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Tags: epistemology, google, guttenberg on 2008-07-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Tags: montpelerin, google on 2008-07-20 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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I've written quite a bit about "bionic software," the idea that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Web 2.0 is that its applications are a new hybrid of man and machine, driven by algorithmic interpretation of aggregated human activity. Recent turmoil in financial markets show us just how such systems can run amok. Figuring out the right balance of man and machine is one of the great challenges of our time. We're increasingly building complex systems that involve both, but in what proportion? Bill Janeway will be talking at the conference with Rick Bookstaber, author of A Demon of Our Own Design. Bookstaber was the head of risk management for Morgan Stanley, and now runs a hedge fund. He argues that the very techniques originally developed to manage risk via computational means have actually increased risk. He asks whether we can put the genie back in the bottle, and whether we can afford not to. Incidentally, this same issue is playing itself out in the world of Web 2.0 itself, with new search engines, from Jason Calacanis' mahalo to Jimmy Wales' Wikia Search making the argument that a purely algorithmic approach is fundamentally flawed. In response to yesterday's announcement of Wikia Search, Cory Doctorow wrote, in a BoingBoing editorial entitled Wiki-inspired "transparent" search engine: We have a notion that the traditional search engine algorithm is "neutral" -- that it lacks an editorial bias and simply works to fulfill some mathematical destiny, embodying some Platonic ideal of "relevance." Compare this to an "inorganic" paid search result of the sort that Altavista used to sell. But ranking algorithms are editorial: they embody the biases, hopes, beliefs and hypotheses of the programmers who write and design them. Mahalo is placing a bet on human intervention in search results; Wikia Search on the power of making its ranking algorithms open and transparent (a la open source software). But both are trying to re-draw the boundary between human and machine.

Tags: economics, google, manipulation, montpelerin on 2008-01-06 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Google's announcement of Knol shows that they understand some of their key business drivers very well; With as much as 5% of the search result links for popular terms going to Wikipedia pages, a solution to capturing some of that traffic in an environment that Google can control and display ads on makes good business sense.... [But] Knol shares with Google Book Search the problem of being both indexed by Google and hosted by Google. This presents inherent conflicts in the ranking of content, as well as disincentives for content creators to control the environment in which their content is published. This necessarily disadvantages competing search engines, but more importantly eliminates the ability for content creators to innovate in the area of content presentation or enhancement.

Tags: google, montpelerin on 2007-12-29 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Tags: google on 2007-07-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Tags: google, market-power on 2007-04-11 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Tags: borges, google, search on 2007-03-29 and saved by8 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Tags: ai, google on 2007-03-07 and saved by11 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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