Here is another in a series of session notes for KM World 2010 and Enterprise Search Summit 2010. In this case it is the session I did - Facilitating Content Discovery Using Chaos Theory. Here is the session description. My notes follow.
“The presentation provides a practical application of chaos theory for creating useful content focal points from the chaotic mess of content resources distributed across the web. Several examples will be provided, both from the internet, where socially generated content is exploding, and from the enterprise, where social tools are contributing to content bloat. The examples illustrate how activity can make information more discoverable and easier to explore through various visualization techniques.”
To set the stage let’s go back to the creation of the text we use to capture 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 spoken conversations to formal documents enabling many breakthroughs.
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 over clay or stone, 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 smart 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.
The economist Charles Handy noted that with the knowledge economy that knowledge workers now own the means of production, their minds, unlike their industrial age counter parts. Tings will change. Well with content production the speakers and readers how have the means of production through the Web. 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.
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.
The first Web search engine was created in 1990 by computer science students at McGill University in Montreal. It's searchable web site database was limited as it did not index the content. It is in 1994 with WebCrawler and Lycos that full-text search appeared on the WWW.
Google added a new and transformative dimension to search with it s page rank concept. Let the readers help determine what content has the highest value and also look at currency, along with relevance This has become very useful. I use it every day and it is the default home page for my laptop. I primarily use Google when I know what I am looking for. For example, when I want to find the score of Wizards Celtics NBA game last night or the Web Site of the Boston Celtics or an article I heard about at this conference, I turn to Google.
However, Google Page Rank was created before the explosion of Web content and has its limits. Sometimes those better at speaking Google’s language than the others on the topic are elevated above the real experts. 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 unintended byproducts of Google.
We do not see Chaos Theory and Correlation Rank™ as a replacement for Google. We see it as a complement. It is an awareness or discovery engine not a search engine. Instead of looking for repeatable patterns, its looks for correlations between content to discover new relationships beyond what you where initially looking for.
If you use Correlation Rank 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.
If I want to find the stories I did not know to look for about a topic of interest, if Ito discover new things, if I want to see the breaking news in real time, the stories generating the most buzz, I turn to Correlation Rank. It does not offer a precise answer, but it reveals a movement or trend as it occurs. I use Correlation Rank when I want to explore any area of interest in more depth and when I want to see real time alerts.
How is it visualized? 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. Through the Scan Cloud™ the Darwin Awareness Engine™ 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 (see below). You become the decider. In this way we see it as very similar with many of the ideas that Dave Snowden discussed in his session that I posted on yesterday.
Through the Buzz Tape™ you see topics of rising interest. Then you can make one of these rising topics the focus of a new Scan Cloud.
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