Next week Tuesday Colby Stuart will be organizing the first Pow-wow in The Netherlands of business network organization Ecadamy (in Amsterdam). The usage of Ecadamy as a social networking tool is a proof-of-concept yet to be established because I have been more into Ryze and LinkedIn.
The event takes place in the context of a so-called "club" inside the Ecadamy network, which can be perceived as a community of interest (or practice, though I have not seen many examples of those in the network). There is not a very intuitive way of finding clubs that one would like to get involved in, which appears to be a barrier. Richard Dybowski has an idea (in his blog) that is based on the referral system, used in for example the Amazon website:
A so-called "collaborative filtering" system produces personel recommendations by computing the similarity between your preference and the preference of others. The idea is to automate "word-of-mouth" recommendations based on the concept that similar people like similar things.
A common example of collaborative filtering is seen with Amazon. When you buy a book through Amazon, it determines who else bought the same book and which other books they bought. Amazon hopes that you might also find these other books interesting.
What if the same idea was available to Ecadamy members? For example, collaborative filtering could be applied to clubs to help you find interesting clubs that you might not otherwise be aware of. The only example of collaborative filtering that we have at the moment is the matching of the "fifty words" lists in an attempt to locate similar members, which I suspect is currently done in a very simplistic manner (definitely room for improvement :-).
This happened at 2:00:58 PM or
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