November 14, 2005

mSpace Design Doc

I was taking another look at mSpace and I found a gem of a document: the mSpace Group Design Project Report. This is one of the best web app design docs I've come across, covering in detail the goals of the project, ui (which was identified as the most important aspect of the app), ontological design, data retrieval and expression, application flow, and user feedback (using instrumentation).

One of the goals of this project is to create a generalised system that allows for a very low cost entry into the semantic web so that the benefits can be seen and experienced by users and developers who are naive or sceptical about the semantic web and any benefits they can expect from it.
...
Being able to understand the underlying semantic data, and the relationships between this data, is much more important than just presenting the information to the user.

Source: mSpace Group Design Project Report

How can I forgive myself for overlooking this pdf?

November 4, 2005

Artificial, Artificial Intelligence

Amazon has created a distributed human intelligence service:

Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial, artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications.

To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call - the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.

Source: Amazon Mechanical Turk Overview

Some docs to look at:

• Developer's Guide
• API Reference

Of course, it does not take me very long to also see the potential mis-uses of distributed human intelligence - and I am smiling for two reasons as I write this. For example: automating the interpretation of captchas or of other difficult tasks in order to give the false impression that a bot is a human.

The benefits and hazards that are rapidly coming to mind reflect the power of this idea.

Spotter: Leigh Dodds

November 1, 2005

The Attention Economy

I have been thinking a lot about attention lately.

At work, several developers complained about having problems concentrating (due to a noise problem), and we plan to improve the work environment by building higher cubicle walls. In my investing activities, I have created a new class of companies that are positioned to convert attention into profits (GOOG and YHOO are at the top of that list). And in my spare time (walking to and fro), I often think about how units of attention could eventually be added to the economic toolbox, along with labor, GDP, and money supply.

I got to writing all of this down because I just read The Looming Attention Crisis on A VC. In this article, Fred quoted Herbert Simon:

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.) Source: The Looming Attention Crisis

I do not see this surplus of options as negatively as Fred does. Humanity has been toiling for millenia so that we may have a few spare moments to think, and pass the results on to the next generation. The only poverty of attention I see is in all of the precious cycles that continue to be spent on survival instead of on some other pursuit higher up Maslow's hierarchy.

As human progress accelerates, we find ourselves having spare cycles, and having more ways to spend these spare cycles. And in these moments, apart from the attention I give at work and at home, I work on tools to help me get even out of my limited attention span. This is because I see technologies such as XML, RDF, and OWL as a way to optimize the ongoing consumption of attention.