http://www.theworldaccordingtopunky.com/blogs/

Are  you sure? what about: The Death Of The Search Algorithm?

Which is it? Those who argue the former seem to base all their arguments on: “this is the way people have always accessed content, through explicit search” and “the only way a publisher is allowed to monetize is through advertising.”

Are you sure? I wouldn’t bet too heavily on the inertia of the internet.

Interesting. I realized last night that Pandora is a core “must-have” for me. It has learned what I want to hear, and does a wonderful job filtering and serving content relevant for me, now. So I’ll put a different spin on that article: Generic keyword-based search and/or “the super-smart machine” paradigm is passe. Smart, mixed-initiative, content and context based relevance filtering is the future of the internet. The idea that humans, whether at page-design time, content-discovery time, or page-display-time (i.e., the end reader) can do all the selection is rendered untenable by the information flood. On the other hand, the idea that there are “magical” algorithms that can unerringly determine relevant content, whether content-based, link-based, social, or “semantic”, is equally naive.

We’ve heard about “vertical search”. I think a much more exciting opportunity is in content selection much more broadly considered, as a key element of any and all sites, as an intermeadiary between site-owner intent, end-visitor interests, and the web-visitor and content-generation communities.

Visit DigitalScirocco’s site for my take on this opportunity.

Translated to intellectual activities like software development, one can believe, as I do, that a top developer is more productive because that person can “hold the bubble” on a larger scope of activity. The external transaction cost of distributing the same scope of activity over a team, in this view, is what reduces the productivity of a team compared to a single individual capable of performing the same task.

Great, but while there are some <really> smart people out there, many interesting tasks are too large for any one hacker. One solution suggested by this model, then, is to seek to reduce the external transaction cost incurred by distributing the task over a team. How? It seems to me the two external dimensions of transaction cost in software development are bandwidth and latency. We can reduce bandwidth by adopting a shared language (e.g., LAMP, or .Net, coding and documention standards, etc). We can reduce latency by increasing the frequency of interaction.

Hence the daily scrum. It’s focus on <daily> reduces latency, while its emphasis on <terseness> reduces bandwidth.

Very clever.

Beginnings are an opportunity for reflection and alignment of near and longer-term life goals. Some thoughts follow that arose while hacking on a demo page while listening to Credence Clearwater’s Lodi: “… if I had a dime for every time I played through a set while the audience sat there too drunk to hear … Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again…” (paraphrase)

Integrity, Commitment, Ambition, and Right livelihood…

Integrity is about staying true to, and continually communicating, the core of your belief and vision despite obstacles (ie, CCR’s despair about inability to connect with audience) and/or temptations to cheapen it, e.g. by resorting to unjustified marketing hype.

Commitment is the choice to continually pursue your vision despite challenges.

Continuous commitment to pursuing one’s vision with integrity is simultaneous with continuous deepening and clarification of one’s vision and strengthening integrity. That’s why action in the world, not just retreat to a monastery, is the more appropriate path for most of us. (St. Francis was horrified when, after preaching, the entire crowd rushed up ready to abandon everything and follow him, barefoot and homeless).

Ambition is what one is stuck with, it’s who you are. No right or wrong here. Some people are born with or develop more ambition than others. You have some choice where to focus it, but it’s very hard to reset the basic level of one’s ambition. Ambition is part of what one needs to have integrity with respect to, it can’t be denied.

Honest livelihood: A means of generating income that is pursued with integrity and commitment.

Almost any vision that doesn’t hurt others, when pursued with integrity and commitment, is not only personally fulfilling, but, if one is lucky, can also be a source of honest livelihood.

Oh – and, “vision” doesn’t have to be spelled with a capital “V”. Visions come in all sizes.

The problem? Tim Berners Lee’s tight binding between a URL and a piece of own content. Today’s URL is built through the collaboration of dozens of content and service providers (the “web infrastructure”), but there is no mechanism for marketing, price discovery, or delivery of the “stuff” that goes into the production of a web page.

Viewed from the site owner perspective, content has to be discovered, acquired, and integrated. Then “free” content often comes with a clickThru that can take a visitor away, and/or may be off-target and drive visitors away. “Free” content has a very high cost, both initial fixed cost and per-visitor.

For a source, again there is a fixed cost to expose the content, plus a per-view cost to serve the content.

Finally, for a visitor, content is very expensive in that rarest of resources, attention.

There is no such thing as free content. However, ultimately, it is content that creates value, for all three of the above participants. While there is no such thing as free content, there may well be very valuable content.

Here’s another thought: dialup is a lot like mobile: higher latency, lower bandwidth, smaller screens (typically). If you’ve written them off in your page design, have you written off mobile also?