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Web Technology & The Cloud
‘The promise – and peril – of personalisation’
Aug 18th
One day, Eli Pariser (an online organiser) logged onto Facebook to find out what people with less liberal opinions than his own were talking about. He couldn’t find them. Based on his past search and click behaviour, Facebook had simply edited them out.
Since then, Pariser has gone on to write The Filter Bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. Speaking recently at the RSA in London, he spoke about his concerns about the filters and algorithms that shape the way the internet is presented to us. The internet, it seems, is not as ‘connective’ as he once thought it could be.
Companies recognised that there was money to be made in helping people sort through enormous data torrents. This led to a focus on ‘relevance’ as manifested in, for example, Amazon’s ‘if you liked this, you might like that’ concept. And these filter algorithms do more than that. They can make inferences from seemingly unrelated data and are responsible for creating a ‘web of one’ in which results are no longer ‘universal’ but rather based on our own search history. This ‘filter bubble’ feeds our human confirmation bias by presenting to us the world as we already see it.
The problem is that in our personal bubble views, we don’t know what we are missing. It is relatively easy to know the editorial or political slant of a newspaper but not the unseen filters of social media. And this matters when social media is driving approximately 50% of the traffic to online news sites. It’s easy for challenging stories to be lost from view amongst the stream of ‘likes’.
We need to move on from narrow relevance and be challenged in our world view. It’s not easy to achieve this but the first stage is to be aware – and to make others aware – that this filter bubble exists.
Travelling on the technology curve
Aug 12th
The theory of how new ideas, innovations and technology are spread is something we should be well aware of. In our own organisations, we know it pays to identify those who are ‘early adopters’ or members of the ‘early majority’ – and who are influential. And we also know that sometimes it’s as unhelpful to be too far ahead of the curve as it is to be behind it.
This week, ReadWriteWeb reports on the latest changes to Gartner’s HypeCycle. HypeCycle seeks to map technological innovations along a timeline from ‘technology trigger’ and through key stages including the ‘peak of inflated expectations’(!) to the ‘plateau of productivity’, when innovation can be seen to be truly impactful and has been adopted by 20-30% of the potential audience. The latest additions to the service include ‘big data’ and ‘gamification’.
Technologies may follow the curve, but each travels at a different speed. HypeCycle places eBook readers beyond any disillusionment and at the beginning of the ‘slope of enlightenment’ and big data climbing up towards the ‘peak’ (and likely to do so quite rapidly).
You can view images and read the reseach summary here.
Facing up to the cybersecurity challenge
Jun 20th
In the latest issue of McKinsey Quarterly James Kaplan identifies a perfect storm of factors that are conspiring to make cybersecurity a major business challenge.
- Stakeholders expect more ‘openness’. Increased demands for mobile/smartphone access present new types of security threats
- More corporate value is to be found online – making it a more attractive target for cybercriminals
- Interconnected supply chains making extended networks vulnerable to weak links in the chain
- Increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals and malware
Organisations need a new mindset to tackle cybersecurity challenges. This includes moving from a focus of ‘protecting the perimeter’ to identifying, and protecting, their most valuable intellectual assets. Most critical of all is to acknowledge that cybersecurity is at best a constant battle rather than a one-off problem that can be tackled and ‘solved’.
Man vs. machine for $500
Feb 25th
Jeopardy is a long-running US quiz show that gives contestants an ‘answer’ to which they must respond with the appropriate ‘question’. Each round will have a range of questions of increasing difficulty (and of increasing prize money value). It’s enjoyable to play along if you find yourself sitting in a US hotel room at around tea-time with 30 minutes or so to spare, although the US-centric nature of some of the topics might put some of us at a disadvantage. Well, that’s my story at least.
Earlier this month (February 2011) Jeopardy’s greatest champions returned to the studio to take on a new contestant – IBM’s Watson. Over three years in the development, Watson was created for this specific purpose, although the lessons learned from the project go way beyond ‘how to win a quiz show’. Watson needed more than to simply have access to millions of ‘facts’. He needed to be able to master puns, humour, allusions, slang and nuance, and weigh the probability of each potential correct ‘question’ being correct before buzzing in.
This article, published on McKinsey Quarterly, tells the story of the complexities of the development stage. The article takes just one ‘answer and question’ as an example. In a round called ‘Diplomatic Relations’ Watson must dissect and respond to this:
“Of the four countries the United States does not have diplomatic relations with, the one is the farthest north.”
In order to answer this correctly, and more quickly than any other contestant, Watson needs to perform many functions, ranging from identfying the ‘type’ of question (is it a historical fact or a limerick for example?); working out the grammar of the clue (nouns, verbs etc); working out what ‘country’ refers to (country music?!); before going on to identify potential countries and geographic locations.
This YouTube video shows Watson taking on the champions, displays lists of his alternative potential answers (some of which are very entertaining) and shows some footage of the early stages in IBM’s development of Watson.
Keeping up to date
Oct 18th
Phil Bradley’s presentation at Internet Librarian International had audience members in a tweeting and note taking frenzy. He explained how he uses a range of tools to help him keep up with new technologies and how he uses social networking tools to share his knowledge and insight with his networks.
He then went on to share his latest discoveries, highlighting tools that can help us perform a range of tasks from file conversion; checking website availability; password security checking; wordcloud generation and much more. Phil has been sharing his presentations via Slideshare since 2006. This presentation (‘What Phil has found’) is, of course, available there too.
New Project to Archive Web Shortcuts
Dec 7th
If you blog, tweet or simply like to click through many layers of links as you surf, then you’ll be familiar with url shorteners, the handy tools from organisations such as Bit.ly ot TinyURL which slim down long web addresses to more manageable lengths. But have you ever stopped to think what would happen if one of these shortcut services ceased to exist, taking all its services and software with it?
In response to this problem, the Internet Archive has set up 301Works, an archiving project which will be able to keep the links running in the event of the demise of any member companies. Read analysis from Searcher’s Barbara Quint and comments from project director Stowe Boyd, here.
