The other morning I found myself in a cafe, with a breakfast meeting over 40 minutes away and only the Daily Telegraph to read. Needless to say it was read with an abnormal level of thoroughness and thus I came across a column which would have normally slipped my attention.. actually to be fair this entire paper usually slips my attention, I digress.

The column in question was fairly banal and talked about how to deal with that overflowing toy collection of your childrens and no, it didn't suggest perhaps restraint when on the purchasing side of the equation, but I don't have kids so I wouldn't understand. It did however talk about how to organise the toys such that they would stay organised and herein I found some parallels to how we currently organise and present content on the internet.

The basic tenet of the article was that you should put the toys into 3 groups, those used all the time, those used occassionally and those used hardly ever. Accordingly you should put them in boxes where those used all the time are most easily accessed and visible through to those hardly ever being up out of the way and out of sight.

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to work out the flaw here... so, with the wisdom of crowds and the 'viewed' counter based content profiling/ordering in any of our major content sites today such as newspapers, share prices, video (youtube), music (pick a site), photos (flickr etc) are we creating a similiar paradigm online?

Put simply if something is simply viewed a lot of times does this make it something that we are looking for? If that many people have seen it then it can't possibly be bad.. a statement that reminds me of a accounting lecturer I had who explained economic rationalism (the rational consumer) by describing that if you see $10 on the ground it can't possibly be there as someone else would have already picked it up.

So I think, how can we order content such that it will be relevant to the consumer of that content? So, I think about how we find out and come to know things that we like in the real world? By three main methods I would suggest,

1. Trial and Error

2. Relational Basis

3. Advice Basis

Numero uno is really your equivalent to the random article button in wikipedia and yes, there is limited consitent performance in its returning 'relevant content' (I would offer that we should be more open to finding its random results relevant as it is highly likely it will be something we don't already know and should engage our innate nature to learn - but lets save that debate for another day)

Number 2 is simple - I like tomatoes therefore I will probably be ok with Tomato Juice. Check out http://www.pandora.com/ for those of you in the US... very cool application of this to an online radio station.. very cool.

#3 is probably the most prevalent .. "here, I think you will like this"...  it is close to 'share' at the bottom of this blog (thats what we call a subliminal message, go ahead, share this article please) but I think this concept is very under done online. Primarily because it isn't passive, it's active. You have to initiate something for the advice to take place.... now who the hell can be bothered doing that? In the real (offline) world for the better part it doesnt work this way. If you are surfing with a mate and he paddles across to a new peak you are afforded the new information through your observation, no invitation required.

We should be able leverage our social networks to prioritise the information available to us. Put simply who cares if it has 3.2 million views... who of the people who know me and my likes/dislikes have seen it ... or better still liked it.. This is not remarkably dissimiliar to google really. If it has a lot of 'links' then its probably the right thing to be looking at.

However, this time the links are real