Locked in Pandora's Box

It is coming up here and there, and I can totally relate, the idea that simplistic customization and adaptivity in information services can lead to you only seeing the same limited set of stuff you have been established to like. This topic is covered in the recent TED talk by Eli Pariser, who calls it 'personalization bubbles'.

One of the simple ways to demonstrate this is through Pandora, the best music radio site ever which I absolutely adore and which allows you to play music you like not by genre or artist but by its musical characteristics and does this extremely well. If you pick up some non mainstream music you can vote songs up and down until after a certain period of time you will be looping through a list of ten of ten songs or so.

This does have interesting implications in other areas as well, certainly when it goes into even more polarized domains such as, interestingly, politics.