Apologies for any implication that DZone is “automated” ranking – of course it isn’t. I’ve recently started voting on DZone (and Digg), and will try to do so on any other such sites where I find good stuff.

I do like DZone, and hope you can get even more people to make the effort so that it improves further. But alongside skimming through lists of stuff to pick out what I do and don’t want to read (and voting, of course, and doing similar on other sites), I still feel there is also a place for a “trusted” individual’s pick of a small number of items they think especially noteworthy. At any rate, I find such things interesting, and sometimes useful as an alternative view.

I guess there’s two extremes: a few individuals putting a lot of effort and their own personalities and “smarts” into it, vs. large numbers of people making a little effort each, and “the wisdom of crowds”. To my mind both have their merits, and my ideal world would have room for both and/or something in-between. As ever, this is just my personal taste (and perhaps a generational thing – after all, I’ve had seven years of being able to enjoy Erik’s linkblog!).

Regards, Mike

But I feel there’s an important subtext that is missing, and I think Erik would agree. DZone is not a 3rd-party information resource assembled by a traditional publishing team of authors and editors. On the contrary, DZone is you – I found this blog entry because it was referenced from DZone.

DZone is NOT automated filtering, not at all. Instead, it depends utterly and completely on the participation of community members who give a tiny portion of their valuable time to VOTE in the queue. Social filtering works, but it only works when people actually vote. The cost (time and effort) is truly minimal, and the benefits are rich. Every single queue vote has enormous impact, and if more people voted regularly we could continue to raise the minimum threshold score required for a link to get promoted.

It’s so easy, but 99% of the people are absolutely passive consumers of the information, returning nothing to help the system deliver better results – the results they want! DZone is powered solely and completely by human filtering, and it can improve by leaps and bounds if more humans participate in the process. I hope every reader will understand this and consider taking the leap into the 1% or so who really make it work for everyone else. I see the numbers every day, and you’d be amazed how much power and influence a single vote can have.

Don’t lament too much, just begin voting and help drive a community effort that I guarantee you Erik has been involved in shaping since I first conceived of it. All it takes is a small effort, and the returns are abundant.

Cheers,
Rick

Thanks for the link to PopUrls, hadn’t seen that before. DZone’s good at what it does, but as Alex Miller says at Pure Danger Tech, there’s real value in human filtering (and maybe adding context and discussion).

The dilemma is that the volume of stuff seems too much for human filtering to be practical (at least for unpaid, spare-time), but automated filtering, ranking etc just doesn’t seem smart enough yet.

Cheers,
Mike

-Rich