“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.”

Thierry
began but pointing out how we are surrounded by chaos on the Web through the
over abundance of content. Page rank was a big improvement over prior search
methods. However, it was conceived before the advent of social media. The
increased and growing volume of Web 2.0 information is causing search engines
to rethink their outdated popularity ranking algorithms by bringing timely
social media content to the foreground in an attempt to increase relevance for
users. 

In
the recent FaceBook privacy controversy, Web users made it clear that they are
not so eager to allow search engines to mine their communities’ content for the
benefit of search engine companies and other third parties.  As a result, social media content is not
rescuing search engine companies’ quest for intimate relevance.   Nonetheless, search is a critical
part of the Web experience, but it is no longer the only way to deliver
relevant information.

It
is since the advent of the Web 2.0 that search engines are no longer capable of
elevating recent and relevant information in a timely and contextual
manner.  Popularity ranking is
corrupted by Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) and requires too much time to
elevate pertinent information that has a short shelf-life.  The sad thing is that users are missing
meaningful information that is hidden on the 50th-plus page of a search result;
they just don’t know what they don’t know since they can’t find it.

To
address this challenge Darwin Ecosystem’s Awareness Engine™ applies chaos
theory principles to reveal emerging patterns and correlations that accelerate
the user’s understanding of what is happening about a given theme of interest
regardless of popularity ranking.  We
believe this organic and self-organizing model is best adapted to the evolution
of today’s Web when compared with the increasing limitation of page ranking
offered by search engines. 
Although not a replacement for search engines, Darwin’s Awareness Engine
highlights a new and missing perspective. Chaos theory does not offer a precise
answer, but it reveals a movement or trend as it emerges in real time.

Thierry
provided a number of examples of Chaos Theory in operation through the Darwin
Awareness Engine. The Darwin interface provides a simple and interactive
ScanCloud™(patent pending) that reveals correlated themes for contextual
content filtering around your topics of interest, a BuzzTape™ that displays
themes that have high content-acceleration within the last 24 hours, and the
ability to save attractors (term used in chaos theory) to monitor the evolution
of your favorite topics. Below is a sample Scan Cloud.

At the top is the Buzz
Tracker ™showing the rising and falling starts. At the top left you can see
that it is set to catch what is happening in the past hour. The Scan Cloud ™
shows the top themes emerging in the target sites. The right column shows the
stories under these themes with links to the actual story. Now here is a close
up of the Scan cloud so you read it better.

In this instance there is a
reference to Knoxville in the middle of the Scan Cloud. If you click on it the
stories in the right column shift to those related to Knoxville and display two
stories about use of social media related to the recent floods in the area.

Looking
at what was
under Twitter in the Scan Cloud and the two stories below are found among
others.

You
can link to one
of the stories in PC Magazine as displayed below.

Thierry provided a number of
examples but this one gives a sample of the basic interface and process. Darwin’s
Awareness Engine can provide a new model of information consumption through
Chaos Theory that will benefit Web and Enterprise users alike while allowing
Web 2.0 authors to be noticed in a timely and relevant context. 

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 Principals 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. 

Rising Above the Quantification of Content: Part One: Parker
vs. Piaget

Rising Above the Quantification of Content: Part Two:
Pritchard vs. Williams (aka Keating)

Rising Above the
Quantification of Content: Part Three: Powerpoint versus Text and Conversation

In this last part of the series on the value of providing people the opportunity to
exercise their own cognitive powers to make sense of content, see the
connections between content, and decide what is valuable to them. I have
reviewed some efforts to over measure topics beginning with Robert Parker on wine
and J. Evans Pritchard on poetry and looked some effects of media on cognition
by exploring what PowerPoint may be doing to us as reported in the New York Times.  Nick Carr addresses similar questions in his Atlantic
article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? He provides some anecdotal evidence but
admits that the proper scientific research has not been done.

I do not feel that Google actually makes us
stupid but also do not feel that it is not going to be the key to understanding
the universe that seems to be the quest for Google.  I am also not suggesting that Darwin is here to replace
Google. It simply complements it and does things that Google is not so good at.
Google is a search engine and it helps you find things you are looking for. I
keep using it to write this post. Darwin is a discovery engine and it helps you
explore a topic and develop a greater awareness of its context and uncover
things about the topic that you did not know to search for. I have written
about the Google question before (see Will Google Make Us Stupid? in the
FastForward blog). I concluded that like any information tool, the final responsibility for
determining the value of the content lies with the person using it. Darwin is
designed to give the user a greater opportunity to make these decisions.

I do agree with Nick Carr that media and
knowledge related technology effect cognition, that the means we use to work
with information have effects on our thought process. I underplayed this aspect
of the Google question in my FastForward post. Our communication channels, whether
they are words, charts, PowerPoint, or Twitter, provide structure to our
thoughts and help shape them and our subsequent thinking. This was the focus of
my psychological research in the 70s, first at the University of Toronto and
then at Harvard.

One clear example of the effects of media on
cognition comes from comparing spoken language with sign language. For example
while errors in speech often reflect the structure of spoken language, the
neuroscientist Ursula Bellugi found that errors in sign language reflect its
parameters: space, direction, and movement. Likewise the poetry of spoken
language reflects the rhythms of sound while the poetry of sign language is
based on the rhythms of visual movement. A communication medium does more than
convey information. It helps to structure your thoughts.  In the last post in this series I
discussed a bit about the effects of the phonetic alphabet on thought.

Carr offers a clear example of the effects
of knowledge related technology when he discusses how the mechanical clock, which came into
common use in the 14th century, changed aspects of thought. He refers to the
work of Lewis Mumford, the historian and cultural critic who described how the
clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an
independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract
framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and
thought.”

So both technology and communication media can effect thought. The Web
is a mixture of both. Carr wonders about the effects of using the Internet
on our cognitive abilities. He writes, “Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or
exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet,
for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of
how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.”

Carr considers Google to be the “Internet’s high church” and he goes
into great depth on how Google’s obsession is with measurement, like Fred
Taylor, Robert Parker, and J. Evans Pritchard. He quotes the Google CEO Eric
Schmidt, that Google is “a company that’s founded around the science of
measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything.”  Sound familiar?

Carr goes on to write, “It seeks to develop “the perfect search
engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean
and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a
kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with
industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the
faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.” 

He also notes that the economic model of massive page views drives
them to encourage us to skim from page to page, not stopping to explore and
contemplate.  Google provides a
linear list of results organizer according to Google’s concept of what is
useful to us. Google tries to be the decider on value. Carr is concerned that
this is causing us to move away from reflective thought and focused reading for
a deeper meaning.

Darwin takes an opposite view. It views the Web as too massive to
understand and human reasoning too complex and individualized to fully progam. Rather
that drawing inspiration for Fred Taylor’s time and motion studies and
attempting to understand and control the universe of content on the Web, Darwin
is inspired by Edward Norton Lorenz’s work on Chaos Theory
in mathematics and weather prediction. Darwin does not try to impose an order
on content, it lets content self-organize. During the 1950s, Lorenz became skeptical of the appropriateness of
the linear
statistical models in meteorology, as most atmospheric
phenomena involved in weather forecasting are non-linear. Instead he
proposed the concept of attractors that operate within a dynamic system that
evolves over time in a complex, non-repeating pattern.  This is the complete opposite of Fred
Taylor’s repeatable time and motion approach.

We think the two approaches complement each other. The Darwin
approach does not require human intervention to be
organized; it is self-organizing based on the content itself and therefore more
representative of what is happening as it occurs, and respectful of each unique
context. It also eliminates the possibilities of search optimization and spam.  Instead of providing a linear list,
Darwin offers a Scan Cloud of the top 100 themes related to your topic of
interest (see below).  Your chosen
topic acts as an attractor to collect related content. Darwin allows you to
move within the Scan Cloud to explore the related themes that are of interest
to you and the Scan Cloud dynamically changes to reflect your movement. 

A list of
the actual content within each theme is found next to the Scan Cloud (see
below) and it dynamically changes to reflect your movements.  Darwin does not try to understand the
universe of content nor does it try to understand your intentions or values.
Instead it helps you to achieve your own understanding of what is happening in
the world of Web content.

Darwin
promotes exploration, contemplation, and discovery. We do not make any claims
on its lasting impact on thought but it does address some of the concerns that
Nick Carr raises. We invite you to contact us to take a look at our Darwin web site. 

through the eternity of every
second,

existing in a world devoid of
tense,

until he learns to live for
tomorrow

by rules from the past.

And belief is built on belief.

When is the present?

It becomes the past before you
can grasp it…

…and Bert and Walter sat in the
corner,

sharing their wine and worldly
views.,

and talking in the past and future tense…