Word of God" manor, they provide no real value and shouldn't be trusted. Newspapers, at least the bad ones (and, no, that's not all of them) are partly to blame.

A good editor does indeed create and in turn rely on the trust of the community. They listen. They facilitate. They save you time and effort from going through stuff that doesn't interest you. Doesn't mean it's junk. Doesn't mean it's not of value to someone else (hence the need to get away from one-size-fits-all news). It just means that for that particular community, the editor included, it's peripheral or indeed counterproductive to the core mission, be it learning about how your local school district works or how a stock is doing or how a piece of software can help you run your business.

The social web has opened up lots of wonderful opportunities for people everywhere to create and share stuff and express themselves online, but it's not sacrilege to note that a lot of it is not of any interest to most of us and can get in the way of our work and play. In fact, that's the beauty of the social web. Most people don't care about any particular piece of information. But as long as even just a few do, that's enough for a community to develop and thrive.

As Jason says, it's about "trimming those weeds before they ruin the lawn."