Comments on: Friday procrastination data mob: Your Influences

By: skud

skud — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:00:32 +0000

I checked it with Mike Love, who instigated that domain -- I see that Martin has also commented in that thread with similar thoughts. If you look at apps like FreeInfluencer, you can see a measure of "importance" there. I also had some discussions about that with Colin from our data team. I guess my point is that it's possible (and quite interesting) to algorithmically determine which influence nodes are "important" ones and which ones aren't. Alas, algorithms like that aren't my forté, but I'm sure someone will pipe up with some suggestions ;)

By: Kris Haamer

Kris Haamer — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:32:36 +0000

I did list myself in the Data Mob but for me it raised the same questions as Will has asked above. If I would access this influence data programmatically, how would I discriminate based on relative ‘celebrity’ or ‘notability’? Perhaps there could be a sort of Google PageRank style filter that one could invoke?

By: Will Moffat

Will Moffat — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:01:21 +0000

Hi, I’m a little worried that this Data Mob might dilute the value of the Influence domain. It seems a little incongruous to read that Jules Verne influenced H.G. Wells, who influenced Carl Sagan, who influenced Peter from Metaweb.

The last fact is unlikely to be interesting to many users. (Nothing against Peter, it’s quite possible that he’ll be a figure of note in the 21st century.)

Perhaps the problem is one of definition, I assumed that “influence” meant “notable influence”, rather than “personal influence”.