April 27, 2008

Looking for the Mouse

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky has me riveted. I've been reading essays about post-television culture since Alvin Toffler keeled me over half-way through my senior year in high school, but Shirky's write-up of his 2008 Web 2.0 Conference speech is among the best.

The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Source: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

While this hopeful logic echoes the "1% of a billion people" fallacy, the immense amount of work directed at projects such as wikipedia attests to huge reserves of untapped intellectual energy.

We're going to need it.

March 10, 2007

What is Open?

Henry Story, Danny Ayers and Shelley Powers wrote some astute criticisms of Tim O'Reilly's write-up on freebase.

Why do Tim O'Reilly, Cory Doctorow, and others continue to mis-cast a means to agree on how to communicate as a centrally-controlled system? I'm half-joking here, but is this all some sort of gesture to the postmodern concept that language itself is a form of oppression?

Less humorous is how the concepts of openness and control are thrown about as loaded language to promote a technology or service. To say that one technology is about control, while another is about openness is total bunk - what really matters are the intentions of the designers and the implementers, and, above all, the outcomes.

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.

January 31, 2005

When Do Assertions Become Facts?

At the core of all of the apps that I have developed is a relational database. I am used to it being there, available to answer any question, and ready to receive updates about the current reality of any given object instance in the system.

Now I find myself developing a web application and semantic data service which are fed from a very large number of SEC filings and news stories. All of the data will be available for others to interpret in their own apps, but I would also like to provide a "current interpretation" for any given object instance.

Poor me, I must have my oracle.

Take the case of an executive's various roles in a corporation: "Chairman and CEO, Former President, Semantic Widgets Division". This is complex data that changes. As time passes, the latest assertions about role will inevitably contradict previous assertions. Such as shareholders firing their CEO.

When should an assertion lead to a re-assessment of the current understanding?

It goes without saying that interpretations of reality are formed in the mind through an ongoing process of re-assessment. We qualitatively compare present impressions with recent impressions. Enough contradiction, and we form a new working state of understanding.

Larger thinking systems such as scientific communities also follow this basic process.

I will use this approach in generating the current interpretation (CI) for changeable objects such as company role. Each CI of an object will have a strength, based on the number and reliability of the assertion sources. Any contradictory assertion rolling into the system puts the CI into a "state of question".

After the strength of a CI has been sufficiently undermined, it is replaced with a new CI reflecting the congruent assertions that caused the shift. This instance is reflects a "state of re-assertion". Example: a WSJ article about the CEO resigning amidst scandal and shareholder revolt would be sufficient to only momentarily put the CI into question, soon to be followed by a re-assert to: Former CEO.

And what if a series of contradictory assertions from reliable sources are received by the interpreter? Well, I'd have to work out how to properly reflect a "state of confusion" for that object instance. :)