What is a Relevance Engine?

Wikipedia and Delicious, both enable us to share content, but the creativity involved in the sharing exercise is pretty low.

Slideshare and YouTube naturally encourages creativity, but it is hard to find the content that we like, from the long tail of mediocrity. Social Recommendations are thus key to consuming content.

While Stumbleupon solves the problem of discovery pretty well, yet the creative effort needed to share a link, is pretty low.

A Relevance Engine, is a class of platform that combines the characteristics of both an Effective Sharing Platform and a Discovery Engine.

A Relevance Engine serves as the one and only means of consuming the Long Tail, that preserves the richness and diversity afforded by the Long Tail

If we consider the Seth Godin's interpretation of Art as something that has the characteristics of being creative, passionate and personal, then Relevance Engine is a new Art Platform.

Talk is Expensive

Clay Shirky, says in "Cognitive Surplus" that, “Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive. “Now the opposite is true: You have to pay in a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want privacy.”

Let us not get too carried away with "Markets are Conversations". Market Conversations are only one type of Conversation, in the enterprise conversational prism.

The Enterprise response to control the outcome, range from total Social Media ban, to opening Social Media to specific departments, to establishing employee policies on Social Media usage. Yet, none of these responses are adequate.

In order to avoid seeing every conversation as a nail, we need new tools, some without conversations, so that Enterprises could instrument relevant tools, pertinent to their context.

Genuineness and the Johari Window are not orthogonal.

Fluid Segmentation

When you ask a person, what makes an Entrepreneur, you would usually get, "A brilliant guy with a great idea and with enormous drive and tons of hard work".

Brilliance is the operative word here and this model is derived from outcome. However, if you ask the same question to an Entrepreneur, he might say, "Just a regular guy with an artist-like devotion to the context that interests him, with tons of experimentation and a die-hard optimist,immune to rejection."

People view the world with their own lens, which is constantly changing. A 30-year old White Male Professional might have had similar interests with others in his segment, in the Television Era, but not so,in the Era of Collaborative Consumption of Long Tail Contents.

Collaborative Consumption provides new affordances to develop a nuanced taste. We are moving from the world of tangible segmentation onto a world of fluid segmentation, where segmentation emerges from computation of consumption data. In the next decade or so, don't be surprised if the 6things that you like, is totally different from the guys, you regularly hang out with.