  How are you related to Malawi? Do recent events on the Comoros effect you in
any subtle way? Who in your extended social network is in Croatia? We seldom
ask ourselves these questions, yet a "long tail" of content beyond our everyday
knowledge is waiting to be explored. In this work we propose a recommendation
task of creating interest in little-known content by building personalized
"bridges" to users. We consider an example task of interesting users in
little-known countries, and propose a system which aggregates a user's Twitter
profile, network, and tweets to create an interest model, which is then matched
to a library of knowledge about the countries. We perform a user study of 69
participants and conduct 11 in-depth interviews in order to evaluate the
efficacy of the proposed approach and gather qualitative insight into the
effect of multi-faceted use of Twitter on the perception of the bridges. We
find the increase in interest concerning little-known content to greatly depend
on the pre-existing disposition to it. Additionally, we discover a set of vital
properties good bridges must possess, including recency, novelty, emotiveness,
and a proper selection of language. Using the proposed approach we aim to
harvest the "invisible connections" to make explicit the idea of a "small
world" where even a faraway country is more closely connected to you than you
might have imagined.
