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Saturday, September 10, 2005
terrywfrazier@gmail.com
I have added a gmail and google talk account to my ever-growing list internet communications addresses (I think it's up to a dozen now.) The number of comm points is getting silly. Thank goodness for Trillian, the all-in-one chat client for Windoze. Otherwise managing all these things would be even more difficult than it is.I've had a jabber account for a year or so, terrywfrazier@jabber.org, but the public Jabber network has never achieved the reach or stability that the bigger services like AIM and Y! have. I hope google talk will bring both. We'll see.
Terry Frazier at 8:22 PM
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Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Why Tagging is Like Sex
Or, its about context, Stupid.
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How many times have you seen this? I see it every time I go to Technorati, which isn't often anymore. This service - and this general idea of tagging everything, everywhere, by everybody - is a real loser. It's the "1,000 monkeys typing Shakespear" theory, writ across the web. To believe that random acts of tagging, by unrelated people and for unrelated purposes, is going to give birth to deep meaning and the secrets of the universe is, well, bullshit. At least, it's bullshit if you want anything useful to emerge in the average human lifespan (which is about how long it takes for Technorati to return search results.) Tagging is a great idea, but there are some great ideas that just dont scale. Like sex. Sex with one person? Great idea. Sex with 1,000 people? Bad idea. Tagging is like that.
Matt Mower is a pioneer in the tagging space, developing several innovative tools for assigning topics to blog entries, and working on early versions of eVectors K-Collector group aggregator. Hes been hammering away at the senselessness of Technorati for some time now.
Weave a circle round him thrice
I just Kevin Burton's response to Jason Kottke abandoning Technorati in which he says:
I'd rather have a Technorati that was fast and always worked even if that meant only indexing 1M blogs. Even 500k blogs as long as they are the top 500k blogs.Which is, I think, indicative of a class of problems people are experiencing in thinking about the blogosphere that revolve around a concept I'll call Leaderboardism.
Right now Technorati are claiming to index 15.7 million blogs and have a database of 1.4 billion links. WOW! Those numbers are certainly impressive. But what does this huge data-warehouse buy us? Gripes about performance and database outtages aside, not much it would seem. I don't get anything from a Technorati search that I value over, say, a Google search. In particular I don't seem to get value from Technorati understanding the blogosphere better than Google which you would think they really should.
Kevin thinks a better idea is to just index the most important 500,000 (3% of Technorati's claimed reach) of blogs in the blogosphere. Sure that would make Technorati fast. But would it make it more useful? After all, who is deciding who is important? How are they deciding it? And isn't importance subjective anyway? To my way of thinking what Kevin is advocating would make Technorati faster and less useful in equal measure (unless you are mainly interested in what the usual suspects think).
The problem is that the blogosphere has grown too large for summary statistics to be relevant to a large group of people anymore. Your Top 100 isn't mine because you aren't interested in basketweaving and vole racing and I am.
I think Technorati (and Feedster who seem, so far, to have avoided many of Technorati's pitfalls) should abandon Leaderboardism and focus instead on how to make their database relevant to each individual.
Relevance is about understanding the context of the reader and delivering the results they would have asked for if they'd only known what they were. I will consider it a success not when I can see The Top 100 Blogs but when I can see The Top 100 Blogs you've never come across but will wish you had! For reference I read 2 of Technorati's Top 100 (although I have read about 30% at one time or other and am familiar with over half) so clearly their measure of relevance doesn't match mine very closely.
This takes me all the way back to where I started thinking about Village Shops in Blogspace.
I just did a quick count on the Technorati Top 100. The score:
- Blogs I read regularly 3
- Blogs I read occassionally 8
- Blogs I used to read 3
- Blogs Ive heard of 8
So 22% of the Top 100 has some (but maybe not much) relevance for me. Or, put another way, 78% of the Top 100 is irrelevant for me. Not only that, but if there were other blogs in that Top 100 that were relevant Id be hard pressed to figure it out. Technorati gives no clue.
What is clear is that if you dont care about politics, software, web design, techno-gadgets, or pc hardware the Top 100 is useless. Which begs the question, Top 100 for who? Blogs for all manner of special interests are popping up, and they are far more relevant to their readers than a random collection of blogs rated by a frenzy of strangers. Folksonomy arguments aside, TagOrgies just dont work. Tagging is personal and there must be, at some level, some shared context for tagging to have significant valuable.
If the taggers can reconnect with the idea of context, and apply their efforts to helping groups and communities speak to each other we can make progress. But until then, were just a bunch of monkeys looking for a publishing contract.
Friday, August 19, 2005
The Peculiar Genius of Personal Fabrication
As a follow-up to my emachineshop post a few weeks ago, there's a great article in the September issue of Wired (on your newstand now, not yet online) about mini fabrication labs popping up all over the place. These labs use the latest in affordable, computerized tools to build one-off devices and parts. Author Clive Thompson interviews eMachineShop founder Jim Lewis and uses the eMachineShop software to create his own one-off guitar to test the process. The author also discusses MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld's worldwide network of fab labs and spends some time inside Saul Griffith's California-based SquidLabs.While the equipment isn't cheap, it's not as much as you'd think. Everything in the shops discussed in the article - vacuum formers, laser cutters, milling machines - could be bought for between $50,000 and $100,000. Further, software like eMachineShop makes using the tools possible for anyone. After each one of Gershenfeld's mini labs opened, people showed up to create an amazing array of things. Among the samples in the article:
- A Norwegian sheepherder built GPS-enabled tags for his flock
- An Indian businessman created and electrode-driven device to measure the fat content of milk
- A Boston teen created a motion-detector security system for her dairy.
The implications for this - the idea that the cost of prototyping is dropping to near zero and tools for design will be understandable and available to anyone with high school-level computer skills - are profound. Today the market is for one-offs - things no big company will make. But in the future this may well replace the R&D and design departments at many, even most, product companies. What has begun to happen to software - small, innovative (and often open source) software companies spring into existence to be quickly bought by big behemoths who can no longer innovate on their own - could well become the norm physical products. Have a better idea for a derailleur shifter on a bike? Prototype it on your own. Designed a spiffy new fuel injector nozzle to drive up fuel mileage? Crank out a few and see if they work.
There will likely never be anything as cost effective as mass production, and there will remain a need to understand materials science, engineering, etc. But today the understanding isn't enough. You need access to massive amounts of capital to test and develop new products. It's this accumulation of capital that allows big corporations to make the rules about what is saleable, profitable, and appropriate. In the future your knowledge of some basic engineering principles combined with a good idea may be all it takes to completely remake a product category. That has to be a scary idea for big corporations everywhere.
Terry Frazier at 2:22 PM
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