Filtering firehoses, embracing constraints and sparking creativity.April 15th, 2009 View Comments |
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Over | Austin, Texas | Mar 2009
Related thoughts that might work as an unordered list instead of a coherent post:
- “Immersive experiences” have a way of upsetting one’s natural flow. Prolonged, deep exposure to another life has the tendency to shift your mode of thinking and question your path; to plunge in deeper or retract?
- In the end the answer lies in the middle and not the extremes; but the question remains, how to we negotiate the world of seemingly simultaneous, incremental and “me-too” content?
- When faced with nearly unlimited digital information available at next-to-zero latency, how do we access and make sense of the firehose?
- We filter, we segment, we search, we tag, we group, we attempt to keep up; or we cut everything off completely and re-start.
- Similar to declaring “email bankruptcy”, we can declare “information bankruptcy”, cut ourselves off from our normal echochambers and filters, find new people and threads of thought to follow, explore new interests, embrace constraints, all to recapture the joy for information and ideas; too much of a good thing is not a good thing.
- How can we turn eddies of disparate and unconnected thoughts and people into a river of relevance? *
- Forget content, I want context; I want to reduce my time, mindshare and life friction involved in finding relevance; moreseo, I want to be compensated for the context that I create.
- And thus, in attempting to find my own middle ground, I’ve been exploring which firehoses of information to turn off; what constraints can I impose and embrace to spark my creativity?
- Constraints force us to be creative, to think rather than do, to reflect instead of act, to design instead of create.
- We are inundated with the tools to create and distribute content at scale, but in the end, I don’t want better ways to create, I want better ways to experience. Each macro- and micro-interaction should help me be present in the moment rather than pulling me away from it; I want to live life in the here and now, not the there and then.
- The “realtime web” offers that promise, but without new tools and interaction methods the meaningful signals will be lost in the noise, needles in the haystack, condemned to the long-forgotten world of lost memories.
- This is what I want; this is what we need; this is what I care about.
(At the moment..)
—
* Hat tip to Michael Lewkowitz for the spark…
April 17th, 2009 at 7:51
To me, a key anchor of real time web is events.
They are a powerful way to organise the mountains of information coming through into rich experiences.
What is an event? Anything that has a start and stop date. Anything with a strong focus that is shared and understood by the masses. Sports, disasters, accidents, trading periods. birthdays, weddings etc.
Think about it. When is real time really useful? Typically around events. We want to know in real time, how is our wife doing when she is giving birth, how our favourite teams are faring against their rivals, how is the situation when a diaster strikes etc. Without events as the context, we will all be drowning in real time.
Just a thought.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:09
One structure that supports your concept is to think of content, business processes and brands all in the context of a narrative composed of interconnected scenes that are improvised.
Framing our business experiences as narrative results in explorations of themes, clear definition of roles and responsibilities and critical assessments of the information added to each scene and, ultimately, of performance by teams, players, brands.
Narrative creates the relevance. Context results.
Thank you for the post.
April 17th, 2009 at 17:46
Perhaps; first, a question: what is the real problem with making use of realtime data?
Is is distribution? (Doubtful.)
Is it accessing? (Not really.)
Is it in combining disparate sets of data / people / conversations? (Maybe, I don't understand the underlying tech as well as I should.)
Is it filtering, or understanding? Is it about deciphering what's important by filtering out the unimportant, or in bringing together disparate data to get a complete picture? (Definitely.)
Given that, what's the biggest need or opportunity in “fixing” the realtime web?
Just a thought :)
April 17th, 2009 at 17:48
Agreed; the real question is how do we create the narrative?
How much information do we need? What's unimportant?
How fast can we create the narrative? How can we reduce the mindshare required to weed through the unconnected and structure the narrative?
That's the opportunity :)
April 17th, 2009 at 19:52
The main issue for me is not 'fixing' the realtime web but whether there is a need for it?
For example, filtering is always valuable but does it need to be real time?
When does real time makes a big difference in the value?
I can't think of anything beyond events : )
April 18th, 2009 at 8:46
i'd suggest expanding events to current events and emergent thought. Relevance is the filter and a big part of what public micro-messaging helps to build. Every micro-message has the capacity to reference people, topics, and object which builds a very interesting relevance profile over time.
April 18th, 2009 at 8:49
I think your 'personal API's' enabling relevant information to come to us is a key. Love too Bonifer's relation back to productivity in terms of creating things. How this technology enables emergent thought to turn into distributed collaboration is another big opportunity.
May 1st, 2009 at 8:12
I know I’m a bit late in the discussion (actually I didn’t know you had this second blog). It’s a very important topic that you cover here and your “personalized API” post. A topic that is close to my heart.
I would summarize it in “how to access content that is of real relevance to me among today’s overflow of content?” Or in other words, “how to democratize/decentralize access to content?”.
There have been attempts. For example, content aggregators are a great improvement in that direction. But they are based on a majority logic which means it’s a “dictatorship of the majority”… and my interest may not be in line with that of the majority (not to mention that it’s more about pushing content than really sharing content).
This means that to access content of real interest to me, I need to be part of a network of people that have similar interests than mine. That was the attempt of social bookmarking. By revealing our preferences, we can access content from other people that have similar preferences. The issue is that it is based on tags… and a word depends on the context and the subjectivity of its messenger. For example, “financial crisis” or “state failure” maybe a common tag between a communist and a libertarian but it does not mean that they are interested in the same contents. So preferences can only be inferred from the underlying selected contents.
As Bonifer points out, I also think that the interconnection of the themes is very important. It allows building the context of a given content. Mind mapping methodologies are great in that sense.
Part of we do at Pearltrees is trying to solve this. First, Pearltrees enables you to easily build the maps of your web. Second, you can share these maps with friends to guide them through what you think is relevant content to them. Third, and more importantly, the maps of different users cross each other on a given web page. Pearltrees allows you to navigate from your maps to other user’s maps and thus to discover new content from like-minded people (these “crossings” are ranked by highest communalities). Meaning that collectively, the community is building the web interest graph.
We are still in early alpha (opened 2 months ago) so the product is still rough (working hard to improve it!). For english contents, points 1 and 2 are more tangible today than point 3… but it should come as US/UK members grow… ;-)
May 1st, 2009 at 9:45
btw, I don't see “real time” allowing me to see more relevant content but rather to see it faster. That's what I like about “real time” but it's frustrating to lose the quality content I receive from Twitter for example… the lost memories.
May 1st, 2009 at 10:35
But speed is an aspect of relevance; obviously not in all settings (example: we can have a great conversation in this manner over a period of weeks and months), but when we're making realtime decisions then the speed at which we receive content has a huge part in delivering relevance (context). An example: a decision on which bar to go to, or which movie to go to, or on checking out restaurants as I walk by them, these are all use cases where the speed at which we receive content and develop relevance has a huge meaning.
I still struggle with the idea of losing great content to the void just because I wasn't there to see it, but I've come to grips that it's impossible to pay attention to everything, and that if it's truly relevant or important than it will eventually cross my path :)
May 1st, 2009 at 10:38
One important point: when I talk about “personal APIs” I'm not only talking about accessing or receiving content, I'm also talking about delivering content and context to people; using the term API is a conceptual approach to thinking about how we can “scale” our time, thoughts and value stored inside ourselves to deliver more (quantity) and deeper (quality) interactions to other people; how can we reduce inter-personal transaction costs of interactions to deliver more value?
May 1st, 2009 at 10:45
Most content aggregators do a fine job of aggregating but a poor job of filtering, for the simple reason (as you point out perfectly) that personal interests between people simply don't map or interconnect perfectly. Which is fine; I would pity anyone that tried to follow everything I am interested in; but instead of cutting down the noise, I would love to help people cut through the noise to get just what they are interested in.
I've probably beat the issues around the inefficiencies of hashtags, “fractured conversations” and mass communication tools to death on this blog, but I'm always interested in new ways to cut through the mess: I would love to hear more about Pearltrees; in fact, @igniter (who commented above) is a big user of mind-maps and visualization methods, I bet he would love to hear more…
May 1st, 2009 at 10:49
And most people don't know I have multiple blogs :) I actually do it to keep two very different interests ( 1) business, innovation, entrepreneurship and 2) photography, culture, etc.) separate because most readers / followers don't overlap on the same interests, yet sometimes my thoughts commingle between the two…
May 2nd, 2009 at 10:10
I understand better. Mind you by building your map that other people will cross and then explore you will deliver content (a webpage or a map of webpages) within a context (the position of the webpage within a map or the position of a map within a broader map).
Now, to be clear it is not an 100% automated process to build your map, you need to work on it: change the order, the position relative to other contents. Why? For the simple reason that the human brain will always be more powerful than any algorithm to understand a content and its context. It's the essence of the edition/curation activity. For example, an algorithm cannot replace the curator of a museum for the selection of 20 art pieces among thousands and for the order in which he/she will organize them in the museum to build a meaningful path/story about a given artist.
May 2nd, 2009 at 14:28
It's just that that you can do: “help people cut through the noise to get just what they are interested in” and I would add “according to your subjective opinion of what is interesting on a given topic or what message you want to promote”. Now to be very clear, it is not really a tool for “real time” news (or not yet at least) but rather for the “lost memory” and to discover content of the long tail.
Very concretely you install a plugin (only on firefox for the moment) that records your surfs whenever you want. Let's say you're doing a surf on a specific photographer (e.g., Robert Mapplethorpe), you just hit “pearl” to record and “reveal” at the end. You then will see the map of your surf in your account. You can easily re-organize/re-order this map as you wish, delete useless items, comment, etc. to build the story you want to. Basically you have crystallized your thinking on Robert Mapplethorpe. You have built an edition about him. Overtime, you will add new contents, delete some others, add new comments, etc.
Why would other people be interested on your map on Robert Mapplethorpe? Well, simply because you have cut through the “noise” of all contents on him to build a story of what you subjectively think are the most interesting aspects. And given your blog, it seems you know something about photography so you have some credibility.
How can other people benefit from your thinking? 1) You can share this map with other people via one link, embed it on your blog, etc. 2) other users interested in photography will either eventually cross your map and end up on it or 3) they will click on “pearltrees” in the upper left corner and will see the closest maps to their own map… and if they have similar interest than yours, your map will surely show up. The latter is at a map level not an account level, meaning that if you have various interests, you'll have various interest networks.
I'm of course not saying it's the only way to “scale yourself”… they are probably other ways of doing it. But it certainly is one way of doing it… though I know I'm very biased as a cofounder…. ;-)
So I'll stop it here. Just go on pearltrees.com and try it out the early alpha.
May 10th, 2009 at 13:49
One aspect of “delivering content and context to people;” is having a repository of content and context to deliver in the first place. Bookmark sites, links and cut and paste are the bulk of it for most people, and not terribly well organized at that. Keeping a useful collection of “things and people I found on the web related to X” and providing a way to easily incorporate that content in discussion without constantly going back to the source or keeping redundant copies, is a challenge. Safari Web Clips look promising, and info is kept live and uptodate, but there's no way to use the stuff you save.
May 11th, 2009 at 20:38
Real-time makes a huge difference when the web intersects with the physical world; it makes a big difference when we need to use the web to make real-time decisions; how will the “mobile web” work when the “mobile web” is just the web?
May 11th, 2009 at 20:46
“What's important is not what it does, but how it's used.”
Combining people and content as an AND, rather than an OR, is a step towards making it easier to find, track and revisit interesting content and people; but incorporating it is the next step. I would love an auto-complete that searched for links instead of just checking spelling :)
May 12th, 2009 at 8:05
You are right in highlighting that on mobile, real time is much more relevant.
I think mobile web works very differently from web. It leverages off the databases of the web but factors in time sensitive stuff like location, weather and other contextual information.
I need to chew more on this.
May 12th, 2009 at 10:46
Ah, but that's the point: at some point in the future, there will be no difference between the mobile web and the “other” web; it will not be about the web but about the devices (and applications) we use to access the web; it will be about how we use the web rather than the pipes themselves.
May 13th, 2009 at 10:10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CusueHRn3Q&feat...
May 13th, 2009 at 10:15
<object width=”560″ height=”340″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/2CusueHRn3Q&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/2CusueHRn3Q&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”560″ height=”340″></embed></object>
May 13th, 2009 at 12:51
I liked the one Chase did a while back where he got run over by a car; love it…
July 20th, 2009 at 10:58
[...] stop there: as we are inundated with information, we will be forced to create methods for filtering and consuming information. We will demand context that we can [...]
August 15th, 2009 at 6:16
[...] do you choose who to listen to? How do you filter the noise to find true signals? And how do you absorb and apply the knowledge that swims around us every [...]
September 5th, 2009 at 0:55
I like the imagery of a “synaptic web” from Chris Saad
This implies intelligence at both ends of the nerve connections.
September 5th, 2009 at 1:57
Ok; consider Shirky: http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog….
“In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.”
If the natural “synaptic process” of my mind and the natural power laws of my social behaviour will create filters and narrow the streams of information, I'm more concerned about search to bring new sources (serendipitous sources, even) of valuable information to me. Efficiency and inefficiency, a set of dynamic individual equilibriums spread over an entire society.
Debating filters v. search isn't something I can really do, I don't have the knowledge. All I know is I want to learn, to find new information and people, to structure the new into my own and society's existing world-view, and to use that synthesis to create new thoughts, new ideas, new applications and implementations of data, information and knowledge.
To do that, I have to “see” and “create” new; I want my world to be shaken by something I didn't know existed, and I want to rock someone else's world with something they hadn't thought of. If “filtering is more important than search” to allow me to do that, then great; if search is better, than great; but at the end of the day I'm pretty sure it's a combination of both.
September 5th, 2009 at 7:55
I like the imagery of a “synaptic web” from Chris Saadrnrn
rnrnThis implies intelligence at both ends of the nerve connections.rnrn
September 5th, 2009 at 8:57
Ok; consider Shirky: http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.htmlnn“In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.”nnIf the natural “synaptic process” of my mind and the natural power laws of my social behaviour will create filters and narrow the streams of information, I’m more concerned about search to bring new sources (serendipitous sources, even) of valuable information to me. Efficiency and inefficiency, a set of dynamic individual equilibriums spread over an entire society.nnDebating filters v. search isn’t something I can really do, I don’t have the knowledge. All I know is I want to learn, to find new information and people, to structure the new into my own and society’s existing world-view, and to use that synthesis to create new thoughts, new ideas, new applications and implementations of data, information and knowledge.nnTo do that, I have to “see” and “create” new; I want my world to be shaken by something I didn’t know existed, and I want to rock someone else’s world with something they hadn’t thought of. If “filtering is more important than search” to allow me to do that, then great; if search is better, than great; if people are better than algorithms, or if algorithms are better than people, great; but at the end of the day I’m pretty sure it’s a combination of all.
February 3rd, 2010 at 6:58
[...] Filtering firehoses, embracing constraints and sparking creativity. We are inundated with the tools to create and distribute content at scale, but in the end, I don’t want better ways to create, I want better ways to experience. Each macro- and micro-interaction should help me be present in the moment rather than pulling me away from it; I want to live life in the here and now, not the there and then. [...]