Mon, Mar 27, 2006

The "come to me" web

by Austin Govella

I can’t sleep so I’m going to ramble a bit about the “come to me” web and how something just doesn’t sit right with me.

Comments

I can’t sleep so I’m going to ramble a bit about the “come to me” web and how something just doesn’t sit right with me.

The maelstrom of structured content, micro-formats, ambient findability, the model of attraction, and feeds seems to be swirling around a nexus some have named the “come to me” web. Sadly, though the name demands we set the user at the center of the internet universe, the majority of the discussion surrounds matters of technology and implementation. Adam Greenfield nails the problem in all of this: “where are the people in this Internet of Things?”

But even people misdirect us away from the real issue. As with every design problem, this is about how you manage the fulfillment of your desire. (Why did we abandon information pimp as our official title?)

Better than the “come to me” web is the “do what I want” web.

My links “thing” is a decent example. I use the feed from my del.icio.us account to publish a link blog. I didn’t bring my data to me. I brought my data to over here. I made it do what I want: share cool links with people.

Structured content, micro-formats, ambient findability, the model of attraction, and feeds let me (more closely) do what I want, when I want, how I want. They let me manage how I fulfill my desires; how I accomplish my goals.

Thomas Vander Wal writes: “Today’s usage is truly focussed on the person and how they set their personal information workflow for digital information.” He frames the intertwingling as being “based on attraction”. Peter Morville is in similar territory with ambient findability, and Adam Greenfield agrees but also demands we consider “the flipside of findability, which is the prerogative not to be found”.

But we’re still not discussing what drives attraction (what is close), what is found (what is here), and what is not found (what is not here)? It seems like there’s a hole there in the middle of the conversation, the center of the maelstrom. I think relevance is the concept at the center. How do our desired experiences negotiate relevance between us and the systems around us?

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say other than it’s more about experience than it is about people. We’re exiting the cathedrals in favor of the bazaar, but I think we’re still in church. If that makes any sense.

Anyway, over at V-2, Mr. Greenfield pointed to a bibliography of links Anne Galloway collected on the “internet of things“.

(Ironic, but a song called “the war against sleep” is on right now. Heh…)

Talk About "The "come to me" web"

Adam Greenfield said:

Yeah, I clearly need to think about this all more deeply, but I don't believe I am at all interested in a "come to me" Web, and the reasons are many.

I start with the recognition that - when even an organization that has as much information about me as Amazon does is incapable of making useful recommendations to me - the body of data necessary to genuinely useful inferences about my desires is probably more than I'm comfortable giving away. Let's call that point one.

Point two is that (with all due respect to Thomas, who I'm quite fond of) the "come to me" Web strikes me as a mere repackaging of the old "push media" idea. Well, I didn't want things pushed to me in 1995, and I still don't. I don't want some institution hamfistedly trying to map their prerogative to sell something onto the nominal curve of my projected desires, y'know? And I frankly have trouble seeing circumstances where what is "coming to me" is other than something I don't really want or need.

And that leads me to point three, which is sort of a derivative of those two: if I don't even want to be offered information which perfectly conforms with my projected desires, how much less so will I want what I am bound to actually get instead, which is some clumsy pastiche of my prior purchases and queries? Like I've said elsewhere, in a slightly different context: the prospect is intolerable.

What is missing in this discussion is a recognition of what I am actually doing when I make an informational query: I am signalling the world that *this is the moment*. What Peter is speaking to in his discussion of ambient findability is a recognition that I need this fact *here* and *now*, not ten minutes from now and six blocks away. Where Thomas loses me is by seemingly failing to recognize that a fact that I haven't asked for, or which arrives too early, is as lacking in utility to me (and potentially as annoying or even offensive) as one which arrives not at all.

There is a call, and there is a response. Something tells me that this is an important part of the way we monkeys experience the world - and even construct reality - and I'm not going to be terribly interested in schemes that involve intervention.

Mon, Mar 27, 2006

Dan Brown said:

Great discussion, Austin! And Adam's response to the initial post is even more food for thought. Here's a question, to keep things moving:

Adam says "there is a call, and there is a response." What happens when the call is not very explicit? Can we give information space affordances that detect implicit calls or queries? I'm not saying machines should *anticipate* or *guess* but instead read cues that are not necessarily expressed literally.

This is what appeals to me about the "come to me" web. The personal information cloud, as I see it, contains information _to which we've added affordances_ that tell the machine when something is relevant even if I don't consciously think it's relevant right then and there.

Thu, Mar 30, 2006

Austin Govella said:

"What happens when the call is not very explicit?"

Human interaction — and many network interactions — are designed for failure. Or maybe more accurately: designed for conversation.

Call, response. The caller evaluates the response, judges the gap, and then calls again looking for a refined response. I think this constant iteration is one reason why we continually evolve interfaces to allow faster iteration.

But it seems like you have to one conscious actor controlling refinement on at least one end; judging (and hacking?) relevance.

And from what I recall of Thomas's info cloud is that it's just-in-time info that's relevant, so it's not really like Amazon recommendations.

Although I agree with Adam's fear of spam, I'm idealistic in assuming we'll have evolve/iterate better filter mechanisms… kind of the way I avoid the Oxfam people between the office and the subway station.

Fri, Mar 31, 2006

Austin Govella said:

P.S. I dig the sense of adding affordances to information… we afford information more relevance for specific contexts…

Fri, Mar 31, 2006

Adam Greenfield said:

I guess maybe I still don't understand exactly what the "personal information cloud" is, or for that matter how one would add affordances to information.

Not to be a stickler, Dan, but do you mean that we should enhance the *perception* of affordance relating to a particular piece of data by providing it with (semantic?) metadata that tells some one or thing what can potentially be done with it? That's an interesting idea, and might go some distance toward improving the really bad machine inference that I'm so concerned about.

(I've got a whole section in "Everyware" about just the issue you raise: how unlikely it is that machines will be able to usefully parse the elisions, ellipses and charged absences of everyday speech - and by extension, other forms of natural communication - in the near term.)

I hear that a major e-commerce player has some very interesting plans afoot regarding the use of people to literally eyeball an array of options that an expert system has kicked out for them, and select the right one. In this kind of context, I could see metadata like that proving fairly useful.

In all honesty, though, I try to stay away from the information cloud vocabulary. As Thomas's mental model of what's happening in a transaction between a user and the technical systems around him, it's interesting, but as a more general and powerful framework for understanding that negotiation (or stream of negotiations) I can't seem to make it work for me.

Fri, Mar 31, 2006

vanderwal said:

Let me start with what you posted, then I will get to commenting on comments.

Austin, I completely agree that it is about people, not just the person at the center of the "Come to Me Web" but the people whom are our friends or just human filters on the flood of information that surrounds us.

Through time we humans create technologies that flood ourselves with information. The printed word in books soon created many more volumes than we could read or digest. We humans then created coping mechanisms to deal with that flood and over abundance of information. These mechanisms were tables of contents, indexes, and page numbers that were used by people to find that information that was relevant to themselves or was used by other human filters to digest the information and relay that information to us. Newspapers created a regular flood of informaiton that has been mitigated by sections and indexes.

The digital age has been creating information at an alarming rate. We can search the this flood of information, but we are only getting the tip of that flood. Blogs and personal information outlets are providing not only new information, but digests of the flood of information.

Looking at the Model of Attraction, which began as a replacement for the navigation metaphor (a really poor way of framing what happens on the internet as we do not go anywhere and the metaphor breaks with improved search and dealing with syndicated information streams). The Model of Attraction posits that all information interaction on the web and internet revolves around a human request to draw information closer. We put a term in a search box and information that may be relevant to the term (as the person understands it) is drawn to their screen. When we put in a URL in a browser that information associated to that page/address. Clicking on a link, as the information around that link or what is stated in the link is drawn toward our screen.

The Model of Attraction is all about drawing informaiton closer. Attraction in terms of a magnet is also about pushing unrelated information away. There is an incredible amount of information that is pushed farther from us when we drop a term into a search box. Google finds well over a million pages related to folksonomy that we can draw near ourself, but what about the other billions of pages not drawn closer? The action of attraction aimes to make that which we want near us to be clearer to see.

Now lets suppose we find information we like in this process of drawing things closer. What do we do with it. We have found it. It is getting relatively easy to find things, either exactly that which we desire or something that is good enough. Refindability is an insane problem that few people address.

This keeping things close (not on us, but near us) is what the Personal InfoCloud is about. Tools like del.icio.us or other tools keep the information close to us and let us keep the information or media easily retriveable thanks to using OUR vocabulary as we view the world.

Where does the information sit that we are pulling closer to ourselves? It could be in the Global InfoCloud or the open internet, which is not centrally organized and information is open to anybody. We could use the Local InfoCloud, which is information resources that are closer to us and ordered in a manner that is more familiar to us. These resouces are framed by locatation (our neighborhood where we live, work, or visit regularly), friends, those near to us in thought, affiliations (work or organizations), social software (social websites, social interactive games, etc.), or portals. Some of these local resources are closed to others but we have membership or are participants. Lastly there are resouces we do not have access to, the External InfoCloud, which is not available as they are closed to us, we do not know about them, or the language is a barrier to us.

So where do we find the information we have interest in? Increasingly it is the Local InfoCloud as it is easiest to find things. We act as each others human filters to the web. We share things we find with each other. We subscribe to each others syndicated feeds of pages or collections (del.icio.us links, flickr photos, LibraryThing book collections, Amazon purcase lists and recommendations/reviews, blogs, etc.).

It is these human filters that are becoming increasingly valuble. In the Model of Attraction it seemed a little cold to people as we are just machines drawing information to ourselves. In many cases we are actually doing this by setting Google search parameters that dump matches to these into our e-mail or RSS reader. We do similar things with Technorati, PubSub, IceRocket, and Feedster as they go through the web and matching our interests against information published there and drawing that information closer to us. In the same way we have friends with similar interests that act as our filters and we are increasingly subscribing to their parsing of information they run across and share back out.

The cold terms were replaced to with the Come to Me Web, which uses people we trust as our guides and filters. We are also getting smarter with the tools we use and tools we make (as a collective) so we can limit the information flow to us to things we have an interest in seeing. I am using conferences not so much as a means to find something new, but to meet my filters face to face and find new resources. I don't think of it in this manner, but that is the end result. It is part of the human existance we have had in community all along. We are surrounded by those we trust and those with interests that are akin to our own. As technologies have expanded our boundaries of information possibilitie, they have also expanded the possibility of having more people like us closer to us in thought.

The Come to Me Web, through the interests I have and continue to persue have brought many people closer for communication. I have built friendships that I would have never had and built bonds with people though these common pursuits. Some of the closest people to me in thought are not close at all geographically.

But, conversely I would love to have geography mapped and annotated by these friends or others who have common interests.

Fri, Mar 31, 2006

vanderwal said:

Adam, the come to me web is not the failed approaches of the past, but our own choices of information filters. It does not have to be a giant entity, and for many those are not what people like and for these people, like myself, I choose people and friends as my filters and recommenders.

I am very much inline with your view and fears Adam and the Come to Me Web is that choice of what I want to have close to me. I have been consulting some large, er make that giant, corporations to allow people that are doing "personal publishing" using their tools to select the adversisers they have a preference for to provide the ads on their pages. It breaks the mold and the economy of advertising. If I only want green products displayed on my pages or green products that contribute much of their profit to socially aware organizations (as I define those organizations) then we are changing the world in a way that matters. If earth and people destroying corporations want to provide advertisements they can pay more or only choose the limited number of options they will be left with. Oddly, these companies I have floated the idea to have liked it and are starting to play with it.

But at the core, everything I talk about is based on each of our individual desires and needs. I hated the crap that was tied to "push", which is why I framed the term as "come to me", it is based on me and my predilictions. Not some corporate idea of what they would like me to want, but my interests. This was the focus of my presentation at Design Engaged this past year, who do we trust with our information and how do we build systems that are not under the central contol of a megacorp.

One of the core concepts of the Personal InfoCloud is having the information at our fingertips when we want it and need it. I am not sure where it was constured that this was anything other than that. We have the technology today to drop information into our pocket or with in easy reach for that which we desire. It is particularly easy to do if we keep a calendar, explicitly or implicitly. Think of Flickr as a implicit calendar of our choices in the past and building predictive models upon that.

I talk alot about stalking, in black-hat (negative) and white-hat (positive) manners. It is still stalking in the white-hat world, which is our friends following what we do on Flickr, del.icio.us, our blog, etc. The difference is what is done with the information. My choice of words is based on getting people to have clear thoughts about privacy and what they are sharing and with whom they are sharing things.

Fri, Mar 31, 2006

vanderwal said:

Dan, the Come to Me Web and Personal InfoCloud are based on a call and response, but the information is kept close to the person when they want it and need it. It could be in plain sight, but they may not notice it, or it will be the first thing that is available as it is pushed closer to the person.

You are visiting your aunt and your photos of your last visit would be made more easily available to you. It could be moved to your mobile, if that is what you like (based on your setting your mobile as a trusted device for you and you have the room). Or when you requst photos, these are the photos that are in the first ones offered to you along with your recent trip and photos you normally have set as priority.

Trying to refind information is a high blood pressure point for every person I talk to. Making information more easily refound is key. Knowing context is important. I don't think Adam's response is to anything I ever said or written, but it is a common response to past experiences that have failed us as humans with real needs.

Fri, Mar 31, 2006

vanderwal said:

Adam, I to your last comment, I am more interested in people connecting with people using technology than technology doing it for me (that is Google's approach and I am not a fan of much that they are doing).

I am also not a fan of past attempts to automate responses. I do not base what I discuss on what is built today. Most was built on models that did nto have humans at the center. Most systems today do not understand context even though we tell them our context. Google mobile search does not return the mobile sites for the results of the search. That is a huge failure, I gave them my context, I am on a mobile using their mobile search. That is a system not built by people understanding and/or not caring.

Before we travel our system should back itself up to a secure network accessible drive space. Should I have to tell it I am travelling? No, well I actually did if I put in a plane reservation in my calendar. Dumb calendars should be a thing of the past. People don't use their calendar for future items or past items as they are not helpful to them. They should be helpful, they have the abilty to help in so many ways. We should also be able to tell the calendar what is private, what can be shared with what group that is trusted (may include trusted devices), and what is public.

I am not a believer that our lives are getting less private. I just think it is people with poor minds that are leading that debate. They should get out of the way and let others that want to address it to ensure our privacy become voices in the discussion.

Fri, Mar 31, 2006

Adam Greenfield said:

Well, I'm glad you're more interested in people connecting with each other, using technology as a bridge (at most), than with technology for its own sake. You know I share this interest.

I want to push back, again, at something you wrote here, because I think you're significantly underestimating the complexity of the task you've set forth.

You said, Think of Flickr as a implicit calendar of our choices in the past and building predictive models upon that.

This *might* work for some abstract Persona, but I sincerely doubt whether it would work for me. Maybe I'm an edge case - I mean, everyone in this discussion is almost by definition an edge case, but work with me here : . ) - but my life is full of the sort of unpredictable discontinuities that would make a hash of any such calendar. What's worse is that the discontinuities themselves arise at unpredictable intervals!

Let me give you a few concrete examples. If you look at the last year of my Flickr stream, you'll see quite a few pictures of my wife, a great many taken in airports, a healthy selection of friends acting silly with some kind of food or drink in the picture, and one or two detail shots of superluxury automobiles (not mine). The places are almost exclusively big cities - New York, Seoul, Berlin, Tokyo - or the airports which serve them.

What would a contemporary instantiation of the "come to me" principle offer me, based on this evidence?

I don't want the kinds of things that machine inference is likely to abstract from this data set, whether they're importunements to join frequent-flyer clubs, pictures of Korean women, or offers to test-drive Maybachs.

What's more, I've met people who are aviation enthusiasts - in other words, people who display similar levels of interest in taking pictures of airports - and find them uniformly dull. (Sorry, dudes.) And luxury auto enthusiasts? For the most part: ick and double ick. So neither do I want social networking based on the interests one might fairly glean from the data set Flickr has relating to me - which is probably the second richest on the Web, after Amazon's, and surely number one if you're counting in raw bits.

In fact, here we really begin to get into the flaw in all of these models of attraction, the Taste Tribes and all that: the people I truly love on this planet have relatively little in common that is taggable. Apparently, you simply cannot capture a sensibility or a stance in a tag cloud, even by very large scale aggregation. Strange to say, but I tend to be bored silly by people who identifiably like all the very same things I like, and delighted by the company of people who have *different* tastes.

There's more I could say, but hopefully we can see (even here, anecdotally) how the attraction models simply break down in the face of the complexity and nuance of real life.

Wed, Apr 5, 2006

vanderwal said:

Adam, I brought up the Flickr calendar reference not to sell you things, but to help as a reminder of where you were, for your benefit. Please remove the idea that the Come to Me Web is about pushing ads, it is about keeping information we have sought and found close to us. It is about drawing similar information closer that we desire.

Your photo with Al Gore would not draw other Vice Presidents to you or invitations to meet them at events. But you used that photo to mark time, that time is very important to you. Being able to aggregate similar photos easily, not with Al but with Nurri is what the Come to Me Web is about. Our own use contexts drive our digital bits around us. It is not about the failure of marketing companies to interest in other ways so they push garbage that we do not want.

The Come to Me Web has two very key words in it. Me is the most important, information I desire and have interest in is kept close to me, which means I have come across it. Come is the second term, which is about our beckoning information and media to ourselves. This is proscribed drawing what each person has interest in. We can turn up serendipity and create collision spaces, or keep filters along lines of things we really want and little else.

We also can ascribe stance and sensibility from tags, which is exactly how I got to know the Stamen guys and I knew their stance on many things by the tags applied to the objects. Unlike Flickr, which fails to add identity (real or cloaked), other services allow for easy determining the interest and stance by the tag, object tagged, and identity triplet. Sensibility is garnered through similar objects tagged, as most people do not tag that which they do not like and only tag that which they have an interest in. This is how I get a better appreciation of the things that you Adam find of value. It is rich information as it adds context through the person's eyes who is doing the tagging.

Wed, Apr 5, 2006

xian said:

Since the IA Summit in Vancouver I've discovered that a somewhat dormant idea for a new book has to take shape in my mind. I'm now (at first in a somewhat passive way) gathering and noting ideas about digital identity and online presence.

I find the concept on a personal infocloud compelling in this context. I also think that TVW's model of attraction improves on the navigation metaphor. I suspect the "Come to Me" concept also fits in here somewhere that I have to admit that I don't find the phrase catchy.

I think Adam may be off on a tangent about affinity marketing and recommendations and the suchlike where what I find most interesting about Thomas's ideas are the potential of being able to access my own information, notes, thoughts, appointments, etc., wherever I am, without being tethered to a computer.

Thu, Apr 6, 2006

Adam Greenfield said:

what I find most interesting about Thomas's ideas are the potential of being able to access my own information, notes, thoughts, appointments, etc., wherever I am, without being tethered to a computer.

Sure! But they'll have to be tethered to *something*, right? Someone is going to have to build these systems, and devise the architectures, and define the standards. And maybe I've been marinated in the sour milk of (cough) enterprise too long, but it's hard for me to imagine that the same open infrastructures and architectures that would be necessary to any such ambition wouldn't be turned to commerce pretty darn quickly.

Look, I'm old-school, I'd rather not ever look at an ad on a Web page again (even a relatively restrained Google text ad). And so, as much as I dislike what happens to the sense of place and voice in a Web site when it gets shoehorned into an RSS feed, I've begun to check out RSS readers again. That's sort of a first baby step toward "being able to access my own information, etc., wherever I am," right?

And guess what happened: the ads followed me! And whenever I've consulted on, or even casually discussed, pervasive functionality that includes self-description etc. with clients, one of the first questions that gets raised is, "How are we going to let people know about the exciting things they can do with XYZ?" And so on.

Look, I certainly don't think it's impossible to devise ubiquitous informatic systems that are respectful of us, that do not intrude on us, that respond to our needs and desires appropriately. I simply think that it will be very, very difficult - far more difficult than we are copping to at present, or that is being implied by an idea like "think of Flickr as a implicit calendar of our choices in the past and [build] predictive models upon that."

So I don't really think my point is tangential (although I'm always willing to stipulate it may not be expressed very well). At root, it's twofold: one, oh my goodness, but this is an inordinately difficult challenge we've set up for ourselves. And two, we can be sure that some part of the obstructions in our path toward the goal will have been put there deliberately, by bottomliners and short-termers who leap to think of the business logic you can push people through, or the robust revenue streams that attend even moderate conversion rates.

I have nothing against people making a buck. I just don't want that ambition to be at (or much of anywhere near) the heart of the ubiquitous architectures we devise - and I don't think we're doing enough in our modeling and conceptualizing, even at this early stage, to prevent that contingency from arising.

Thu, Apr 6, 2006

xian said:

Maybe I wasn't clear. I meant "without me having to be tethered to a computer." I realize that the data, the reminders, the notes, the mementos, have to be tethered to something (or some things).

I don't actually see how the "threat" of commerce is different in this context than in any other.

Sun, Apr 9, 2006

Adam said:

Because it will be, well, everywhere - in every moment and in every transaction that's implied by ambient access to your data, reminders, notes and so on.

I hate to turn to fiction as evidence - it's worse than anecdote - but Phil Dick had a handle on this forty years ago.

The vignette from Ubik that I include in Everyware features poor Joe Chip arguing with his front door as to whether he'll be able to leave his apartment without deposited the mandatory nickel in the door slot; Joe contends it's "in the nature of a gratuity," and the door disagrees.

The Dickian stance survived Spielberg's ministrations, and can be seen clearly in Minority Report in the scene with the cereal packages, each of which runs a (loud) loop of animated self-promotion when it's touched. (The protagonist knocks a few over, setting them all to yammering at once.)

Fiction, sure, but of an unusually clearsighted kind. (Or maybe it's that fiction reverses the usual convention, appearing first as farce and only later as tragedy.) In any event, to read these scenes today, they sound less like parodic exaggeration and more like someone's business plan.

To me, the danger of anything that "comes to me," the trouble with any conception of me as a focal node or attractor, the problem with any schema that renders me an all-but-incidental object at the heart of a cloud of information is that these scenarios acquire justification, even a sense of inevitability.

Well, guess what: they're not inevitable. We don't have to shrug our shoulders and adapt to a life in which every mundane operation and transaction engages some business logic. But we have to be exceedingly clear in how we think of ourselves and our relationship to the data we throw off like a spoor if we want to retain even a shred of our autonomy and dignity.

That's why, to me, any conception of a "come to me Web" that doesn't incorporate an acknowldgement of my, of our, sovereignty and absolute right to a private sphere is an unacceptable one. And I don't think we're anywhere close to that acknowledgement in the discussion that's been offered so far.

Sun, Apr 9, 2006

vanderwal said:

Xian is right the focus is on that which we find and keeping that arranged close to us as the first pass of the Come to Me Web. There is very little that helps people in this manner today and most of what we do with technology as regular people is insanely inefficient because of the lack of focus on keeping things near us. We have the technology to do this today, but the focus is on the wrong interactions, if we flip the interactions from the going and getting to the attraction we have a better foundation to work from.

Adam, this attraction also has a second action, which is repulsion. Much like a magnet the act of attraction pulls what we desire closer, but pushing that which we do not want away from us, is also essential and is part of the model of attraction. The heinous intrusions of commerce in our lives is rather banal compared to other more sinister intrusions.

One of the reasons I love presenting the model of attraction and Personal InfoCloud works in Europe is their is still a very visceral reaction with regards to privacy. The privacy issues are very close to people in Europe as it is bred into the social DNA it seems, even in the young people. There is still a very strong recollection of having trust in having your personal information stored at the town hall, but only to wake one morning and a league of people has taken over your town hall and not only gained access to the files, but is forcibly removing people from their homes and lives based on that centrally stored information. This is a fear and pain that goes deep in much of Europe. I look forward to presenting and discussing solutions in this environment as the visceral reaction is strong and I get reminded that we may trust who is running the mothership (think any large organization that has access to our information and stores it - be it e-mail, search queries, chat, etc.), which stores our information and maintains its privacy and integrity, but those running that mothership may not be there tomorrow or they may turn over that information to an external entity that is not careful or even outright malicious with that information.

One of the things I have spent many waking hours thinking though is a Personal InfoCloud that is not reliant upon central resources, or only in the most limited manner. Something along the lines of encrypted P2P, where the peers are personal and we are transferring our data from trusted device to trusted device securely. Digital identity is paramount to this being successful, but not a centrally stored federated identity. It must be a digital identity that is routed via ping to our own validation tools on our own trusted service (some or many may still choose to use a mothership for this) on one of our devices. A central resource is not collecting information on our morning food preferences, the name of our pet (so to send it a pre-approved credit card), our kids, etc.

We only give out to the disconnected services that which we are comfortable giving. We (or our service) receives a ping to validate who we are and we share just a tiny bit of secure validation information. It is useless aggregated with other information and there could be a Creative Commons rights ascribed to each piece of personal information we share. This information, similar to a CC, can only be shared or reused based on our wishes.

This requires address books that ping our service before our information changes hands so that only information we wish to be passed from one service to another is passed. If there are three pieces of info that are my default pieces of information (name, work e-mail, and work phone), but my contact information can also include the 9 IM screen names, 43 social software names on what services, 8 phone numbers, 5 text message addresses, 8 e-mail addresses, my current address (as well as my all previous addresses), etc., but I chose what is given out to whom. If I have somebody on my list of people I would like to share more information with, but have not met them it is possible that one of my fiends that has access to 10 pieces of my address book entry connects me to a friend of theirs on my list of people I want to contact (possibly a friend from college) and when they ping an authenticate their info they get 25 pieces of my info.

What does this do to our Personal InfoCloud? It allows us to better control not only what info about ourselves we share, but also what files and media we can share easily. It could limit other's access to our personal preferences, unless we wish to share them. It could ease our providing access to our social bookmarks on one services with an other service. It could ease using our social network and having it work well as our preferences shared are granular so we could find a good place to find fish tacos in Amsterdam, find the spot where somebody took a photo of a shoe store in Florence, connect with long lost friends as they come through our town (their not knowing we live there and our not knowing they are coming through), etc.

Can we stop the bombardment of advertising as shown in Minority Report? I doubt it. But it could do a couple other things: 1) have no clue as to our preferences, 2) or be helpful at letting us know about things we care about (the shoes Adam recommended and are on your wish list are in this store so you may try them on).

The more we control the information we have been sharing with others the more we can benefit from it. Any explicit action we take with our information (e.g. purchase something, hand out a business card, use a fast pass to ease paying tolls on the expressway) we should have our own record of as well as who else has that information and it should be ours to control how that information spreads.

Having a video at the end of the day of all the surveillance cameras I was captured on would be nice (or insanely freaky). But, if I could require others to get permission to use that image it would change the dynamics. It could also help us reconstruct our own lives, getting back to a calendar being made from our actions through out the day. The cameras reconstruct that we went to the bank (our bank does not have a record of any transaction), bought a sandwich (it is entered into our record for our nutritionist), parked our car and we need to validate our adding more money to the prepayment card, went to Barnes and Noble and did not buy anything (wish list annotates lack of products we desire there, but notes two new items were added to the wish list from that visit). You get the idea. Who else has this information? Possibly many, but we also have it so we can correct it and use it to improve our lives rather than having it impact our lives in less helpful ways.

Sun, Apr 9, 2006

Adam said:

Real quick, but highly relevant: have you seen the work the Attention Trust folks are doing?

Mon, Apr 10, 2006

vanderwal said:

Yes, the Attention Trust work and Root are quite good (or at least interesting). It all falls into the Consumer Managed Information (CMI) models that many in the business research world are looking into. I have an interest in both the selling of my attention (I may give REI and Oxfam fee access to advertise to me, but gas companies and plastics companies have to pay above the normal cost) as well as having part or whole ownership of my explicit actions (I own the data surrounding what I put in my Amazon shopping cart, modifications that recommendation engine, and what is/has been in my Amazon Wish List).

Part of my first job out of undergrad was working at a non-profit in "member acquisition". This was a polite way of saying direct-mail and other similar efforts. I learned very quickly the value of a name and a name on what least was worth more to somebody. I always thought it has been odd that my name and contact information (along with other metadata about me) could be sold for 8 cents (U.S.) to 18 dollars and I never saw a cent of that. Some of the people buying I was happy that they were wasting the money on buying my name for something I could not care about (at best), but conversely I encouraged other types of information flows surrounding things that were valuable to me (in the non-profit sector I would be happy to give them the right to access me for free).

Now we take that an put it in an NFC (near field communication) device or Bluetooth and I can indicate what is on my preferred list. But, I could also have a list of pre-negotiated costs to others for access to other things, or more appropriately access to things I loathe. If somebody wanted to sell me something on my wishlist that was a good price, I would not mind being pinged as I walked near a store, but if it were an offer to buy a handgun, they could pay my price of 1500 dollars (U.S.) and offer that sale. All of this would be preset by me or a bot on my behalf. There is stuff I do not want to see, but I would like to draw information about things I have interest in closer to me.

Wed, Apr 12, 2006

plainasm » Putting “me” in the “come to me” web said:

[...] conversation going about technological developments swirling around what some are calling the "come to me" web. Structured content, microformats, json, rss and atom flavored web feeds, and other [...]

Wed, Apr 12, 2006

alex-and-r said:

Let me add something to your very interesting discussion and comment the original (also very interesting) post.

From the early days of human history people by means of our intellect were creating the means (instruments, methods, ways) to meet our needs and demands. Those needs and demands were developing during the time. So were the instruments. We needed food so we developed spears, axes, bows, guns, genetically modified products. We needed transportation so we tamed horses and then developed automobiles which reach 100 km/h in less then 5 seconds. We needed communication and from the smoke signals and tam-tams we came to VOIP and videoconferences. Through history we always tried to developed most convenient and effective instruments to satisfy our needs and get the resources that we need in shortest time and with minimum efforts.
In a digital age the most valuable resource that we need is information. So we're developing the instruments to get, gather, manage and produce information as easy as it can possibly be.

And the "come to me" web is exactly such an instrument.

Now the majority of information on our planet is in digital form. We created a huge database (not very well formed or organized though) and now we need a query language (the instrument which I mentioned above) which could help us to get the needed information from that database on a speed of light. So the first step to creation of such an instrument was the creation of the search engines. But they are still imperfect. We can't just tell them "Give me the information that I need!" and they supply us with it. We need to translate our questions to a form that can be understood by search engines. We need to simplify them, we need to break them in pieces to form queries. It's difficult, it's time-consuming and it's ineffective. But why?
It's because the machines don't understand our language. But at the same time the most convenient way of getting an information is simply ask for it. It's very easy for us to ask in a manner that is common to us, in a manner we communicate with each other every day. But as I said machines don't understand us. And I think one of the problems is that our questions asked in common language bear much more information than is enclosed in words from which the question itself is constructed. Our questions are never all-sufficient by themselves. They are always asked in some context. The contexts may be cultural, social, political. The contexts may be defined by our education, our religion, our race, our family, our current emotional state. And all this contexts strongly define what we want to get as an answer to our question. But when we ask the machine we got only pure question (but even the question itself can be asked in a manner that is common to us). There are no contexts. We don't pass them to machine with the question. We can't inform the machine about all those nonverbal circumstances which have effect on the answer that we need.

And now i finally come to "come to me web".

I think this conception is a way to pass our contexts to the machine. We have lists of feeds that we read. We have our links in del.icio.us. We have our blogs and categories of entries in it. We have search history. Don't it all define the context in which we live? Can't it all when being processed tell the external viewer "where" (in what) we live? Can't it be used to filter the information that is returned as a result of our direct question which by itself doesn't pass any contexts to the machine? Isn't it a way to inform the machine about nonverbal information which heavily define what exactly we're asking?

I think it is!

I think the concept of "come to me web" is about transferring our context to the web. It's about creating our digital personality which can be evaluated by machines and based on which more accurate results of our queries to the global database can be generated. It's like our avatars in a digital world which act on our behalf and in our interests accumulating not just any information but information that is needed by us and only by us. It's a way to tell WHAT EXACTLY we need.

And privacy. What about it? Well, i think it's irrelevant. We always can give up blogging, make all our bookmarks private and uninstall our IM.

Thu, Apr 13, 2006

intruder’s register » ? said:

[...] ?

Thu, Apr 13, 2006

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