Last weekend I shook off my Berkeley inertia and took a trip in to the city to attend WordCamp.

I particularly enjoyed a talk by Rashmi Sinha about social networks and popularity. There are some problems inherent in basing a site’s navigation on popularity. A lot of sites like Flickr, Digg, etc. emphasize browsing based on “most viewed”, “most downloaded”, “most popular” tags, etc. The undiscovered posts/images/constributions (the Long Tail) cannot rise to the top in this structure, and ultimately become less findable. The hierarchy reinforces itself. Early adopters of a social network become overly dominant, and their popularity is difficult to dismantle.

Rashmi presented a few ways to override this self-reinforcing popularity mechanism. On her project SlideShare, they set up other navigation panels such as “most recently added”, and they restrict the popularity measures to a specific period of time (“most viewed in the past week”.)

Her presentation from the talk is here (on SlideShare, of course).