Learning from the Web

Adam Bosworth (Google's VP Engineering), has an interesting article on ACM Queue on unintuitive lessons that the web taught us. Here are the main points:

1. Simple, relaxed, sloppily extensible text formats and protocols often work better than complex and efficient binary ones.
2. It is worth making things simple enough that one can harness Moore’s law in parallel.
3. It is acceptable to be stale much of the time.
4. The wisdom of crowds works amazingly well.
5. People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs).
6. Pay attention to physics.
7. Be as loosely coupled as possible.
8. KISS. Keep it (the design) simple and stupid.

Compare this with Tim O'Reilly's core competencies of Web 2.0 companies, as mentioned in his article "What is Web 2.0":

1. Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
2. Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
3. Trusting users as co-developers
4. Harnessing collective intelligence
5. Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
6. Software above the level of a single device
7. Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

You can see that a lot of the "lessons" that Adam Bosworth pointed out, have been learnt and are being applied by Web 2.0 companies.

Links

• Learning from THE WEB on ACM Queue
• What is Web 2.0 - Tim O'Reilly

Understanding the 6th and 7th Media

This is a great blog post by Tomi Ahonen which talks about the 6th and 7th media which are the Internet and the Mobile Phone respectively.

...the first five mass media [Print, recording, cinema, radio and TV] are all very mature, over 50 years old each. Even the sixth media - the internet - is well into its teens. The least understood of the seven media is the youngest, mobile phone, which became a media channel only six years ago when NTT DoCoMo first launched its revolutionary i-Mode service in 1999. i-Mode has in its very short life, as regular readers of this blog know, become the world's largest internet service provider, ie bigger than AOL, Yahoo, etc by paying subscribers, by revenues and by profits.

Links

Understanding the 6th and 7th Media

Search relevance

Ethan Stock talks on his blog about the four fundamental ways to determine relevance in search results. These are:

1) Market/collective/algorithmic - Call it the law of large numbers, the wisdom of crowds, or statistical truth, but PageRank and similar "hubs and authorities" algorithms figure out, on average, what everybody thinks of a given site.

2) Expert/editorial - Roger Ebert on movies. Julia Child on cooking. Henry Kissinger on diplomacy. They've spent a lifetime figuring out what is the best, and the'll tell you so. Yahoo's roots are in this sort of directory/taxonomy/recommendation based organization.

3) Personal - Based on the user's past history and demonstrated interests, give them results that most closely match their tendencies. Amazon's A9 is the best current example.

4) Social - Based not only on the user's past history and demonstrated interests, but on those of all the people they know. This is a fascinating middle ground (possible sweet spot?) in between personal and collective/algorithmic -- you've got enough critical mass of opinions on key topics to hopefully eliminate outliers, but you've got a close enough connection to the user that you can bend your results to match their point of view.

The one that he left out that is getting important these days is location. All the major search engines have the concept of local search, which can retrieve results given a certain location either explicitly (user specifies which location) or implicitly (GPS device, Mobile network location etc). So for instance if I search for "weather", then the most important search hit should be the weather of the city I am currently in.

Medio is a mobile search company trying to incorporate location and personal data to provide answers to queries rather than just search results. The company came out of stealth mode earlier this year and has put up some information about their product on their website.

Links

• Fundamental ways to ways to determine relevance in search results
• Medio's Mobile Search System

Amazing list of web software

I came across this amazing list of mostly free-to-use web software compiled by Phil Bradley. Since the list is quite new, all the links are alive and most of them are worth checking out, if you haven't already.

Phil also has a page on search engines. "Which search engine when?", lets you know which search engine to use based on what you need to find and what you already know.

Links

• "I want to..." - Web Software List
• Finding information: search engines