This is the ninth in a
series of my notes on the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, June 14- 17. This one
is different as it covers the session led by myself and by my Darwin colleague,
Thierry Hubert, Using Chaos Theory Principles to Overcome
Information Overload within the Enterprise and on the Web.
Here is our description and then summary of my opening comments follows.
The next post will cover Thierry’s comments.
“With the addition of social media to
the already increasing amount of Web content companies are spending more
resources trying to make sense of what is happening. In addition, the
connections between formal, informal, structured and unstructured information
are becoming more difficult to establish. It may only get worse with the advent
of auto-generated content and other content “farms.”
In this session we will explore and discuss how the
application of chaos theory to this issue can help break the silos of
information and allow the emergence of meaningful awareness for better decision
making.
This new paradigm moves beyond Page Rank to reduce the impact
of traditional SEO techniques that elevate low quality content. We will look at how the visualization
of connections between content related to a particular theme can reveal new
relationships and help with the discovery and awareness of trends, both anticipated
and unanticipated.”
I started by
saying that we do not see Chaos Theory as put in practice through our Darwin
Awareness Engine™ as a replacement for Google. We see it as a complement. It is
an awareness or discovery engine not a search engine.
For example, when
I want to find the TV schedule for the NBA playoffs or the Web Site of the
Boston Celtics or even the Los Angeles Lakers, or an article I heard about at
this conference, I turn to Google.
I use Google when I know what I am looking for.
If I want to find
the stories I did not know to look for about a topic of interest, if I want to
discover new things, if I want to see the breaking news in real time, the
stories generating the most buzz, I turn to Darwin. Chaos theory does not offer
a precise answer, but it reveals a movement or trend as it occurs. I use Darwin when I want to explore any
area of interest in more depth.
Now if I go to
Google I get a linear list of results rank ordered by its external framework.
Google decides what is important for you. Darwin provides an overview of the
100 top themes related to your topic of interest visualized in a tag cloud type
structure and allows you to explore the ones that appeal to you. You become the
decider and we will show some real time examples.
Rather than taking a linear, deterministic approach to finding content
through seeking repeatable patterns on the Web with an external framework like
page rank as done by Google, we use Chaos Theory to find non-repeatable
patterns in Web content that come and go in real time. Rather than using an
external framework, we look for self-organizing patterns within the content
itself.
Sometimes
external frameworks and measurement have their place. Other times it can be an
obsession that gets in the way. For example, Fred Taylor tired to systemize
work processes and this approach led to profits in some cases but has alienated
most workers. In his Atlantic article, Will Google Make Us Stupid, Nick Carr quoted Google CEO Eric Schmidt, that Google is “a
company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving
to “systematize everything” in the same spirit as Taylor. This can be useful;
but it also has its limits. It depends on the use case. Robert Parker has tried
to systemize wine reviews and in my view is a clear over step. How can you say
with any certainly that one wine is a 94 while another is a 92 and be serious
about it?
We offered this
video showing Robin Williams in The Dead Poet’s Society discussing the value of
a measurement system for poetry. Here is a link to the Measuring Poetry episode on
YouTube.
Now I am not
saying that Google is like Pritchard on poetry or Robert Parker on wine in that
it is useless. Often you have to lay pipe in Robin Williams terms. It is the
default home page on my laptop and I use it everyday. However, I do say that
its quest to systematize everything and make it serve all content discovery
functions is a delusion.
Google has its
limits. For example if I type in - Sardinian beach bars - into Google I find
that my blog post is number one out of 349,000 as it has been for the past five
years since I wrote it. I have even used external frameworks myself.
On the same trip
my friend and I where sitting at one of these beach bars and over a few glasses
of wine devised a measurement system to rate the beaches of Italy. Now if you
type rating the beaches of Italy into Google you will find that my blog posts
are number one and two out of 691,000.
Of course I offer
these examples with great humility. I have no delusion that I offer the best
content here or that I am the world’s expert. I was just better at speaking
Google’s language than the others on the topic. This is a problem when you use an external framework.
People learn how to game it for good and bad reasons. SEO and spam are
byproducts of Google.
I must confess
that I have done some consulting over the past three years helping firms get
their blogs on the front page of Google, using respectable methods I add.
If you use chaos
theory to let the content self organize there is no external framework to game
or approach through legitimate methods. There is no SEO or even spam as it
would serve no value.
To set the stage
we went back to the creation of the text we use to create content. One of the
greatest information technology inventions remains the phonetic alphabet. The
Greeks came up with it in
the early 8th century BC. The same twenty-four letters have been used to write
the Greek
language ever since. It is the first and oldest alphabet to note each vowel and consonant with a separate
symbol. This invention provided
great flexibility and unprecedented accuracy of linking symbol to word and thus
on to thought. Now we moved from
relying on informal communication through conversations to formal documents.
One of the great flexibilities of the phonetic alphabet or text was
the wide range of vehicles that can be used to convey text. Most of the
technological advances since the work of the early Greeks have been on the
vehicles to convey text, such as paper, and the means to produce these
vehicles, such as the printing press, rather than the alphabet, itself. Text remains king on the Web and the
darling of search engines.
In the
past, the effort to create text acted as a filter but a series of inventions
such as the printing press cut into this difficulty reducing the barriers to
creating formal context, generally for the good of most
Now with Web 2.0
the barriers to creating permanent content through text have been mostly
shattered. You still need a computer or a mobile phone or some other electric
device and access to the Web. But
much of what is being added is closer to the informal conversations of the
pre-text world, than the type of content normally taken to print. This has both
good and bad consequences. As Plato said in reaction to a possible
over-reliance on documents, conversations can clarify intensions. On the plus
side we have much more to look at. One the negative side we have much more to
look at.
Next I showed the
evolution of content delivery channels. In 2008 more content was created through the Web than in the
history of content. The same thing happened in 2009. We are now in danger of being overwhelmed by content and
sinking into chaos. Why not turn to Chaos Theory to help pull us out? Instead
of imposing an external framework to attempt to make sense of content, why not
let content self-organize itself. Instead of looking for repeatable patterns,
why not look for correlations between content to discover new relationships
beyond what you where initially looking for?
My colleague
Thierry Hubert now took over to explain how this can work. His comments will be in tomorrow’s post.
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