There is a lot of sharing and curating going on of objects that are available for sale somewhere. See Svpply, Fancy, Pinterest, large swaths of Tumblr, Polyvore, Delicious, Wanelo. Users of services like these are gaining followers and influence, expressing and discovering themselves, and having fun, but they aren’t benefiting financially from their curation. Some would say it would be a conflict of interest for them to do so, or would result in less compelling content. Or take the fun out of it. Or feel spammy.

The discouragement of self-promotion is one reason why Pinterest works so well, and why it’s often more compelling to follow someone’s favorites on Etsy than it is to follow the items they’re selling. When someone other than the seller says a thing is good, people listen. If a lot of people say a thing is good, even better. Especially if those people have influence. This is also a really simple way to think about the basis of PageRank.

It makes sense when you think about it. An endorsement from someone with nothing material to gain from the endorsement is more compelling and trustworthy than one from the person doing the selling, particularly if you know or admire the endorser. Someone constantly pushing what they’re selling is like someone who talks about him or herself all the time: boring, and suspect. Big brands have gradually figured this out as they learn how to talk to people on the internet.

So what if the people you followed for their good taste made money when you bought something they shared? Would it change your perception of their curation? I wonder if such a system would ultimately ruin good curation or further motivate it.

The closest thing I know of to this currently is ShopSense from ShopStyle. Its users are proprietors of fashion blogs and editorial properties—people who, for me anyway, don’t have nearly the authority and influence as the people I follow on Etsy and elsewhere. There must also be some interesting Amazon Affiliate sites out there.

The experience I’m thinking of though is more like what you get when you keep up with a really well-curated vintage shop on Etsy (there are many; see my favorites). The shop owner obviously has a financial incentive for their work, but is also just genuinely excited to share the discoveries they’ve made.

Refavorited is a Tumblog (do people still say that?) where my favorites from Etsy, SoundCloud, YouTube, Flickr, Fancy, Twitter and Wikipedia go, automatically, via ifttt.

Etsy is not yet an official channel on ifttt (but is so ready), so I’m using my Etsy favorites RSS feed as a trigger. As for Wikipedia, for a long time now i’ve felt compelled to save articles I learn from and like in a Delicious account for lack of something better and the time to build it, as a sort of record of random learning, and Delicious is a channel available on ifttt.

Other channels I would love to see on ifttt: Simplenote (I broke up with the ifttt-supported Evernote for Simplenote earlier this year and have never looked back; they have a backroom API), Findings (API on GitHub), Pinterest and Quora (no official APIs yet) (what’s up, Palo Alto?).

This all arose from extended rumination on sharing, and what motivates people to share things they like online. There is a good Quora thread on why people share; every answer is worth reading. Deena Varshavskaya’s is the broadest and most succinct:

Sharing is a basic unit of socializing. Humans are social animals and socializing is at the foundation of who we are. When people approve, appreciate or relate to something we do or say, we feel good. This can be explained in evolutionary terms. Social validation means reduced risk and uncertainty. Life is all about managing risk and one way to reduce risk is to do things the same way as other people do it (i.e., a lot of people are statistically less likely to be wrong than a single person).

Sharing various aspects of ourselves gives us a chance to get validation (validation = reduced uncertainty) in our life choices.

Validation is really at the heart of it, and systems that facilitate validation—alerting you when someone out there likes something you posted—keep you motivated to continue sharing.

There’s also this slightly crazy presentation on discovery from a few years ago that I return to regularly and still find valuable. Basically, enabling discovery is about allowing people to:

1. Discover new, valuable information
2. Get discovered by others
3. Discover more about themselves

Which is another way of saying discovery is about facilitating social validation.

The New Delicious tagline is “Discover Yourself!” Services that can get you hooked on doing that can help other people discover things that they never would have thought to search for—like everything I’ve ever favorited on Etsy, SoundCloud, Flickr, Fancy, YouTube and Twitter.

Alternate filtering in effect for followers here on Etsy.

No official API yet, but that hasn’t stopped Kellan.

I came across this post on Quora on “Lévy-flight personalization” and optimizing Quora’s activity feed for novelty-seeking users. Its inspiration is the albatross, a long-range ocean forager that’s larger than you think.

Lévy flights are seen in the behavior of many animals. It’s the pattern that emerges when an animal darts around randomly in one area foraging for food (exhibiting Brownian motion) then, once they feel they’ve used up all the likely food sources, heads off in a random direction to a brand new area, and forages there. In the case of the albatross, that leap to a new area can mean a flight in a straight line across an ocean. Lévy flights are “random movements that can maximize the efficiency of resource searches in uncertain environments.”

Seth Godin has applied Lévy flights to website usage patterns. Edwin Kite, the author of the post on Quora, notes that Lévy flights are optimal for locating resources when those resources are:

• Randomly distributed
• Sparse
• Once visited, are not depleted, but remain targets for future searches

He argues that Brownian motion makes sense for activity feed usage on “campfire” social networks, like Facebook. But Quora thrives on novelty and new connections, the effects of which can be addictive. “The kind of people who could make Quora great are allergic to sameness and want intellectual challenge. They need Lévy flights.”

This is actually how I experience the Etsy activity feed.

Someone in my Etsy circle whose taste I like will favorite an item of interest, and I’ll head straight there and start foraging. I’ll check out the shop, then check out the admirers of the shop and their favorites, then check out the shop owner’s favorites, then check out admirers of the item and their favorites, then see which Treasury lists the item has been featured in, the admirers of a list, the list curator’s favorites and their other lists. Any one of these paths can lead across the ocean to a new area rich with resources. And I’ll leave favorites behind as clues for the people who have added me to their circles.

Etsy is a rich environment but also an uncertain one, in that you’ve never seen most of things you’re likely to encounter there in a given session. It can be a murky or overwhelming place with short sightlines, like Kite says Quora is, until you get plugged in and start receiving guidance from the right people implicitly. Etsy’s activity feed, and the clues it can provide from other foragers, can facilitate leaps to new areas and lead to transactions you weren’t planning on. That ends up being addictive.

This Lévy flight post is a good example of why I like Quora, and why I’ve been gradually getting pulled in deeper and deeper since Quora engineer Tracy Chou startled me out of lurker mode with a direct question—the site is populated with smart people offering interesting perspectives on fields outside their own, in addition to their own. In this case, a grad student studying astrophysics and working on the the early Mars climate problem has me thinking about applying bird flight patterns to activity feed design. That doesn’t happen on a lot of websites.

In other words, everything that makes the old Treasury unique is related to the fact that it’s a Flash application: its constraints, and its real-time feel. These things are inseparable from its origins in Flash. But at Etsy an entirely new infrastructure for collections is being created, powered by MongoDB.

So we launched Treasury East as a testing ground for a new unlimited Treasury world, where anyone would be able to create a curated list of items, and that curation activity would be rewarded and harnessed as the important signal it is in a marketplace of one-of-a-kind items made by humans. Etsy is filled with things you never knew existed and never knew you wanted. People welcome guidance and clues from other people in this environment.

And the birth of Treasury East has been remarkable. It feels like the flowering of something new and great, as fascinating items and shops are surfaced by people with a talent for finding things.

Because as any collector knows, it’s fun and satisfying to find things, and can be an outlet for self-expression. Here’s a list I made this morning while on a vintage mid-century modern housewares binge (it happens):

Already we’re seeing games emerge organically, some reminiscent of the Etsy Sneak Attack and PIF (Pay It Forward) phenomena, like Treasury East BnR (Buy and Replace), started by Grace of Homespun Handmaiden. BnRs are bemoaned in the old Treasury world but in this new environment they start to feel like a primitive social-commerce life form that might evolve into something more interesting.

OK I’ve started a treasury east that’s a BnR (buy and replace). Basically you can buy any of the items in the treasury and post the transaction link in the comments. I then go to YOUR shop and replace the item you bought with one of your items! It’s a win-win for all involved. This is a great way to promote your shop and support fellow etsians at the same time!

Keeping an eye on the constant stream of Treasury East blog mentions and Twitter mentions for more.

• Tangentine: My Treasury East and thoughts on SEO, usability and opportunities
• Etsy’s Treasury East Rocks!
• “I tried out the new Treasury East feature on Etsy with this Malcolm McLaren-inspired collection from DIY crafters.“
• On Curating and Treasury East
• Treasury East… oh, the possibilities!
• “The whole world of Treasury East is cleaner, fancier, and just screams ‘buy me!’“
• “So, if the new treasuries never expire, why not explore this idea even further? Why not, in fact, create a treasury/inspiration board for each of my items?“
• East vs. West
• Etsy Treasury Tuesday
• “While fears of dilution are real, I don’t think persistence necessarily = creativity, and I’m confident Etsy will refine its Treasury East algorithm until the best of the best surface.”

A few weeks ago we had a “handmade code” hack day at Etsy, wherein many interesting features were born, large and small. One of the small hacks I crossed off on my to-do list that day because it didn’t exist yet was this Etsy search add-on for Firefox, for searching Etsy from within your web browser. Using the OpenSearch format, these things are criminally easy to bring to life. Here’s how.

The add-on was approved by Mozilla for public status and distribution today, just in time for a significant improvement to Etsy search: the ability to filter search results by category. Within a few hours of this update, I had hit a personal record in Etsy spending and paused to think about the larger economic implications to come when we really start unleashing discovery.

There are many strategies people use to make discoveries on Etsy. This is my favorite.

Find a shop you like? Check out the shop owner’s favorites. Find an item in their favorites that you like? Check out that shop owner’s favorites. Repeat until you realize three hours have gone by and you have 26 browser tabs open to Etsy pages.

I never stop at the shop level on Etsy. If I find an item of interest, I go past the shop to the shop owner’s favorites, and enter an affinity feedback loop. Below are some favoriters I’ve been digging lately, and here’s a Yahoo Pipes-generated meta-feed consolidating all their favoriting activity which you can subscribe to if they strike your fancy.

Protip: If you find yourself past page 3 of someone’s favorites, subscribe to their favorites feed add them to your Etsy circle.

corduroy‘s items populate most of my favorite sellers’ favorites, so being pulled into her favorites was inevitable. She’s led me down some fruitful paths.

Etsy all-star hearter TeenAngster hipped me to the favorites of groundwork (among many others), who happens to be corduroy‘s sister. Their mother, pogoshop, is also an active hearter. They share a great eye.

Just now after following a thread from groundwork’s favorites I was led to siiso (hearted this painting of hers). Her favorites led to half-dozen other eye-openers so she joins this list as well.

Icebear, aka Sofia Arnold, is in India right now but she left behind lots of quality favorites leads. I was taken with this free bird and French hermit crab.

Domestikate favors the witty. She likes “color, humor, good design, wood and skies of blue.” She also finds and sells parrot staplers.

yaelfran is one of Etsy’s heavy hearters, with a massive number of favorites. They’re a bottomless source of unusual illustrations and prints.

I’m a fan of Virginia Kraljevic‘s intricate line drawings and her favorites have led me to some interesting places, like Hillarie Tasche’s graffiti train drawings and Betsy Walton’s world.

More found daily.

We just need better ways of sharing, organizing, displaying and discovering these things (working on it!).

Good data on micro-enterprises and entrepreneurship around the world is hard to come by. There’s the World Bank’s Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Database, but it has more caveats than a prescription drug commercial. Different governments operating in different economies at different stages of development have different definitions for these things. The 2008 World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey comes close, “striving to define a unit of measurement, source of information, and concept of entrepreneurship applicable and available among the diverse countries surveyed.” This limits it to the “formal sector”—small companies registered with their governments—as opposed to the informal sector, like most sellers on Etsy. Still, it’s of some interest. Above, a screenshot of the Many Eyes bubble chart version of some of the data, with nations sized according to “new business density,” or the density of new registered companies per 1,000 citizens. New Zealand, Iceland, Hong Kong, the UK and the Netherlands round out the top five. See the same data on a map here.

See also: Etsy and the World Economic Forum.