[drupal-devel] Google Summer of Code: Social context of content

[vlado]

> > Vlado, thanks for you feedback.  Before I add your comments let me  
> > ask a couple clarifying questions to make sure I understand your  
> > additions.
I'm not sure if I am not overdoing it. Maybe I'm widening the scope. If it is
the case ignore me.

I have the understanding that the social context, i.e who knows
whom, who trusts whom on what topic is useful, if it helps us improve
the delivery or filtering of content for particular people, with
particular interests. 

> >  What's new on this subject? veiwpoint?
> I understand why this is useful, but is this really related to  
> social context.  Social context of content does not require  
> categorizing the subject of viewpoint of content.
It is very far fetched, the way I see it. For example:
a controversial issue, let's say election, Bush vs Kerry
viewpoint would be election coverage from Bush, kerry or neutral
supporters. I'm not sure how this could be done though.
It is hard to achieve. But good to keep in mind for future.

> > Decentralised content discovery?
> Correct.  This is the major thrust, can we apply a common set of  
> labels across data sources with common dimensions(descriptions) so  
> that we can discover social context.
> 
> Example:
> Users table
> Contact table
> Contact manager table
> Buddylist table
> XFN hypthetable
> CiviCRM-table
> Profile-table
I would add referral or recommendation, which can nicely fit with the
above. For example A recommends B to C. Again the identification of A
could be done by any of the methods you mention. 

> > Content propagation?
> I suspect that content propagation is outside the scope of social  
> context but please explain further if you think it is relevant.
It is related to referral I mentioned before. Consider a chain of
RSS aggregators. With a referral filter on a subject.

A->rss-feed->filter1->B->rss-feed->filter2...
This can be useful for discovering content

> > Discovery of a context neighbourhood?
> I assume you are talking about some form of statistical technique for  
> weighting or clustering common social context terms.   Great idea,  
> but I think that just getting the social content to be manually added  
> and extracted from solid relationships will be a summers worth of work.
true, this is far fetched

> Several of these are great Phase III, Phase IV type projects.  
I agree that probably it is better to keep the things close to the
ground, to ensure the foundations. Again it's good to have a view of 
the "big picture".

> I'd be  happy to add them if you wanted to help flush out the
> deliverables, that would probably have to go to other students.
Please explain, I can definitely help with some of that. I'm working on 
some related ideas of my own, but it is early days.