Matt Webb pointed me to SixDegrees. Wonder if Malcolm Gladwell is a shareholder?

Two snippets from a long and excellent interview on Salon with Meir “Manny” Lehman about his work into the evolution of software.

“As I like to say, software evolution is the fruit fly of artificial systems evolution,” Lehman says. “The things we learn here we can reapply to other studies: weapon systems evolution, growth of cities, that sort of thing.”

That Lehman conspicuously leaves out biological systems is just one reason why his profile has slipped over the last decade. At a time when lay authors and fellow researchers feel comfortable invoking the name of Charles Darwin when discussing software technology, Lehman holds back. “The gap between biological evolution and artificial systems evolution is just too enormous to expect to link the two,” he says.

and

“Whenever I talk, people start off with blank faces,” Lehman admits. “They say, ‘But you haven’t told us anything we didn’t already know.’ To that I say, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in coming up with the obvious, especially when nobody else is coming up with it.”

Heh heh heh.

» Salon.com : A unified theory of software evolution: By Sam Williams

» Communities, Audiences, and Scale.

Further investigation needed. Definately.

“Teoma’s underlying technology is an extension of the HITS algorithm developed by researchers at IBM several years ago. In a nutshell, the search engine goes beyond traditional keyword and text analysis and seeks out “hubs” and “authorities” related to your query terms — a “social network” of related content that forms a “community” about the topic.

The cool thing about Teoma is that its community-seeking behavior is both query-specific, and happens in real time. “Whenever you type in a query, we’re actually looking for the communities after you type the query,” said Paul Gardi, Teoma’s Vice President of Search. “We’re using a method called dynamic rank, because there’s a lot of information you can learn about that page by its friends.”

Teoma’s approach differs from Google’s, which uses a similar, but more static ranking system. It’s also unlike the approach taken by Northern Light and other engines that classify web pages based on pre-defined categories.

“We’re going into the communities, finding the link structure of the community using text structure as well,” said Gardi.”

» SearchDay for April 2, 2002 | Teoma vs. Google, Round Two

Does Arthur C. Clarke’s 3rd law connect this to this to this to this?

I keep coming back to this. Depresses the hell out of me. I don’t know how to resolve the conflict. Sneaking feeling I’m part of the problem not the solution. I keep thinking and saying to people that society could solve more problems if we all just read more science-fiction; so I’m going to.

And hey – the sun is shining.

My photos from ASIST IA Summit in Baltimore and AIGA Voice02 conference in Washington DC. I’m still in the process of typing up my notes from both events.

One of the highlights of Voice was Milton Glaser’s address “This is what I have learned” [transcript here in PDF] for which he received a standing ovation.

There are more transcripts and post-conference material at the Voice02 site.

At the ASIS IA Summit, Celia, Victor and myself talked a lot about the potential of bots. I’ve been trying to put stuff together on them and talking with Matt Webb about them for a while now.

Victor asked today what an IAbot would do. I replied that it would be amazingly easy to code as its response to every query would be “It depends…”. Celia asked her favourite bot, Dipsy, about Information Architecture…

ia?
dipsy: ia is Information Architecture
Information architecture?
dipsy: wish i knew, space
Information Architect?
dipsy: i don’t know, space
tell me about security
dipsy: security is really interesting. libpcap, raw sockets… yummy.
usability?
dipsy: bugger all, i dunno, space
explain karma users
dipsy: Positive: “into face sucks” … Negative: “punks and
weirdos”,”interface sucks”,”just complain” … Overall: -9
explain karma designers
dipsy: Negative: “worse then nathans”,”how am i supposed to get this
7mb presentation onto a machien with a FDD?” … Overall: -7
design?
dipsy: design is really crap
content?
dipsy: rumour has it content is easily pirated
the internet?
dipsy: rumour has it the internet is entirely iffy
the web?
dipsy: the web is bad and wrong, and should be culled
bots?
dipsy: somebody said bots was a list at
http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/bots or for talking about bots,
including (but not limited to) infobots
explain karma bots
dipsy: Positive: “I like me” … Overall: 4
explain karma dipsy
dipsy: Positive: “knows the entire “”meaning of liff”””,”keeping our
‘secrets'”,”knows me like i know myself” … Negative: “Arcane quoting
rules”,”fick”,”shouldn’t have remembered that” … Overall: 273
bbc?
dipsy: bbc is, like, a funny place to work
matt jones?
dipsy: matt jones is a Good Bloke.
follow me
dipsy: sorry…
follow me
dipsy: what?
follow me
dipsy: i’m not following you…

Thanks to Debra for helping me get it…

Jason Kottke demonstrates that conversational interfaces may have a way to go.

Been in NYC, and now in Washington DC at AIGA: Voice. Been looking and listening. Oliver Sacks in NYC on “Narrative and Science”. Just saw Ken Garland speak taunting himself and the audience’s conscience. Many connecting threads. Lots of stuff to write down, remember, and most importantly act upon…