Serendipity
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Serendipity
Serendipity means a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise"; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful while not specifically searching for it. The word has been voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. [ 1 ] However, due to its sociological use, the word has been exported into many other languages. [ 2 ] [ edit ] Etymology The first noted use of "serendipity" in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1797).
Toward a local syzygy: aligning deals, check-ins and places
Three significant trends in the local sector — deals, check-ins, and place pages — are on a bender and headed for an exciting convergence. When they meet we will see one of three things: a train wreck of incompatibility, an awkward confluence, or a very powerful alignment. I’m hoping for the latter, a sort of local syzygy, because a well-conceived orchestration of these trends will benefit the consumer and it has real potential to take us entirely out of the Yellow Pages era and into exciting, unexplored territory. This is a two-part post: here I look in more detail at check-ins, deals, and place products (including, briefly, the adventurously named Facebook Places ) with an eye to what might follow. In a following post I will discuss how we may more actively ease their convergence with linked data and some basic adherence to extant standards, specifically how these efforts will affect the local consumer.
Information Flow: Web of Constraints on Giant Global Graph | The Phaneron
It’s been almost two years since December 2, 2008 when I published the first use case for Open Government: Linked Open Data . It’s great to see the wide-spread interest that’s emerged as well as the early adoption that has begun to take place. There was a time when it wasn’t clear that it would. In those two years both the US and UK governments have incorporated Linked Data into their datagov approaches, RDFa-like languages have been adopted at Google and Facebook, and membership in Semantic Web Meetups has skyrocketed.
Apple announced on Wednesday a cornucopia of new hardware and software : sleek iPods, a brand new Internet-enabled video streaming device and new versions of its iOS software and iTunes 10. However, the most impressive to me by far was Ping , the music-only social network that Apple is opening up its 160 million existing iTunes users. No, I’m not blown away by the 160 million number. What I’m impressed by is the thinking behind Ping . Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream.
Why Ping Is the Future of Social Commerce: Tech News ?
Search Tech: Entering the Age of Personal Discovery
The Web is transitioninginto dynamic, real-time aggregation. This real-time aggregation and personalization of content is known as "discovery." True discovery will tie together all of your information -- what you have liked, purchased, viewed, discussed, browsed -- into a real-time aggregator that provides actionable recommendations on any category of your choosing. Web 2.0 (everyone's favorite 2007 buzz word) heralded the age of social networks and powered a fundamental shift in the Web: filtering out excessive noise while building connections to friends, organizations and communities.
The Five Stages of Filtering, Relevance and Curation
Tonight's news of Gmail taking on information overload directly, using a combination of intelligent algorithms and your own feedback to build in box personalization is yet another hallmark move to taking on the increasing deluge of content approaching us from all directions - be it our e-mail, static Web pages, audio and video, or the many different social streams which we have subscribed to. There is no question that content creation and sharing is exploding and people are completely incapable of giving every single message and item their full attention. And many smart folks are looking to bring solutions to find the best and ignore the rest.Blogs, RSS, IM, Twitter and FriendFeed - the number of sources of sources of information online can feel like it's multiplying exponentially every day. It's easy, natural even, to feel overwhelmed. Especially when we are more familiar with the tightly controlled editorial policies of mainstream media. The social media space is noisy, though. There are many times when filtering that noise effectively makes a lot of sense (some tools discussed below) - but there are also many times when noise is just what we need. Experiments in Noise Control
Why Online "Noise" is Good For You
Mapping Startups & Services Filtering For Relevance In A Matrix by
After looking at the different approaches to filtering for Relevance , I have been seeking a way to map them visually. There are many different startups competing in this space along with the giants, and a way to map them in a matrix would help us see the big picture of how the battle for relevance is evolving on the social web. What are the fundamental ways in which these approaches and startups differ? These could form the axis around which we can then proceed to map them.
In a previous post, we looked at the big shift From Numbers To Relevance . There are dozens of apps/sites that are focusing on filtering information today, but which of them will succeed? To attempt to answer that question, let’s first look at the different approaches employed by such apps/sites today in the search for Relevance. This is a topic that is usually the subject of scholarly research papers in academia; this is only a layman’s overview. The different approaches I observe are:
Comparing Approaches to Information Filtering for Relevance by
Google vs. Facebook - How Will Google Build Its Serendipity Engine?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt wowed the crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt Sept. 28 with talk of autonomous search and serendipity engines that deliver search content to users' mobile phones without the user having to do anything but walk down the street. What Schmidt didn't say was how Google would build its serendipity engine. Given Google's penchant for leveraging algorithmic search, we can logically assume these results will be auto-generated by the sprawling Google search engine, proving a major efficiency boost over Google Instant predictive search, which now provides a major efficiency boost over traditional type-query-hit-enter search. You get the idea, but I'm not sure that's the best route, if only because Facebook and a slew of startups are setting examples of how people -- not the machine -- are helping people find the information they seek.
Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage to give a speech about his thoughts on the future. It was a very interesting talk which spanned a variety of topics. Naturally, the most important topic that Schmidt talked about was search. “ We want to give you your time back, ” Schmidt said. He noted that we live in an age of information overload, where we all have too much to do. The first step in getting your time back is Google Instant, the realtime search feature that Google recently launched, Schmidt said.
Eric Schmidt On The Future Of Search — A Move Towards A “Serendipity Engine”
Is Google building a Serendipity Engine?
Will Google's search engine eventually evolve into a serendipitous, omnipotent entity? Well, Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes that his company remains on track to build an "augmented version" of humanity. "[We envision] a future where you don't forget anything. In this new future you're never lost.Time: 3:15 What is Heightened Serendipity? What are the consequences in our intelligence when we are tapped into the collective brain and benefiting from Serependity all the time?
Heightened Serendipity- Video Blog - Edward Harran
{*style:<i>You don’t reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings … serendipitously. </i>*}- John Barth, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor A teacher of ours at the GreenMBA , Julianne Maurseth, likes to say, “People gather and things happen.” And what is the most wonderful thing that can happen when people gather? That would be serendipity.
The Subtle Art of Provoking Serendipity
Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week: Benoit Mandelbrot died this week: Why Mandelbrot matters “the market is not rational at all”: “A few fund managers have experimented with these concepts [of price dependence, whatever that is, and volatility].