No sex or politics at JavaOne
Steve and I are giving a talk at JavaOne about our recommendation project. We submitted our slides a couple of weeks ago and we've received some feedback. According to the J1 organizers, our Slide 18 must go! It is too controversial!
Our slide 18 shows how social recommenders can be vulnerable to hacking and manipulation. It shows a screenshot of the amazon recommender linking Pat Robertson's "Six Steps to Spiritual Revival" to a gay sex manual. The story behind the recommendation prank is here. Apparently that's too racy for JavaOne.
We offered this alternative, which shows the Last.fm similar artists for Hillary Clinton
- which have apparently been manipulated Last.fm listeners to tie her
to politicians with a less than stellar reputation. Once again, this was
a No go with the JavaOne crew - politics can be a bit of a touchy
subject too.
So
that leaves us looking for some less controversial examples of
recommendation hacking - no sex and no politics allowed. Our
current best candidate is the boring Vote For the Worst
which is a site that encourages people to vote for the worst American
Idol Candidate - surely there's something better than that. Any
suggestions?
I'm a big fan of the Paris Hilton = Brutal Death Metal hijinx.
Posted by Zac on March 25, 2008 at 01:24 PM EDT #