 Chris Butler Vice President I've been the office robot since September, 2004.The internet is a work in progress :-| → Chris Butler's Tumblr page → Chris Butler's LinkedIn profile → Chris Butler's Facebook profile → Chris Butler's Google profile → Chris Butler's Technorati Profile | Chris Butler's BlogThe internet is a work in progress.
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Another Advance Toward Conversational Synthesis
July 1, 2009 at 8:00 am by Chris| In this month's newsletter, The Future of the Web, Part 1, I spent some time talking about how in the future, we will manage data using conversational synthesis technology. By "conversational synthesis," I'm envisioning tools that receive data from various sources and condense it into one easily manageable stream. The conversational piece refers to how these tools will allow users to query the database with natural language, creating new types of reports on an ad hoc basis and not having to parse through pre-configued report results and combine them to get the answers they really need. This kind of advance is going to take some work in various areas, so I'm not expecting this kind of experience anytime soon. But I have noticed other examples of advances in synthesis online recently. One type in particular, which I ended up editing out of the newsletter but I thought it was worth mentioning in the blog, are online reports depending upon Twitter feeds. On the base level, an example of this is offered by Twitter itself in it's search tool. I can search Twitter for trending topics (indicated by # marks in tweets) and then scroll through all the messages that correspond. This came in handy last week when I wanted to monitor how Mark was doing in his two presentations at the How conference. I just searched Twitter for "#howconf" and was able to see everyone's feedback- which was very positive, by the way.  Another example of this is a site called SickCity.org. This site pulls it's data from Twitter feeds and allows you to search for a city and see graphs of what maladies its citizens are suffering from (and then twittering about). It's a neat concept, of course, it depends upon users including specific words in their tweets- not any hidden magic ;-)  One last example that you may have already heard about: Toscaninis, a Boston ice cream shop, displays Twitter mentions on a screen in their main room. Nice idea! |
Tags: conversational-synthesis web-development social-media
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DELICIOUSThe Future of the Web
June 30, 2009 at 10:00 am by Chris This morning I published our June newsletter, which is the first of a two-part series on The Future of the Web. In Part 1, I cover the future of websites, the "fractalization" of the web, what I like to call "holistic browsing," conversational synthesis, and more. I added a bit of a caveat to the introduction of this newsletter, reminding readers that "this and next month's newsletters are by no means a comprehensive overview of the possible future of the web. There are plenty of general themes and specific technologies that I won't cover, and among those that I do cover, probably some disagreement on the finer points." I hope my take on the future of the web elicits lots of your opinions- feel free to tell me if you think I'm way off. |
Tags: web-development marketing strategy business social-media
Download PDF EmailComments (0) Clay Shirky on Social Media
June 26, 2009 at 9:00 am by Chris| The past couple of weeks in the news have truly highlighted how influential social media are as far as how we communicate globally and spread news. From the post-election unrest in Iran to the lightning-fast spread of the news of Michael Jackson's death, social networks like Twitter and Facebook are outpacing traditional news media significantly. Clay Shirky, in a recent TED Talk, shares his thoughts on how social media is influencing the course of politics and history. The video is about 17 minutes, but well worth your time to watch: |
Tags: social-media video
Download PDF EmailComments (0) Digital Preservation or Conservation?
June 5, 2009 at 3:00 pm by Chris
Last week's episode of the Spark podcast featured a segment on digital preservation, a concept I'm interested in both from an organizational and practical point of view. The host interviewed Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. In the course of his interview, Ross mentioned Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster, an animation about digital preservation, and the problem of bitrot, where storage media degrades such that software can't interpret the bitstream because some information has been lost. Ross also suggested that we should be storing entire databases of information (medical records, tax returns, etc.) for posterity because historians:
"are going to be very interested in large data sets, because embedded in these data-sets is the ability to look at our society at high levels of granularity. You can see the individuals, but you can also see the trends. And they can ask new and original questions that help them to understand who and what we were better. It's in that base of information that the greatest knowledge about our contemporary society is being held."This concept came up initially for me when the whitehouse.gov site transitioned from the Bush administration to the Obama administration. Many people wondered (and still wonder) what happened to all the information that used to be at that website. Suggestions have ranged from archiving these sites and moving them to new domains or having them as subsites of whitehouse.gov. But the larger problem is really whether storing large data sets, given how rapidly large amounts of data is generated, is practical. I am all for archiving and preserving information for history's sake, but if we do this, we'll need digital curators just as much as we'll need the physical resources necessary to hold the data. What we don't want is vast storage of junk tweets, blog posts, comments, Facebook wall posts, etc. Perhaps we should be considering digital conservation? |
Tags: digital-conservation the-future
Download PDF EmailComments (4) Protect the Future... It's the law?
June 4, 2009 at 8:00 am by Chris This was an intriguing bit for all you futurists out there: Andrew Revkin, in his New York Times "Dot Earth" blog post, A Push to Stop Crimes Against the Future, quotes C.G. Weeramantry, a member of the council and former vice president of the International Court of Justice, who says, "We are today using international law in a heartless fashion, for we think only of those who are alive here and now and shut our eyes to the rest of the vast family of humanity who are yet to come. This forecloses to future generations their rights to the basic fundamentals of civilized existence: acknowledging them as holders of rights in the eyes of our law.”On one hand, I like this idea. After all, who could argue with thinking ahead and doing so being mindful of how one's decisions might affect future generations? This is essentially at the route of the moral argument for environmental conservation- protecting the availability of resources and a life-supporting environment for our children and beyond. But on the other hand, I find myself skeptical of our ability to always accurately predict the long-term affects of our decisions, such that we may end up making a harmful decision that appears beneficial, even in terms of projected ramifications. In other words, without the perspective of hindsight, how will we really know how to "stop crimes against the future?" This is a bit of a Minority Report-like problem, but without the precognition. Revkin ends by asking, "Are we mature enough as a species to safeguard the rights of future generations without the threat of a day in court?" Realistically, in terms of maturity, probably not. We tend to be myopic in this regard, and I think we all know it. But assuming we grow in maturity and start thinking like time travelers in order to protect the future, we still have the limitation of being in the now looking at the future, rather than being in the future looking at the past. |
Tags: strategy privacy the-future
Download PDF EmailComments (4) Describing the Internet
June 2, 2009 at 8:00 am by Chris
How would you describe the internet? Is it a vast series of tubes? A superhighway? An organism? Where this gets difficult is that sometimes we lean toward more static descriptions of the information channels, like "tubes" or "web", while other times choosing descriptions that focus on the
activity of the web, like "superhighway." (By the way, contrast the metaphor you thought of with those listed in this study from 2000, Making sense of the Web: a metaphorical approach.) I recently ran across two blog posts that are doing some more current thinking on this matter. One came from Tim Malbon in a blog post titled, The Web as a Column of the Ocean. Malbon describes the current state of the web as comparable to the ocean, which has different levels based upon the life that thrives (or does not thrive) at various depths. Here's an interesting quote: "At the very top, in the seething surface layer of the Epipelagic the Web is a boiling mass of life. A rising storm of thrashing users. An unimaginably massive number of interactions. The waters are hot. Currents flow fast. Waves crash and spume flies as millions of short messages rip back and forth across the surface. Links and people collide in a foamy chaos of tangling and untangling networks... This top layer - the scalding Photic cauldron of short messages and streaming data visualisations - is where it’s at. The top layer has become a lens for finding content further down. The surface is now where I look for new stuff, where I ask questions (search) and where I discover the vast Web of sites, pages, documents and content hanging lower down in the depths. This layer is connected to that which lurks below through trillions of filaments and capillaries."The other example came from Mike Arauz's blog post, Visualizing The Network Structure of the Internet. After reading Malbon's post, I wondered, if the top layer is "where it's at," how do we manage to navigate it, especially since it seems to expand faster than the rate by which we can even hope to organize it. Arauz seems to answer the question here: "This is why things that blow up and become hugely popular on the web do so at the top strata. Because there's so much mixing and overlap. However, the lower strata are crucially important. Because of their more narrow focus and secluded environment, they create a qualitatively different relationship between the explorer and their discovery."This makes a lot of sense to me. It's in the connections between readers at the top that the filtering occurs. See, my big question was how, in the Epipelagic layer that Malbon describes, anyone actually finds anything. But the answer was in Arauz's post itself. Before reading it, I had never heard of Tim Malbon. But because I had already been connected to Arauz, I eventually found information by adopting his connection to Malbon. Arauz's description looks a bit like the structure of a fractal, in which each endpoint spawns more connections. With a structure like that, one needs only to be connected to a small group of people or sources in order to ensure that they receive a comprehensive sample of information. Of course, knowing who to connect to is not always that simple, but I think this "trickle out" approach works. At least, I've found it to work for me. What about you? By the way, here's an interesting take on visualizing the internet from Kevin Kelly's CT2 blog:  |
Tags: technology
Download PDF EmailComments (8) Are webinars part of your marketing strategy?
June 1, 2009 at 9:00 am by ChrisI just asked this question on LinkedIn. If you have an opinion on this, I'd love to hear it... |
Tags: social-media marketing strategy business
Download PDF EmailComments (0) A Practical Guide to Social Media
May 28, 2009 at 10:45 am by Chris| I just published this month's newsletter, which is a practical guide to social media. Whether you're already immersed in it or you're still wondering how to best integrate it into your life and work, social media has probably been on your mind lately. I'm willing to bet that whichever state you find yourself in, user or lurker, you're probably still a bit overwhelmed. My goal here was to focus on some particular tools that offer some real practical value to you. As I was preparing for this newsletter, I stopped to consider what exactly social media means. I really like the Wikipedia definition, which reads: "Social media are primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings."I like this definition precisely because it's so general. See, eventually (if not already), what we think of as social media will simply be the standard way of using the internet. We are moving inexorably from a unilateral display vs. receive approach to web-based content to a multilateral paradigm where anyone and everyone can interact around specific content. Sure, there are going to be bumps in the road that upset our personal and professional sensibilities, but it's my hope that we eventually settle in to an approach that facilitates honest, forthright communication and transactions between individuals and businesses. In other words, today you may rightly feel that social media is exhausting, but as we all integrate it into our daily lives in various practical ways, it should become much more satisfying and productive. If not, we can all head for the hills ;-) |
Tags: social-media
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