Victor proves the first rule of the lazy-web (“if you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about”) by writing about why I haven’t read boxesandarrows properly since it launched, I’m avoiding things like tonight’s AIGA event as if they’re plague-pits and I’ve been reading clay, webb, rael, cory, stolarz and udell more than iaslash and xblog; and why I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a long time.
Victor’s piece is nice, polite and constructive; just like the man himself. I’m not in as concilatory a mood. Personally I’m finding the discussion in the user-experience design community at the moment deeply stultifying. The distance between Baltimore and Santa Clara (let alone Camden for that matter) feels a lot more than 2442 miles.
As Victor says:
“It’s a little disconcerting, embarrasing even, that no IAs are at the forefront of these discussions. Isn’t that what we do, find interesting patterns in information and present them to people?”
Alex Wright, Peter Van Dijck and Eric Scheid have been writing interesting things about “what’s going on”[tm] (who else should I be reading?) – how the craft we’re struggling to refine, if too narrowly viewed, might be as redundant shortly as hot-metal typesetters.
» Noise Between Stations: “Library Science + Computer Science”
Petafloptimism 
i’m v bad as far as the lazyweb is concerned (but i will get a site design that doesn’t look broken and rubbish soon. soon, i say!)
and having fun is a good thing; important. like i said, i don’t want to grow up yet, but i think your response that there are different stages of growing up is a good point and important to remember. hope you had fun at the bwilson show!
I’ve been talking a lot to people like Eric and Peter offline about ways to connect stuff we read/write, but have to admit that as a non-CS person, I am at a loss as to how to create semantic connections between this data. We’ve been talking a lot about human-centered methods for semantic linkage rather than computer-centered methods. The trouble I have with the current interest in CS-type ontology is whether relevant meaning (exhaustively derived meaning) is truly extractable based purely on social networks and boolean logic. Perhaps it is the library/info. sci. part of me that thinks that we’re talking AI here. For me, the promise that RDF offers of linking fields of data is meaningless unless the abstract concepts are truly extractable in a consistent and meaningful way.
Let me qualify what I said earlier. I think computers are efficient at extracting meaning when it comes to categories such as classes of things or objects. But I wonder how adept they are at understanding abstract concepts, the subject matter. Will there be an ontology building system that will be able to discern in poetry, for instance, the different types of love — romantic, platonic, paternal, maternal, brotherly, etc.? That’s the stuff I wonder about.
Glad that rang true with you too.
Eric Scheid points us to another great source:
http://www.decafbad.com/
Right now there’s fun experiments going on (who’s 2 degrees of seperation from my blog? Who’s linking to sites that link to me?) but nothing blatently useful. So there’s opportunity for us to play these reindeer games.
To Michael, I’d say there’s plenty of practical things you can do short of AI. We’re building some and I just can’t talk about ’em yet, but other people are too.
As for love, I think future generations will look back and envy us for how purely we experience love without all that machine interference 😉
As a librarian, my perspective is qualitative: first, and most basic, how do you determine the “aboutness” of an item? That’s a subject analysis.
But there are many more facets we can apply to any given piece of information, above and beyond subject analysis. Examples: the intended audience, sources of funding to produce of the information, thematic access (a parable on honesty? a novel of education and upbringing? a scinitllating postmodernist romp through the frontiers of applied cliche? a scathing critique?), etc. etc. etc.
Semantic parsing of text can produce many correlations between seemingly unrelated documents, and a great deal of serendipity. But semantic analysis will never reveal all the many facets of significance which humans may attach to a piece of information. In fact, the timeless appeal of great art is the fact that every generation applies its own facets of significance to extract its own appropriate sets of meanings from the universal language of the world of forms, the world of forms as it interacts with the human brain.
Close enough for jazz– or good enough for who it’s for. We’re looking at the return to something resembling the geocentric world view, as each individual person strives to order the universe of information with themself at the center …
You can increase serendipity, you can increase precision and recall, and you can increase the processing, filtering, and dissemination of information through human networks through technical means. However, in the final analysis, human attention span is the limiting variable, and human attention has the potential to add value to information which can not be achieved through technical means.
The upshot of these ruminations: The finite human attention span is the key point around which everything else must be designed.
1.E-Business strategy
2.E-Business model
3.Web Architecture
4.Fundamental Design Issues
5.Establishing a Web Presence
Your comments are very interesting