Pi ist genau 3

Sometimes you find great stuff by accident. I remember a documentary on the power of Google that I saw on a flight, unable to sleep and  having watched everything else remotely interesting. The documentary, made around 2005, was not very good. I don’t even remember its full name, but it featured an interview with some guy whose name I also forgot. He offered a truly new perspective on personalized search. I vividly remember what he said about the recommendation system on amazon: “It makes you more like you are.” Since then I’ve been thinking about this, for instance when reading tante’s datenschutzkritische defense of personalized search. Via Sebastian Spaeth‘s blog I now learned that this is all long known as the filter bubble, advertised by Eli Pariser who has already published a book with the same title. What I have not found are practical ways out of this danger.

Sometimes you find great stuff by accident. I remember a documentary on the power of Google that I saw on a flight, unable to sleep and  having watched everything else...