Thanks for this great post!

Re the “Calacanis/Keen model of human human and expertise filtering content for you”.
Kevin I think we need more moderation about human filtering. I mean I don’t feel like it is relevant to name this old time reality by a couple of web actors. Stowe Boyd once in London was kind enough to do a private conference at Headshift about the “flow”. And in this flow, information was coming from known and accepted sources. Actually what we see here is nothing more than an old habit. Up to the emergence of institutionalized mass media, the best channel for getting attention was word of mouth. Information flows from one to another and diffuse to a certain extend depending on the level of confidence we have on the information provider. Depending on the confidence we would remix the message by adding a certain level of subjectivity, like “this is crap” or “this is great”. Subjectivity is the filter but subjectivity is filtered too. The capacity to diffuse the info is based on recognition exactly as it happens within the blogosphere.

Re the “I’m just concerned that some people may make a jump from “reading my mind” to “making my decision for me””.
Mark, you are right but I think we already are beyond that. I mean the problem already is there. It is there on the wild wild web as behind any participative website, wikipedia first, there is a hierarchy that influences the content. For instance, the French wikipedia is known to be very restrictive as it is lead by “deletionists” while the Spanish and English ones are more liberal as managed by “inclusionists”. Check Kaboodle as an article in those three sister encyclopedia. I was referring at the time to a small Santa Clara based start-up doing social shopping. The very same article in three different languages. English and Spanish Wikipedia accepted it, the French version deleted in in less than 3 days. It was immediately flagged and the 3 day review process was very similar to Mc Carty’s : a tiny tribe of friends decided it was not good and declared for the sake of the “community” that this article was to be deleted.
This happens behind the firewall too. I mention that because there is a trend towards having second generation web entering the organization (Enterprise 2.0). The hierarchy makes decision for you in areas where you are supposedly clever enough to decide. For instance, it is by managerial decision that you are given access to certain info or restricted to use the web. In certain projects I manage, clients do want a blog but do not want to allow conversations. The blog is there is for publishing corporate info and comments are either prohibited or subject to a lengthy review process that kills spontaneity and therefore conversations.

Now to get back to the article itself, I reiterate that it is a very nice one. There are couple of elements I would like to discuss:
1) not all tools are on the same level. Blogs and wikis are excellent for producing contents (1st level), social networks are excellent for diffusing information (2nd level) and RSS and aggregators are excellent for capturing information (3rd level). Obviously level 3 helps fuel level 1 so that we have a “virtuous” circle here.
2) Relevance comes from the sources but also the purpose.
The social computing stack we both describe is to be organized toward a certain purpose. Otherwise it is only a bunch of tools that produce nor value nor relevance. So that one needs to think purpose and process, not technology when choosing its tools, whether as an individual or as an organization. Too much social computing projects fail because people believe that the tool will do everything by itself. This is a belief inherited from previous IT: one problem, one solution.
3) The issue now is not to store but to access information
There is a shift of problematic here. And one way to sort it out is to let the end-user decide and manage what information s/he gets, from which source. This is the reason why I see, in addition to powerful rss filtering and trusted peer networks of information distribution, real value in personalized portals. They allow aggregation of information, personalization and simplification (one roof) of the of the user experience. This is the reason why I see those tools being the first and principal point of entry to information, on the web but also in organizations. Search engine and document folders would probably see their domination decreasing in the coming years. Netvibes and iGoogle definitely are great tools on web, apparently PersonAll
follows the same path but works in and for organizations.

Recommendation and filtration seem to be the dominant themes of “what’s next”. I’m just concerned that some people may make a jump from “reading my mind” to “making my decision for me”.