Finding, not Searching. The Theory of Answers.

Answer Theory
June 17, 2013

The question throughout human history has been how to find relevant information in the shortest amount of time; basically, to find the answer. I have always argued that people want to find the answer, not search.

The simplest solution has been to collect the information in some type of storage, memory, cave paintings, books, video, hard drives. And to pass that information from one person to another, via language, airwaves and networks, both social and digital. Currently "The Cloud" and "The Internet" seem to be the storage and information transit solutions.

Finding the answer from older storage solutions, like memory, books and even older computer mainframes required hours of manual labor, usually via an expert in the field, even after computers made information correlation faster and easier, still experts were required to find and provide answers. And these methods to supply answers were very expensive.

Ways to use the internet to generate answers evolved from the basic search functions, providing lists of links that anyone could view and determine which pieces were relevant, one distinction was that the question had to be asked, the other was that the links used very little information about who was asking the question. Probably the most used way to answer questions still in use, almost unchanged since Yahoo!

Some search engines use people to determine what the most likely searches people are making and tailor the results, like ask.com.

Social Information systems usually generate answers before requested based on a users biases and those of their friends. For example sending information on a concert before you even knew they were on tour. You no longer have to wait for an MTV news update. While being predictive social media sites generate noise, not every update is valuable information.

Hybrid answers are generated by combining the search methodology with social networking, having a user's search results influenced by their social media contacts, past searches and even current location. Google has various solutions which provide argumentatively better results using these methods.

A future successful version of the answer system would have less noise than social media systems, but provide relevant answers before a user asks. Google Now appears to do this by taking the most asked questions and dynamically providing the answer at the correct time, such as, "What will my commute home be like?"

And other solutions will use the phonemes from our searches to search youtube videos, music, tv shows and movies to provide better answers and better answer format. Of course this may bring an end to the #hashtag.

wdnii
© 2013 Norris Proprietaries Incorporated

Information Aggregation

Information Visualization and Aggregation

June 10, 2013

The way I think of Information aggregation are processes which organize the incoming flow into various streams or channels, yes, channels like  television. These channels could be, for example, like sections of a newspaper, “Sports”, “Current”, “Politics”, and can be grouped further by how well you trust the source such as: qualified information, unqualified information and advertising Information, or by the information being pushed up or down by other site users, such as on reddit.

There are way too many applications to individually name, but I am particularly interested in mobile apps, and the best appear to be: Flipboard, Google Now, Google Currents and Taptu.

Taptu has a nice interface, but ignores social media sites and only has access to news.

Google Currents does not aggregate between information providers, so you cannot see just a general category of ‘Sports’. But you can view the articles in the LA Times, for example. The information display feels to be displayed more by a program than by human design.

Google Now places applications on the google search page to customize information selection and the display dynamic, such as providing current conditions effecting the daily commute.

Flipboard is one of the more interesting applications. They provide access to social networking posts from your friends, magazines, newspapers and current trending social networking and news feeds. Some of the magazine articles are the initial teaser and then you are prompted to subscribe if you want to read the entire article. Flipboard uses a pictorial interface, like an advanced Tumblr., and Flipboard does display Tumblr. blogs better than Tumblr. The interface feels designed, less robotic.

Finally Android OS and the various widgets can fit into this category allowing aggregation updates, but each widget has a slightly different look and feel, not providing a uniform experience.

Next I expect we will see News TV aggregation would pull out snippets of the news programs for you to view only on the topics you were interested. You could build your own 30 minute news TV show from the various programs. Probably a few copyright issues to clear first.

Another along the same thought would aggregate articles on a single topic eliminating redundancy creating one article with all of the information. Be kind of interesting to run editorials from opposing points of view.

And an aggregation stream that will include radio and social tv channels, along with social picture, blogs, and the pay for media sites.

Finally, the big changes will come when some company can provide a subscription service which includes most all of the various premium content for one monthly fee. This will encourage a pay stream for internet content which is currently underperforming compared to other content/information delivery systems.

wdnii

© 2013 Norris Proprietaries Incorporated