I had the pleasure of joining Rex Hammock for drinks last night in Potrero Hill while he was here for Macworld Expo.

Rex is tuned in to some interesting aspects of the online world, particularly through his site SmallBusiness.com which is becoming a useful and increasingly powerful wiki. I was amazed to hear that the contributions are no longer coming from his team. The community is making the site work and building it into a resource that matters.

We also talked about RSS and start pages. Rex shares my frustration that start pages are so dependent on custom configurations that the majority of the world will never do. Machine learning and recommendations technology is not new, and it seems like such an obvious direction for the start page to go…

Show me what the world looks like through a global lens, my networks' lenses and my own personal lens. Learn from both my explicit and implicit behaviors and then adjust.

Amazon knows how to use my shopping behavior to create compelling shopping experiences. Why can’t my news reading behavior be interpreted to create a better start page experience?

The Onion understands this, too:

“Amazon Recommendations Understand Area Woman Better Than Husband“

Pamela Meyers said that her husband, whose gift choices have never reflected any outward recognition of her desire to learn Spanish, nor of the fact that she looks terrible in orange, rarely, if ever, communicates with Meyers while away on any of his frequent business trips.

“I was having some tea from that Nebraska Cornhuskers mug Dean got me for Valentine’s Day, when a little emai from Amazon popped up out of the blue,” Meyer said. “Just completely out of the blue.”

“It was nice to know that on my birthday, someone or something was out there thinking about me, and what boxsed sets I wanted.”

Here’s a fun experiment in crowdsourcing. I’ve been getting overwhelmed by all the startup news coming out of the many sources tracking the interesting ideas and new companies hunting for Internet gold. Many of these companies are really smart. Many are just, well, gold diggers.

And with so many ways to track new and interesting companies, I’ve lost the ability to identify the difference between companies that are actually attacking a problem that matters and companies that are combining buzzwords in hopes of getting funding or getting acquired or both.

There must be a way to harness the collective insight of people who are close to these companies or the ideas they embody to shed light on what’s what. Maybe there’s a way to do that using Pligg.

While shaking my head in a moment of disappointment and a little bit of jealousy at all the new dotcom millionaires/billionaires, the word “flipbait” crossed my mind. I looked to see if the domain was available, and sure enough it was. So, I grabbed the domain, installed Pligg and there it is.

It should be obvious, but the idea is to let people post news of new Internet startups and let the community decide if something is important or not. If I’m not the only one thinking about this, then I can imagine it becoming a really useful resource for gaining insight into the barage of headlines filling up my feed reader each day.

And if it doesn’t work, I’ll share whatever insight I can glean into why the concept fails. There will hopefully at least be some lessons in this experiment for publishers looking to leverage crowdsourcing in their media mix.

Last.fm is my favoriate web app. There’s nothing else on the Internet that comes close.

This thought occurred to me a few weeks back, but it wasn’t until I explained last.fm to a group of publishers at the Stanford Publishing on the Web course this week that it became a conscious truth.

I mentioned it in the context of the importance of user data in today’s distributed and networked media environment and contrasted it with Pandora. Pandora’s service is driven by vast meta data about content. It’s a very robust service because of the depth of data they work with. But content data without user data is not necessarily a defensible position anymore.

I also happened to stumble on one of the coolest mashups I’ve seen in a while called All Crazy Style via the Yahoo! Mashup Gallery the day of the presentation which I then added into the talk last minute. All Crazy Style simply pulls my last.fm usage data (with my permission) and matches it against my Upcoming.org location (again, with permission) and then shows me where and when the bands I tend to listen to most are playing in my area.

Wow. Love it.

I didn’t know that RJD2 is playing at The Independent in San Francisco December 3rd…and since none of my friends are fans I never would have found out otherwise. And there’s no way an advertisement for such a small event would make it to me through the media I consume.

Additionally, I probably wouldn’t have gone looking through Upcoming.org to find any of these listings, because I’m lazy. But my implicit behavior provides enough data so that I don’t have to explicitly track down when my favorite bands are playing. It also provides enough data to essentially recommend shows that I might like.

I was already a fan of last.fm but I didn’t realize they opened up their APIs this way. Now I’m never going to leave. In fact, I want every music-playing device I own to include the audioscrobbler tracking tool which tracks my listening behavior. I want it to own all my listening behavior, and I want mashups to pull that data to do interesting things for me.

If only I could take last.fm with me offline somehow.

UPDATE: Businessweek coves last.fm this week:

With 15 million unique users a month, 150,000 band biographies, and an amazing 65 million songs listed in its database, Last.FM has attracted the attention of big money.

I hope that’s true for their sake. This is a startup that deserves a big break. But I hope an acquisition doesn’t ruin the service for me.

It’s hard to resist adding my $0.02 in a debate about blogging like the one Nick Carr started this week with his post on The Great Unread, the story of the royal hierarchy in the blogosphere:

“As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated - with the best of intentions, mind you - by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite.”

It’s definitely worth a read if you blog. If you don’t, it’s more echo chamber music, as is this post.

I suspect that the idea of the blogosphere and the blog elite is a temporary one. The blogger hierarchy does not make the substance of a post any more or less valuable. Ultimately, that value is completely up to me, not some shallow power structure.

I’m hoping that instead of reinforcing global hiearchical power structures that things like recommendation engines, personalization services, syndication and filtering algorithms will weed out the crap and bubble up what matters to me, empowering me to own my media experience.

Popular blogs, podcasts and videos will become just a sidebar to my daily intake when their relevance to my world is only tangential.

I respect what Jay Rosen says (and Nick, for that matter), but his posts are too long for me. I need the blogs I read regularly to filter out which of Jay’s posts are worth spending the time to read. I’m impressed not just by the quality of the posts Jeff Jarvis generates but also the volume. Again, I need an interestingness filter on Jeff’s posts to surface the ones that matter to me.

Yet all of Jay’s and Jeff’s influence on my thinking about journalism and media has no bearing whatsoever on the music I listen to, the basketball teams I follow or the technologies I find interesting.

What Nick rightly points out is that there will be an increasing tendency for people to publish for the sake of fame and fortune which will dilute the pool of interesting things out there. This is the popularity problem.

Perhaps I’m just optimistic. But it seems reasonable to expect that we’ll find technology answers to this issue, automatic ways to subvert wasteful power structures that may be forming in the world of personal media.

Former Yahoo! colleague Don Loeb (now at Feedburner) called out the recent addition of RSS feed recommendations to the My Yahoo! product. This module automatically bubbles up sources that you might want to add to your page so that you don’t have to hunt and peck so much to find stuff that matters to you.

It’s cool to see a technology work as it was intended…but then there are the surprises that aren’t intended that are even better than seeing something go as planned.

One interesting unintended outcome is that I’m actually discovering new blog posts to read that I would never otherwise find amongst my current list of feeds. And I don’t have to subscribe to the feeds to see these posts.

For example, Niall Kennedy’s blog was recommended to me in this new module and I learned that he’d just left Microsoft after a short stay with the Live.com team. I don’t currently subscribe to Niall’s blog and none of my feeds seemed to reference this news. Very impressive.

This is another example of the “Interestingness” concept Tim O’Reilly and Bradley Horowitz have written about this week.

You can get access to the recommendations module by clicking on the small promotional link in the “Inside My Yahoo!” module that comes as a default when you sign up for an account. The reason we’re not making more noise about this pilot is because we’re in test mode to see if it works and if people like it. Plus, it feels like the kind of feature you just expect from a personalized start page anyhow.