How do you filter out what’s important to you? For knowledge that flows towards you, you have a lot more control over this. Through our feed readers we have precise control over what we follow, and through email we can filter out spam and label all mail automatically. When we go out searching for something though things aren’t quite as controllable.

An earlier podcast on StackOverflow talked briefly about this problem and their human driven solution to solving it. The problem is simple — there’s a lot of information out there so how do you cut through the stuff you don’t want so that you only see what’s worth seeing? Slashdot has been doing exactly this with their comments for as long as I can remember. Each comment to an article on Slashdot can be rated (1-5) as well as have a reason attached to it (funny, informative, insightful, etc). This enables the average user to glance over the comments and see those that stand out the most. Digg has a similar system based on up/down votes for comments, which seems to be the route StackOverflow is headed as well (which means they probably won’t have 50 options for displaying comments, but I can live with that).

I’m a fan of this kind of system. It’s the same thing Digg or Tallyhoh use, just on a micro scale — that of user exchanges. But it doesn’t solve the bigger problem: everything not submitted. Everything Google finds, for example, it finds on it’s own by using spiders to explore every available link. The only data available about a given page is right there, on pages that link to that page and possibly on the DNS record for the domain. That’s not too much to go on when you’re trying to evaluate the importance of one site over another.

Eric Sink mentioned this in a very good article titled Baptists and Boundries. Apparently he out Eric’d a number of other much more recognizable Erics throughout history (lots more to that article by the way, and worth a read). The same problem exists in the Adam-verse as well:

First Page:
Adam (bible)
Adam Curry (geek)
Adam Lasnik (geek)
Adam Kinney (geek)
Adam Trachtenberg (geek)

Other Notables:
#15 Adam Savage (Mythbusters)
#21 Adam Baldwin (Firefly, The man they call Jane)
#23 Adam Sandler (Actor, Comedian)
#39 Adam West (Batman)
#100+ Creation of Adam (Michelangelo)

It makes me wonder how many people searching for “Adam” would actually be looking for geeks. Based on the results on Google’s first page, 4 are geeks, 4 are technical topics and the other two Wikipedia articles for the biblical Adam. To be fair, the Wikipedia Adam is much more relevant to what people would actually want to find, and is grouped much more logically. The problem with the two is that the Google index is created automatically while on Wikipedia the entire set of results was created manually by someone to resolve such ambiguos results.

Googles solution is to use search engine optimization practices to determine who’s on top, coupled with Pagerank and incoming links — but that’s obviously flawed. They also order based on some personal preferences (if you’re logged in) which might help focus results to your interests. The blogs in the top might have semantic HTML, proper title tags and a decent amount of incoming links from similar geeky sites, but I wouldn’t say their more important than the Sistine Chapel. Microformats might help to give context to some of the results, but it doesn’t do anything for order. I wonder if it’s time for Google to start leveraging group think for order. Having a Google system that can be that easily gamed is a recipe for disaster, but I wonder if there’s a way the two could be merged to fixed problems like this.

Maybe Google really thinks geeks are that important. After all, Penn said it best:

Google doesn’t seem to fuck up much. – Penn

There comes a time in everyones life when they have to setup a linux computer from scratch. OK, so maybe not, but if you’re a web programmer you might well be faced with the problem of putting out a colocated server, just a VPS where you have full control over the box. With full control comes full responsibility though, so I hope you’re willing to learn a little on your feet.

For the new rails site I’m putting together, I decided on Slicehost. Why Slicehost? For cheap, respectable rails hosting with a load of support it just kept coming up. You have all the default features — the ability to upgrade your account at any time, a variety of operating systems. For someone just getting started, you might also want the ability to rebuild your system at anytime, which is possible from the Slicehost web panel. If you decide you want to switch from Ubuntu 7 to 8, or from CentOS to Fedora, it’s just a matter of selecting the option (well, and then rebuilding your slice from scratch). You can also restart of course.

What really sold me was the wealth of information available by other Slicehost members. There’s a wiki with some details but the technical article repository is a fantastic source of knowledge for getting a fresh install up and running for just about anything you’d want.

I’m still in the process of getting this setup, but I’ll post about my experience at Slicehost more as I use them. If you’re looking for a quick start with Rails from scratch, whether you’re experienced in setting a box from scratch or not, Slicehost offers some very useful tools.

If you’ve ever noticed that little leaf on my sidebar, you’re probably familiar with 9 Rules. 9 Rules is a community of bloggers focused on, you guessed it, 9 Rules. These are available in their about page, but the focus is to Love what you do and Never stop learning. If you’re even reading this blog you’ll probably qualify for both of these. If you have a blog, why not submit it to 9 Rules this round? I’m amazed at some of the new blogs that have been accepted this round already including Zen Habits, Unclutterer and Smashing Magazine — 3 blogs I already follow. Don’t think you need 100,000 RSS subscribers or even 100 to join though — they accept based on content and dedication. I’m looking forward to seeing if I stay in in what looks like a very fast growing and dedicated blogosphere.