My favorite Echo Chamber :)

David Weinberger asks:

What do you think are the best examples of Web-based echo chambers?

Beyond the shadow of a doubt: The biggest, most significant echo chamber of the day is facebook.com. The reason why this is so simple and plain is that facebook is a closed community (in other words: a “walled garden”). Another example of this might be wsj.com. Any site that requires a login (to read what others have shared) is (in my opinion) an echo chamber.

If no login is required, then it is more difficult to envision them as closed off (according to Weinberger, by “echo chamber” he means sites which “do not for a moment seriously consider other points of view”). It would be possible to create “open” websites that nonetheless have very parochial world-views, but I doubt those would be sustainable for long periods of time. 2 Examples of such open and yet persistently parochial world view are Google’s search engine @ google.com and also it’s youtube website @ youtube.com. Both can be used  without logging in, but I presume most people use them while logged in — and in that case Google tends to function as an echo-chamber.