A crash course in changing the world.
Serendipity versus Spam
My EVOKE inbox has 79 messages. All of these go to my regular email address too (I know, I can change that setting, but then I'll miss the ones I DO want to see). I understand, and patiently tolerate, people's need to drive others to their posts by sending out messages to their entire friends network, or worse, to the the wh*** community -- I know I get messages from people not on my friends list.
I want to speak up for the value of personal connection, but even more, for the value of serendipity. Chances are, if you email me some spam asking me to go look at your post, I won't. I do sometimes, but only if I know you and I've already read your posts and I'm intrigued by your description of what you wrote. The way I prefer to navigate Urgent EVOKE is by serendipity.
There are many serendipitous paths through the community. If you comment on one of my posts, I'm very very likely to follow the link back to your profile and spend some time browsing yours. (I'm a little behind at the moment, but I'm catching up. I'll get to you.) If you comment in a discussion thread I'm active in, and I'm interested in what you say, I'll go look. I like to check the Latest Activity bar and follow up on titles that interest me. Sometimes I search for tags of interest.
And very often, I follow a meandering path that may start with one of those, but that then leads me to look at posts by people who commented on posts I've read, or things they link to and call out. I've learned so much that way.
I just want to encourage everyone to try serendipity and see where it gets you. It feels more satisfying than spam.
(As an aside -- one type of email gets deleted instantly when I see it. Those are the ones that appear to be responding to an ongoing thread, but are actually just a list of links to the sender's posts. If you're going to spam people, at least be up front about it.)
Views: 8
Tags: EVOKE, serendipity, spam
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Comment by Thomas Pinkerton on March 24, 2010 at 3:40am -
Seconded. Redirect-emails get botched religiously. (And I use my main email, as well. Silly me, eh?)
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Comment by Nicholas Nagao on March 24, 2010 at 3:44am -
Great post ninmah. I like your word choice..."serendipity". This type of usage is something I've been studying on my own websites for some time. This "serendipity" as you call it has some interesting side-effects. There are many tools being used here that encourage this type of usage, and funny enough, when you know this usage exists, you can accurately predict, and if you want influence, usage based on this known user pattern. Anyways, thanks for sharing, and I agree with you. I like to use the site that way as well. I do find it hard to keep up with my threads in the profile area though, so I appreciate the emails as well. I think if the profile section was better laid out, you could get rid of the email notifications altogether, and keep up from within the site itself. It seems like this would be a benefit for the site as well as it would help keep users on the site.
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Comment by ninmah on March 24, 2010 at 3:48am -
Thomas -- Not silly; in theory, we should be able to! Thanks for commenting.
Nicholas - I agree with you, it's difficult to find the updates you want. I wish I could create groups of my friends so that I could have a small number that I really want to keep up with. I love all the connections I've been making, but it's difficult to find the people I want to follow. I know I can "follow" their profiles, but -- ack -- more email!
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Comment by Jessica Gomes on March 24, 2010 at 3:53am -
it's nice to see that you do such a thorough profiling. it must be quite a challenge to do so since you are obviously getting so many emails. you deserve courage points!!!
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Comment by Linda Holt on March 24, 2010 at 3:59am -
I couldn't have said it any better! I want to see what people are doing - but the spam is overwhelming! I like serendipity - I think that Evoke is generating alot of it. . .
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Comment by Nicholas Nagao on March 24, 2010 at 4:02am
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Hey you guys should check out my blog about this kind of stuff
http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/evoke-anarchy
I think you might have identified a possible add-on to the site that maybe someone could tackle even without the site's help.
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Comment by Thomas Pinkerton on March 24, 2010 at 4:10am
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Nicholas: I'd suggest perusing some library literature, if you have the access (or feel like filtering through Google Scholar), on serendipity. It's actually a well-doc**ented occurrence in that field, and one of the main reasons why we organize by subject, instead of some semblance of alphabetically. That way we increase the chances that someone browsing the stacks will find something useful.
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Comment by Nicholas Nagao on March 24, 2010 at 4:15am
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Thomas, thank you for that insite. That's twice now something in library organization has crossed my path today...I will definitely take a look.
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Comment by ninmah on March 24, 2010 at 4:17am
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I would *love* friend groups. Does anyone know how to make that work?
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Comment by Nicholas Nagao on March 24, 2010 at 4:25am
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Let's work the problem. If what you're looking for is a way to orgainze email notifications we can start from a few places.
1. We can try to change the source of the emails (Evoke). However, for this exercise let's avoid this so we can come up with our own solution.
2. We can try to have all the users on Evoke conform to some standard that would allow us to filter based on some keywords that the users would know to embed in their messages. This might work as a Rapid Protoype. Let's say you want to test with just the people in this thread. We could find out if we embed something like in every post we think you'd be interested in, you might be able to create a filter on your inbox to only see the messages that came from people that knew to do this. To help automate this, perhaps we would all be able to use a Signature feature, which would automatically embed a list of these tags to each post. Anyways, this is a very manual way to do this, and unlikely to work long term.
3. The last way I can imagine doing this is to make modifications to the email client itself. With today's technology, there are ways we can actually do this and share the solution. Say for instance we want to use Gmail. Google allows you to use APIs to create add-ons to Gmail. We could create an add-on site to Evoke, call it ninmahfriends-evoke.com Here anyone that wanted to manage such a list could configure their list and install the plugin to Gmail so that it would know to organize the emails, separating the emails related to the people you setup as your true friends on ninmahfriends-evoke.com in a special folder.
Wow, that wasn't as short as I thought, but hopefully it shows that we can achieve things like this all on our own. And when we do, everyone wins :)
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