how to decide what to read

[Geoffrey Hinton]

In the old days, there had to be a way to decide what to print because
printing and circulation were bottlenecks.  But now that we have the
web, the problem is clearly how to decide what to read.  It is very
valuable to have the opinions of people you respect in helping you
make this choice. For the last five years, I have been expecting
someone to produce software that facilitates the following:

On people's homepages, there is some convention for indicating a set
of recommended papers which are specified by their URL's.  When I read
a paper I think is really neat, I add its URL to my recommended list
using the fancy software (which also allows me to make comments and
ratings available).

I also keep a file of the homepages of people who I trust (and how
much I trust them) and the fancy software alerts me to new papers that
several of them like.

Its hard to manipulate the system because people own their own
hompages and if they bow to pressure to recommend second-rate stuff
written by their adviser, other people will stop relying on them.

Obviously, there are many ways to elaborate and improve this basic
idea and many potential problems that need to be ironed out.
But I think it would be extremely useful to have.
Somebody please write this software.

Geoff Hinton