. This award is like the Pulitzer for business journalism, which sounds kind of funny, but I think this is a pretty serious award given by very serious people.
A small team of us won a Neal Award back in 1996 for a pretty cool feature we did on
at Macworld. We got Les Claypool to license a track that we encoded using both Macromedia's Shockwave and RealAudio's formats. Then we created
, a page with all the samples using all the codecs and playback rates. You could play each sample and then vote for your preference from that page. We also wrote a
I don't remember how many people worked on that piece, but the one thing I do remember thinking at the time was that this was an expensive project that would have a short life span on the Macworld.com home page.
aren't cheap, either. The research involved in doing performance analysis on big ethernet switches or anti-spam tools or business intelligence packages is not for the lighthearted. Add in a requirement to post to an
regularly, and your typical InfoWorld editor is now earning his salary through blood sweat and tears.
Anyhow, I'd like to think I had at least a small part in helping InfoWorld get into the nomination circle. Of course, everyone knows the man behind the curtain there is
...always on the hunt for ways to make existing technologies more powerful.
Thursday, January 26
January 26, 2006 07:17PM (EST)
I've been
tagged. So, here goes:
Four jobs I've had in my life:
1. Window washer and baby sitter for really super incredibly wealthy financier
2. Hasher for a sorority house at UCLA
3. Security guard at Hollywood music studio (I spent an hour talking to Keith Richards on the phone one night. I think he was drunk.)
4. Games reviewer at Macworld
Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Caddyshack
2. Shawshank Redemption
3. I HEART Huckabees
4. Old School
Four TV shows I love to watch:
1. The Office
2. American Idol
3. Frontline
4. Elimidate (I hate it, but sometimes I can't help myself)
Four places I've been on vacation:
1. Andorra
2. Cabo Wabo
3. Santorini
4. Chicago
Four of my favorite dishes:
1. F-line Burger at HiDive
2. Pizza
3. Burrito
4. English Breakfast
Four websites I visit daily:
1. Bloglines
2. Memeorandum
3. Searchblog
4. del.icio.us
Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Italy
2. Tahoe
3. My deck at home
4. Thailand
Four bloggers I am tagging (as in "you're it"...?):
1.
Chad Dickerson 2.
Hunter Hubby 3.
Lloyd Shepherd 4.
Don Loeb (maybe this will inspire your first post, Don)
The first generation of Internet users learned (and created) the online social models through the nature of the protocol itself. A back and forth relationship. Make a request, get a response.
But the model has evolved into a sort of
graffiti approach to the online social model. People flag things, tag things, rate things, annotate and comment, link to things, blog about things, etc. The art of flirting through lightweight notifications gets the teens spinning with gossip. There's less of an on/off experience and more of a data soup happening out there.
Unfortunately, I still have to define my friends and co-workers into 2 distinct and separate identities in my IM tool. I'd much rather use tags to identify my relationships with people. I'd prefer to see whatmycolleaguesread.memeorandum.com. I want playlists from my brother and his 1st degree friends who also obssess on music.
Does this have meaning in an offline world, too? Could we alter our commitments to traditional structures so they are less about the man-made constructs that once made sense to new constructs that serve a more interconnected world?
For example, My mother and stepfather have been loyal Republicans since they were children, and they voted for George Bush (twice) because of that loyalty more than any other factor. Despite their desire to remain faithful to the system, they are now torn with frustration. (Strangely, the straw that broke them was when Bush
nominated his personal friend to the Supreme Court.)
It makes me wonder if we'll start to view our political system in a much less binary way because of this cultural phenomenon happening online. I can't possibly agree with every issue my representative votes for. I would be glad to add value to a political discussion through ratings and tags and pings and blog posts and emoticons.
But just like I don't want my IM app to tell me that a former colleague who I used to drink with can only be a friend or a co-worker, I don't want such an either/or relationship with my government. In aggregate, lightweight social data from people could have relevant meaning to decisions made by the people in power if it was possible to contribute that way.
And the idea extends way beyond government.
For example, I want to track the UCLA athletes I remember from school through their trades and professional achievements...I care more about seeing Baron Davis do well than I do about the Warriors who can be difficult to cheer for. After 5 years together, a wedding and a child, my wife is still facing visa issues that make living in and travelling to and from the United States an annoying experience. Somebody needs to realize that we are inextricably connected. We call our baby's physician when she gets sick, but we usually end up on the phone with someone else from the group who may or may not be as helpful. Shouldn't our friends and family be able to connect us with knowledgeable and reputable doctors who are accessible at the moment we need them?
I suspect that the offline social constructs don't work as well as they did when geopolitical boundaries could be reinforced through the cost of communication and travel. But there's a new sociology of lightweight interactions out there. It might be time to reevaluate how that is going to improve the world as we know it on a larger scale.
Does '
loosely coupled' have a similar meaning offline?
Wednesday, January 25
January 25, 2006 02:52PM (EST)
I didn't have a chance to blog
the news about Susan Mernit joining Yahoo! when it came out, but I was reminded of this today both when she
posted about her first day and while sitting through a presentation here on the impressive community efforts going on. Looking forward to seeing her contribute to a lot of solid thinking happening at Yahoo! right now.
January 25, 2006 12:46PM (EST)
Last night the local
PBS affiliate
KQED ran the first segment in a really cool series called '
Guns, Germs and Steel' based on the research of
Jared Diamond published in 1997. He tries to reduce the evolution of civilizations to a few
key resources and the way people adapted because of the presence of those environmental factors. (I haven't read the book or seen the 2nd and 3rd episodes yet.)
He challenges the concept of free will on one level, as he maps common outcomes around the globe at similar times in history where cultures were not likely to cross pollinate. He says that the introduction of farming followed by food storage followed by animal domestication created the foundation upon which sustenance could support a standalone community. The system was robust enough to allow a segment of the society to explore beyond the day-to-day grind and invent new tools, weapons and art forms.
Of course, the local environment repeatedly fails to support this system across time, yet the inventions of man continue to open up new ways to counterbalance nature's inherent instability.
You can see similar forces occurring within society and even within human nature itself. We even replicate this pattern in our creations including the Internet and the businesses that try to survive there.
Take the recent discourse on
Old Media vs New Media. Old Media relies on known beasts of burden (the editor, expensive distribution, advertising revenue, etc.), but it has spread too thin the resource that keeps Old Media alive - attention. And while Old Media was making enough money to support the crazy web site project on the side, they often failed to leave the dry desert for more fertile ground found by the New Media explorers.
Diamond goes on to explain how the farming system forced people to spread from the Middle East to Asia, Europe and North Africa in search of more sustainable land. Cultures like New Guinea which were unable to capitalize on key new developments remained small and unchanged if they survived at all.
It would be a mistake to proclaim the end of tv, radio or print. Media as we understand it today is a sustainable concept with some very important social implications. The system works and it matters. But it is equally wrong to hold on to the old models with the knowledge that the resources are evolving, drying up in some cases, and that new tools, weapons and art are now available to grow and expand media into more fruitful territory.
Tuesday, January 24
January 24, 2006 12:47PM (EST)
The
Google News recommendation engine exposes one of the interesting problems facing the new media models. Though machines can make really good editors, the better solutions for providing relevant things to people are those that combine the power of social actions with machine learning.
Justin Fox of Fortune (who happens to be a good family friend, actually) asks if the role of the traditional editor is getting hijacked on the Internet, then what is going to replace the need for social reference points?
"There is nothing natural or inherently superior about the monolithic media institutions of the mid-to-late 20th century. But there is still a need for the community-building, consensus-shaping role that the best of the media gatekeepers can play. The question is, who's going to play it? And how are they going to make it work economically?"
Google's PageRank algorhythm was a landmark differentiator in the web-based world of machine-driven editorial decision-making because it placed value on one very important social action, the hyperlink. The existence of a hyperlink to a web site implied human value because it was assumed that the link was created by a human who valued that destination page. Therefore, that page should be ranked higher than other pages valued less by humans. That factor more than any other made the Google search results better than everything else out there at the time.
It's not obvious to me that Google learned from that breakthrough in their new recommendation editor in Google News. It appears to be based entirely on machine learning. Just like all the content in Google News, the results are pretty good in a sort of categorical way and in terms of immediacy, but the machine context isn't enough to create any kind of emotive response to the recommendations they give me.
(
Update: Google News posted some
info on what's happening: "Google News has no human editors selecting stories or
deciding which ones deserve top placement. Our headlines are selected
by computer algorithms, based on factors including how often and on
what sites a story appears online...Google News can automatically recommend relevant stories just for you by using smart algorithms that analyze your selections.")
The
New York Times published a Recommendations 101 piece this week where they described why recommendations matter, and they noted a key flaw in the concept:
"Earlier this month, Walmart.com issued a public apology and took down its entire cross-selling recommendation system when customers who looked at a boxed set of movies that included 'Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream' and 'Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson' were told they might also appreciate a 'Planet of the Apes' DVD collection, as well as 'Ace Ventura: Pet Detective' and other irrelevant titles."
If recommendation engines are to replace traditional editors, they need to have a more direct connection to the human-powered web. This is one of the reasons I like del.icio.us so much. The output and display of content there is very purely machine-driven, but all of the input is human-driven. It's a fantastic combination of the two forces working together.
Noah Brier agrees that the role of the editor in a media company is changing quickly:
"In many ways, recommendation systems spell the end of the editor as we know it. Of course there will always be a place for human editors somewhere, but increasingly technology is going to find ways to deliver information without their help."
Our social actions create the editorial filter through which we will discover things that matter to us. Recommendations are very trendy and for a good reason, but the juice that makes it a powerful force is not the machines behind it...it's the people.
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Comment (1)
We're watching the media go to battle with it's future self. Editors who use their deep analytical processing capabilities and expensive liberal arts educations are lashing out at the man-made machines built by their antisocial computer science adversaries.