Shaping Network Society

For a while, we have been trying to develop a MECE framework to think about how we want to access data in our mediated environments. We started out with search (google), but missed that what was at the tip of our tongue, namely discovery (think any recommendation engine or stumbleupon), then where awed by the global thought stream (twitter and the facebook stream), but had always hoped for a chance to mine “real” knowledge.

There is the Eyeplorer, a startup from Berlin you might want to take a look at and today Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame will speak at the Berkman Center about his new venture Wolframalpha. Do watch it here at 3PM EST today (9 PM Erfurt time) Or watch and interact in Second Life: http://tinyurl.com/s6tv4

No matter the merits of the announcement, the argument is sufficiently interesting to be re-stated. Stephan Wolfram of Mathematica fame has just announced another contender to how we organize human knowledge. His approach is based on his thinking in A New Kind of Knowledge (2002) and Mathematica.He argues:

(a) all/most knowledge today is digitally available, however, we are not able to question and do stuff with it [compute it].
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(b) there is hope that by semantically tagging it, this could be achieved. Stephan Wolfram does not believe so [think anything from delic.io.us to twitter].

(c) A new kind of science reminds us that instead of reverse engineering our theories from observation, we should simply enumerate systems and then try to match them to the behaviors we observe [build the world from simple automata].

(d) This means we can model the data relationships that we have available to create knowledge.

(e) However, data is not data, therefore, it is necessary to curate the data [have experts decide on what matters].

(f) Assuming this works, we have created an intelligent system, but how do we interact with it?

(g) Humans use natural languages, so we would need to get the system to answer “real questions.”

Clearly, an amazing project – we will see in May how well it does on all seven points. And there is more than just epistemology involved, this is about political theory too… :) Let us see how google responds..

For the longest time, there has been a debate, about what is the next big challenge on the way to “augmented reality” after search. Logically, it should be discovery, but somehow sites like Stumbleupon have not hit the main stream. Over the last year the buzz around twitter has grown stronger and Erick Schonfeld argues on Techcrunch that we are moving into a world, where we can mine the “thought stream” of the world:

What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.

Translated into the frameworks of the venture capitalists, Twitter is an interesting proposition, because it is:

1. Open.  That makes it easy for others to build on top of Twitter and it also makes it searchable.
2. Real time. It is a huge database of what is happening right now.
3. Ubiquitous. You can get to it from just about any device.
4. Scalable. (Don’t laugh)
5. Persistent. It allows for an archive of what is happening and what has happened, which is searchable (see No. 1).