Yoick - Hightechwire

Marc Fawzi blogged recently that Wikipedia 3.0 meant the end of Google. Perhaps, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath. While I’ve always said that the Internet giveth and taketh away - both with blinding speed…it’s gonna need a lot of ‘taketh’ to topple the Googlezilla.

In any event, Marc did make an interesting comment that:

“The emergence of a Wikipedia 3.0 (as in Web 3.0, aka Semantic Web) that is built on the Semantic Web model will herald the end of Google as the Ultimate Answer Machine. It will be replaced with “WikiMind” which will not be a mere search engine like Google is but a true Global Brain: a powerful pan-domain inference engine, with a vast set of ontologies (a la Wikipedia 3.0) covering all domains of human knowledge, that can reason and deduce answers and not just throw some information at you using the rudimentary concept of the ’search engine’.

Having spent some quality time with Doug Engelbart recently, I hear within Marc’s comment rumblings of Doug’s Collective IQ vision. This also ties in with the influence upon Doug, and many others, of Vannevar Bush’s seminal paper on the Memex.

I love how John Battelle ties this all together in The Search:

“But what may well become possible in the world of perfect search is the ability to take the clickstream of that journey and turn it into an object – a narrative thread of sorts, something I can hold and keep and refer to, a prop to aid in the telling and retelling of how I came to my answer. Tracks in the dust, so to speak, that others can follow, or question to discover how I came to my conclusions. And these tracks are not just potential narratives for others to read; they can also be objects that can be spidered by a search engine, providing them with an entirely new order of intelligence about how people learn. In the aggregate, these clickstreams can provide a level of intelligence about how people use the Web that will be an order of magnitude more nuanced than mere links, which formed the basis for Google’s PageRank revolution. 

“As We May Think”, Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 essay in The Atlantic, posited the memex, a computational machine that created the equivalent of clickstreams in the field of scholarly research. In the essay, Bush outlined a looming problem for humankind – that knowledge and learning have become so complicated, so layered, so inefficient, that it is nearly impossible for anyone to be a generalist, in the sense that Aristotle was in his day. In short, there is simply too much knowledge – we can’t depend on any one person to be a philosopher to the kings. 

As Bush outlined it, the memex gained its potency by capturing the traces of a researcher’s discovery through a corpus of knowledge, then storing those traces as intelligence so the next researcher can learn from and build upon them. 

Clickstreams are the seeds that will grow into our culture’s own memex – a new ecology of potential knowledge – and search will be the spade that turns the Internet’s soil. Engines that leverage clickstreams will make link analysis-based search (nearly all of the commercial search today) look like something out of the Precambrian era. The first fish with feet are all around us – nearly every search engine now supports search history, and dozens of interesting tools have recently come to market that attempt to make sense of the patterns we searchers are leaving upon the Internet’s corpus. We have yet to aggregate the critical mass of clickstreams upon which a next generation engine might be built, but we are already pouring its foundations.” 

More on this later.

 Perhaps the most interesting point made by Marc, is this:

 “Wikipedia makes ‘us’ count. Google doesn’t. Wikipedia derives its power from ‘us’. Google derives its power from its technology…Who would you count on to change the world?”

This reminds me of the comparison John Battelle makes between Google and Yahoo:

“…key distinction between Google and Yahoo. Yahoo is far more willing to have overt editorial and commercial agendas, and to let humans intervene in search results so as to create media that supports those agendas. Google, on the other hand, is repelled by the idea of becoming a content – or editorially driven company. While both companies can ostensibly lay claim to the mission of ‘organising the world’s information and making it accessible’, they approach the task with vastly different stances. 

Google sees the problem as one that can be solved mainly through technology – clever algorithms and sheer computational horsepower will prevail. Humans enter the search picture only when algorithms fail – and then only grudgingly. 

But Yahoo has always viewed the problem as one where human beings, with all their biases and brilliance, are integral to the solution. It’s humans, backed by technology, who drive the ‘also try’ results at the top of the page (the process has been automated, but its classic architecture of participation stuff: “Here’s what other humans find useful related to your search”). It’s humans who push Yahoo’s internal content and commerce sites to the fore in the shortcut results. DNA has much to do with it – Yahoo started as an entirely subjective collection of links – humans first, technology second.”

It’s this ‘us’ people factor that defines much of the Web 2.0 movement and it also sets the scene for a 3.0 inflection point in the near future.

At Innovation Bay recently I hosted a dinner on the future of media. Our special guest for the evening was David Kirk, former captain of the All Blacks, Oxford scholar and CEO of Fairfax, a global media company operating from Sydney. While the discussion there is not disclosable (our sessions are always closed door), it did set in train some interesting thoughts.

Key of which is that the future of media lies in attention. Think about why Newscorp bought Myspace - to elicit the attention of a certain demographic. Exactly how and for how long one’s attention is captured is key to so much in the media area - the GYM (Google, Yahoo and MSN) purport to have this figured out and make money out of it by doing stuff like selling adwords.

It can be argued that our “attentionstream” is private data and that we should feel affronted if others exploit it…well, not sure I buy into that completely, but some folks have: enter the AttentionTrust. Seth Goldstein and co. have created this non profit based on the premise that:

“When you pay attention to something (and when you ignore something), data is created. This “attention data” is a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values, and it serves as a proxy for your attention.”

Last evening I attended a function hosted by Ross Dawson, Chairman of the newly minted Future Exploration Network, to launch a Future of Media Summit they are putting on in Sydney and Silicon Valley simultaneously on the 18/19 July. Should be a fun event. As part of the launch Ross shared with us a Future of Media Strategic Framework, which is a great mindmap for visualizing the entire media space. I’d make one change though — at its very center I’d place a rather large target-shaped content box and fill it with one word, yip you guessed it: ATTENTION.

Following on from my last (first) post, I note Kevin Maney from USA Today has written an article in similar vein - titled “Tech startups don’t grow on trees outside the USA” - I’d take it one step further, Kevin, they don’t grow on trees without the right environment. If an avocado tree does not have the right mix of ingredients, it will never bear fruit…Silicon Valley is full of startup bearing avo trees (excuse the mixed metaphor).

In fact Kevin’s article starts off talking about a VC roundtable lunch I hosted in Sydney recently at which I brought together a number of the key players from the Australian early stage VC community. The purpose was to explore ways in which we at NICTA can work together with the investment community to foster a more well-honed ecosystem. The conversation did indeed settle on how we could create a Google, Myspace or Skype out of the geography. Watch this space…

One of the roundtable attendees, Bjoern Christensen, had the following to say in response to my blog posting yesterday: “It is indeed almost magic how to generate success”, in his imitable Danish style he continues, “but it starts with the right people finding together and deciding to start the journey to a destination not yet known.”

Touche, Bjoern. 

Living on the  S-axis between Silicon Valley, Sydney and Shanghai, I often get asked what’s the secret sauce to commercializing technology and emulating the Silicon Valley success story.

Firstly, let me paraphrase our newest board member at NICTA, Graham Hellestrand, “Commercialization takes a mix of dreams, vision, experience, determination and sacrifice”. It depends on who you talk to as to the importance placed on each of these elements, but they are all required.

As Ray Crock, the founder of Macdonalds (no I don’t imbibe) said, “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence”. And you’ve gotta believe that the recipe for persistence is a good dollop of each of Graham’s elements.

Some folk seem to think that you can put someone in the Valley for a few months, let them soak up some magic dust and then return them and together with government support…viola, you can have a ready made ecosystem. It doesn’t work like that. It’s about the soft stuff, as a former colleague, Julie Meyer says, “…and whether ordinary people are willing to pull together to achieve something extraordinary - you can’t quantify it.”

So how can YOU contribute. That’s easy! ”Be unreasonable about success. It’s not about the money if you’re a true ‘disrupter’, but about who you are and how you express yourself,” says my friend Julie.

Sprinkle a little magic dust in and around yourself in the way that you do things and become an entrepreneur hell bent on risking everything and in the process you will disrupt whole sectors and create your own S-axis.

Welcome to Yoick!  Which btw translates as PURSUIT, ‘purpose in action’, search, chase, quest, hunt - take or hold a course, shape one’s course.