My cousin, Nate, posted this video on his blog. He wrote about ways for companies to think about their modus operandi. It’s also an enlightening way to think about the direction computer-facilitated communication has been moving for the past few years. Definitely worth watching (and drop.io is useful too, by the way!).
It’s a nice afternoon and I’m in a coffee shop working with friends. The “work party” in a non-work location is by far my favorite way to work. I picked up a cup of tea and mentioned to the barista that it must be tea time. So he asked me when tea time is. I have no idea. My first idea is to consult The Oracle. However, there’s some remodeling going on here and the router is temporarily disconnected. So I mention to my friends that the barista asked about tea time and immediately I discovered that (at least in Australia) tea time is around 3:30. It’s a bit late for tea time, however, I realized that I just inadvertently and successfully performed a social search.
Combining social and algorithmic searching is one of the more brilliant moves on the part of search engines. Folks will start delving for information either by consulting a search engine or calling a friend with some level of expertise. The process is almost completely situational. However, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project:
For help with a variety of common problems, more people turn to the internet than consult experts or family members to provide information and resources.
The variety of common problems is broad and the decision to tap into a social network versus consulting a search engine is subjective. However, some new projects are popping up that look promising. They give the social search a new, more efficient execution, or try to integrate social and algorithmic search. Google Profiles are one step Google is taking to make searching more human. I believe the most notable project at this time is Aardvark: (vark.com). Aardvark actually “lives” in your instant messaging program and seeks out the person who can best answer your question. This is no Yahoo Answers.
From their site:
Why use Aardvark?
A real conversation with a friend (or friend-of-friend) can provide much better information than a web page. After all, there’s much more knowledge and experience in people’s heads than there is written on web pages.
Aardvark routes questions within your social network, so the network is as big as you make it.
With more friends on Aardvark, you get faster and better responses. (You can connect Aardvark to your existing social network on Facebook, MySpace and other popular sites — you may have friends already using Aardvark.)
I like the idea that searching is moving in a more networked, human direction.
This has everything to do with libraries, and more importantly, the place of libraries in peoples’ lives. Reference question statistics continue to rise at PLCH irregardless of the rising number of home computers, and hence, search engine users. The library provides an added value to customers. Asking a library worker is a social search with the power of the algorithmic search behind it. I’m curious how libraries can use these new ways to find information within the institution. We’ve talked about using IM on the public desk to alert co-workers at their cubicles that we need help. What about using a service like Aardvark within the whole library system to better answer reference questions?
Read more:
Brynn Evans writes about the issue
Web Worker Daily reviews Aardvark
Google’s Profiles page
Pew Internet and American Life Project’s research on the topic
Six years after learning about Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire from a botanist friend, I finally got around to delving in. The theory is one of those mind-stretching exercises found in the most engaging pop science books:
Depending on the environment in which a species finds itself, different adaptations will avail. Mutations that nature would have rejected out of hand in the wild sometimes prove to be brilliant adaptations in an environment that’s been shaped by human desire.
This in the middle of a chapter about the history of the tulip, a flower I’ve felt endeared to since reading Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook. We’ve been taught that plant evolution is a force of nature outside of human forces until we capture this force and manipulate it. But what if these mutations that would never work in nature compel humans to take this plant and multiply it like crazy? Pollan applies this to the apple, the tulip, the potato and marijuana. In talking about the tulip, he emphasizes the appeal of symmetry:
… but the appearance of symmetry is a reliable expression of formal organization – of purpose, even intent. Symmetry is an unmistakable sign that there’s relevant information in a place. That’s because symmetry is a property shared by a relatively small number of things in the landscape, all of them of keen interest to us. [...] Symmetry is also a sign of health in a creature, since mutations and environmental stresses can easily disturb it. So paying attention to symmetrical things makes good sense: symmetry is usually significant.
The same holds true for bees. How do we know? Because symmetry in a plant is an extravagance (whereas animals who want to move in a straight line can’t do without it), and natural selection probably wouldn’t go to the trouble if the bees didn’t reward the effort.
But if the pleasure bees and people take in flowers have a common root, standards of floral beauty soon begin to specialize and diverge – and not just bee from boy, but bee from bee as well. For it seems that different kinds of bees are attracted to different kinds of symmetry. Honeybees favor the radial symmetry of daisies and clover and sunflowers, while bumblebees prefer the bilateral symmetry of orchids, peas, and foxgloves. Whatever the case, the more perfect the symmetry, the healthier – and therefore sweeter – the flower.
Suddenly in the midst of all of this botany narrative business is a paragraph about formal organization, purpose and intent. It’s the kind of pontification that addresses the most root issues of information organization. Here is symmetry, which we as a species utilize for nearly all of our information in some way or another. And here is a suggestion that different types of bees are attracted to different kinds of symmetry, much in the same way that different types of people seek different kinds of information. All of these connections emerge, especially relevant in my life where I help people find information at the library as well as help people organize and present information through my web development work. SQL, Joomla!, WordPress, various search engines for specific purposes give people (and especially me since I use them all the time) tools and lenses through which we work with information.
How do we organizers, presenters and retrievers of information take this way of seeing information, mutation, and evolution and take it from theory into praxis? By using advanced methods of organizing information we can take the most basic, oldest ideas and translate them into something useful. The power of many people influencing content, creating mutations and evolving has resulted in some of the greatest and fastest growing successes on the internet. Of special note is Firefox, which has rightfully and righteously carved out a bigger piece of browser use statistic pie than Internet Explorer. The superior product was developed by a whole army of programmers and regular old internet users. Of course, Wikipedia and Facebook would have never been successful without their user-generated content.
This bottom-up organizing has been criticized for producing unreliable or inconsistent results. However, this is what evolution is all about. These are the mutations that bring about improvements.