Blog

Newsweek has an article that argues that Web 3.0 is going to be all about injecting the experts back into the information production and dissemination process. I think they’ve gotten the big picture badly wrong, but the saddest quote in the article is about why one of the ‘experts’ they interview thinks this change will come about:

Fueling all this podium worship is the potential for premium audiences—and advertising revenue. “The more trusted an environment, the more you can charge for it,” says Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, a former AOL executive who was previously involved with several Web start-ups. It’s also easier to woo advertisers with the promise of controlled content than with hit-and-miss blog blather. “Nobody wants to advertise next to crap,” says Andrew Keen, author of “The Cult of the Amateur,” a jeremiad against the ills of the unregulated Web.

Pretty amazing that the argument is that advertisers are going to fight to prevent the amateurs from taking over information processes so they can protect their advertising revenue. (Newsweek is, of course, heavily supported by advertising.)

It’s also interesting that none of the examples they give in the article — from Google’s wikipedia killer to the Maholo search engine — have any real traction in the marketplace. I think we’re seeing a fantasy here. People whose business depends on the elites managing who reads what where and when are arguing that we have to return to that model to make sure “good” information gets out.

I was speculating the other day about how different the world would be if there had been some way that radio and television could have been supported through a fee-based model, rather than the advertising-based model that we have today …

John

Read/WriteWeb has a look at a very interesting new Web site called Traackr.  The idea is that you tell Traackr all of your media accounts (YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, etc.), and Traackr logs in every day to see if you have new content, and to see who has been looking at your content.  Traackr then generates cool graphics showing how much visibility your different content items are getting across the entire Web.  After all, what could be more interesting than seeing how interesting you are!

The idea of a site that brings together all of your accounts around the web is not new, of course, but it could be very valuable.  Traackr is less interesting than some efforts in that it is focussed on showing you what is happening on all of those sites, rather than on helping you remember all your usernames, passwords, and how you actually interact with each of them … but it’s at least a step towards bringing together information about these accounts.

John

I just got back from the Collective Intelligence FOO Camp that O’Reilly organized at Google.  The meeting was great, the people were great, and overall the experience was great.

One issue that popped up is what exactly people mean by Collective Intelligence.  At a high level, it was clear that everyone meant basically the same thing:

agent -> work
agent -> work
agent -> work                                                                 (some require superlinear)
agent -> work              —— combining function  ——> outcome that would
agent -> work                                                                   be harder to produce
agent -> work                                                                   with any individual agent

Interestingly, a number of participants were only interested in examples in which the outcome was superlinear in the number of participants.  I’m not sure why this would be.  Several participants were speculating about what a “complexity theory” of collective intelligence would be like: could we identify problems that are demonstrably more difficult for a collective intelligence to solve than other problems?

I’m personally more of a “big tent” CI guy.  I think that as long as the result is intelligent, I’m okay with situations in which the individuals agents are providing the real intelligence, and the combining function is simple.  If we want to taxonomize, I can see at least three interesting types of CI:

Types of Collective Intelligence

1. parallel intelligence: many independent agents (e.g., Wikipedia, reCaptcha)
2. aggregate intelligence: independent agents + combining function that joins the results (e.g., recommender system)
3. emergent intelligence: the result is intelligent, even if the individuals are not (e.g., ants foraging, leaving scent trails)

Overall, the experience was fun.  I did find it intriguing that we had no tools for applying collective intelligence to the process of creating a “unconference”.  For that, we used white boards and markers, lots of sticky notes, and pieces of paper to cover up events that were cancelled.  It would seem easy to do better: people could propose ideas, which would show up on people’s laptops. They could say which ones they would like to attend, which would cause them to be scheduled so most people did not have conflicts, and so they would be in rooms of approximately the right size.  If noone wanted to come, they could be cancelled or merged.  It would be fun to see CI in action at a Foo Camp of the future ..

John

ManagedQ is a very cool search engine interface.  It runs on top of google, and presents a visual view that aggreggates pages according to people, places, and things.  Kind of fun to play with … but the fact that it requires the Shockwave Player means I can’t use it on some of my favorite platforms :(.  I very much like the higher-level view on top of the vanilla Google interface.  Check it out!

John