
Implicit kicks explicit's ass - udfalkso
http://breasy.com/blog/2007/07/01/implicit-kicks-explicits-ass/
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mynameishere
There are two things being said here:

1\. Implicit is better because it avoids people's corrupted "conscious" minds.

2\. Implicit is better because it is harder to game.

The corollary to #2 is: An implicit system can, in fact, be gamed, but it
requires cleverness/sleuthing/persistence/money/massive
organization/etc/etc...whatever the situation calls for. Google uses 40+
variables to determine what gets on the front page. Digg uses 1 variable.

...if something smells funny on Digg's front page, it's usually pretty clear,
and it's pretty obvious _what_ is going on. There's one method to game Digg,
and because of the simplicity, the community and the admins _should_ be able
to put in counter-measures that are equally simple. With google...eh. Who
knows? It's security through obscurity. One thing is certain: The well-
pageranked of google are an enduring elite, whose only real enemies are the
heuristic wizards deep within google itself.

~~~
tt
The real hat trick is to combine the two approaches. You can "ask" the users
for explicit feedback, but use metadata to decipher their real interest and
intention.

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cglee
This is is obviously true. However, the problem has always been in figuring
out which implicit vars lead to explicit insights about your ecosystem and how
strong that association is. Implicit tracking also opens some privacy
questions. Generally a good line of thinking though.

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bootload
the url has barfed (404) try <http://breasy.com/blog/2007/06/30/implicit-
kicks-explicits-ass/>

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udfalkso
link is fixed now

