Shel Israel (co-author with Scoble on Naked Conversations) has an interesting observation on Digg that should suggest to the church or its supporting organizations that “finding what is relevant” is for us, certainly NOT likely to be found in mass culture. While it is certainly useful to KNOW what mass culture is interested in, from the perspective of church people, we need our own “DIGG”, with its own taxonomy (for that amtter, we need our own Google , too)
Naked Conversations: Why I don’t dig Digg
I think it is very, very hard to let people find what is relevant to them and for a company to do that for masses of people. I look forward to using any tools that can help me find stuff that I personally consider either interesting or useful.
Thanks Shel! I work in Web development for a church denominational organization, so this type of thing has long been on my mind. The social networking, myspace-type concepts along with the various relevance engines/platforms are also , in my book, a potential key driver of “conversation-finding”, which I believe gets even more valuable for church folks especially when their theological tastes don’t find much local resonance (ie “they’re finding it hard to find people and places who share their vision for the church). Finding conversations via relevnace/ranking/interest-aqggregation seems to be an important consideration for churches and other theological communities.
BTW, sorry about the Red Sox recent slide. I can relate, I’m a Cincinnati Reds fan (who aren’t out of it yet, but seem to be heading that way after a disastrous West Coast trip.)
BTW, you can now comment here “unmoderated”. Thanks for being here.
Dale
It seems to me that it could be relatively easy for churches of the same denomination or belief set could get some sort of relevancy engine. That engine could let church members search by keywords. It should also be relatively easy to establish social reputations rankings such as ebay uses, so that recommenders or voteers are ranked by their particpation and relevance in the church.
The same should be true for me. I want recommendations from people whose passions may be pretty secular, who care about business, blogging and maybe the Boston red Sox.