Disqus - Latest Comments for gfcampbell

Re: You Won't See The Palm Pre On Me

gfcampbell — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:02:45 -0000

right. Snap it on the bottom. Or, better yet, isn't that what Bluetooth is about? Try hooking your bluetooth apple kbd up to your iPhone... no dice.

Re: You Won't See The Palm Pre On Me

fredwilson — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:53:16 -0000

i'd love rim to come out with a blackberry keyboard for the new iphone which supports third party devices

Re: You Won't See The Palm Pre On Me

gfcampbell — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:43:45 -0000

Back to hoping for an iphone mini keyboard for me. Will somebody make one please? Like the old thumb board for the palm 5 http://www.amazon.com/Seiko-Thumboard-Keyboard-...

Re: The rise of Sensor Media

gfcampbell — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:48:03 -0000

Good point. Worth understanding... there are expressions of status, the wish to be associated with the source...

Re: The rise of Sensor Media

TomHaney — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:28:39 -0000

I see a lot of expressions of endorsement, which amplify the original expression of someone else -- retweet, I like this, check out this link, etc. It can have the effect of your friends sensing what's on the network and aggregating content for you.

Re: The rise of Sensor Media

gfcampbell — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:22:01 -0000

aha. it isn't perfectly clear.

The first is expression of thought or emotion - more personal communication. e.g. "want to go get coffee @bob?" or "@bob, I love radiohead's first release"

The second is the expression of information - or news. "The coffee shop at x and y streets is on fire. @bob and I going somewhere else" or "I just ate a burger from burgerworld and got food poisoning"

The best way I know to determine how definite the line is between the two types is to study query logs and resulting clicks. Not readily available data. That's why I am left in the world of hypothesis for the moment.

I have posited that the 2 other types of possible messages are transactional and of entertainment value. Looking to validate...

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

gfcampbell — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:25:45 -0000

Hank - would be happy to talk. I am crushed over the next week, but ping me on Twitter and we can set up a chance to talk.

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

gfcampbell — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:24:11 -0000

Kimbal - thanks for the comment. I have had a look... interesting approach. Sort of reminds me of what Seth Goldstein was doing with AttentionTrust before it evolved into SocialMedia. Sort of... but his was about profiles/privacy and I see you're building an index.

BTW, I feel like we should meet - I heard a lot about you from Jay, Abdur and Greg over the summer...

I will ping you some time soon to talk.

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

hymanroth — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:55:09 -0000

OK Gerry, point taken wrt social graph.

My own approach is slightly different. I explicitly assign authority to people based on subject. So, for example, I give Tim O'Reilly and Scoble high marks for 'tech', and zero marks for 'soccer', whereas I give my friend Boz top marks for humour, because he is a really funny guy, but zero marks for everything else (because he ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer)

I then break down a given stream (eg Twitter) into subject-specific virtual feeds which I then filter and throttle on the above and other criteria.

The basic point is: Tim O'Reilly is in my tech stream (with high relevance) even though our social graphs don't overlap.

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

gfcampbell — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:23:25 -0000

David - I think you missed the point that the online social graph is a critical ingredient... the physical world is only an illustration...

And getting the signal to noise relationship solved is the crux of the issue. In the simple query-response world we would simply call it "relevance" or "precision at X."

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

gfcampbell — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:22:36 -0000

Nice post. Good clear thinking...

A couple of quick responses:
- Agreed: Twitter is by no means the only source of realtime-ness. No way.
- Can Google (or Yahoo, or...)build a product that addresses this? Yes. No doubt.
- Should we sit and wait until they do? Nope.
- Don't miss my point that expressed information, vs published, benefits from a social graph for prioritization/interpretation

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

gfcampbell — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:02:21 -0000

Interesting point, but experience tells me otherwise.

Trees don't grow to the sky. Revenue generation/growth is an endless cycle of innovation, discontinuity and cannibalism.

It's the single-variable management mindset (e.g. revenue-only) that leads to strategically soulless companies - those are the companies that lose touch with their customers and open the door wide for the competition.

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

gfcampbell — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:47:08 -0000

Trevor - thanks for the comment... ping me on twitter and we can talk directly. Would love to have a conversation about your thoughts/experience...

G

Re: Case Study - CostToDrive.com - Small and clean | luckyrobot.com

gfcampbell — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:43:50 -0000

site nav problem on my part. sorry. the best way to get there today is to click to previous posts and scroll through backward that way. Thanks for the comment.

Re: Darwin, DaVinci and Accelerated Change

gfcampbell — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:38:42 -0000

Craig, the point was not left out accidentally. It was intentionally and respectfully left for interpretation by the reader.

I don't begin to have the answer as to why the genes formed, why Leonardo DaVinci is stands as a towering intellect over everyone else of the time or why the leaders of today are emerging/will emerge.

Serendipity, faith, chance or destiny. Everyone can try what fits with their perspective and beliefs.

In fact, I'm a big proponent of taking the counterperspective just for argument's sake to understand and be sensitive to all sides...

Re: Zemanta Open Semantic API with commercial support

gfcampbell — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:28:38 -0000

Smart move.

I have said for some time that tagging of the Web needs to happen at a tool level, allowing app builders and developers to bake the approach into the platform level.

This move reinforces the migration of semantics from the icing layer (publishing) to the infrastructure of the web.

Re: The Invention Of Air

gfcampbell — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:45:05 -0000

I can't wait to read the book. I have been boring my friends and family about Cholera since I read Ghostmap last summer.

And I completely agree with your take on the times we're in. There's no doubt in my mind. Many of our institutions and approaches we have relied on for the past who-knows-how-many-years are transforming. The foundations of our economic, political and social world are changing.

There is a precedent in science, philosophy, etc that new ideas are often thought up at the same moment in different places (that's what the quote is about...). Good time to be in emerging technology and media. Huge positive impact to be made.

Props to Mark and Steven. Very impressed with what you're doing with outside.in.

Safe and fun travels to you Fred.

Gerry

Re: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

hymanroth — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:24:01 -0000

Gerry, I would say the goal is to *infer* context rather than codify it.

For example, in a document that it tagged as about MSFT, references to Gates are statistically more likely to refer to the person rather than the object. So, instead of tagging (codifying) each individual reference to Gates in the document, context can be inferred from one single tag, and hence the ambiguity resolved.

Re: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

gfcampbell — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:08:55 -0000

and can't we use co-occurrence, etc to establish that relatedness...

Re: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

gfcampbell — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:07:49 -0000

Does the nature of the task (and this discussion) change if we talk about it as codifying *relationships*? That's really where I am going.

I am not sure it makes any difference at all WHAT the thing is, it's more about the interrelatedness of one word to other words. In that case, the ambiguity is represented in a set of linkages that are more or less exclusive.

For example - the linkages to gates the thing vs gates the person would be different. Even in the case of that double entendre, the two sets could be statistically separable.

Re: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

terrycojones — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:03:17 -0000

Hi again Gerry

I wasn't being very nuanced in my original comments. That's partly due to lack of time, partly due to liking a more colorful debate. So here are a few more thoughts, and some pointers.

Consider Artificial Intelligence and its pursuit of intelligence. We once thought it took real intelligence to play chess (for example). But as we got better and better at engineering, and we thought up smarter (but completely mechanical and non-mysterious) algorithms, we moved the goalposts. I.e., we decided that actually you didn't need to be "intelligent" to play chess after all.

I don't believe that "intelligence" corresponds to any "thing" either, just like I think "meaning" and "understanding" are also just words. What I do believe however is in engineering and tool-building. We're primates, and primates are pretty good tool builders. So I often suggest to people that they spend less time (and investment monies :-)) on chasing abstract words and more time on building tools.

The lesson of AI seems clear. If your tools are good enough, you can give the illusion of intelligence up to and beyond (i.e., beyond grandmaster) where it matters in any practical sense. The computer plays chess so well that you might as well say it's intelligent, or not - it just doesn't matter anymore.

And I believe the same is true of semantics, and going after meaning and understanding. Those things can perfectly well not really exist while at the same time we can practically achieve them (i.e., the convenient and practical illusion, as with intelligence for the purposes of chess playing) by just focusing on engineering and tools.

Make sense?

From that POV, I argue that huge strides can be made by improving representation. If you get representation right, things that look like problems can simply go away. If you get the representation right, you may not even need a clever algorithm. Can you do an end-run around Google's armies of PhDs by changing representation? I.e., don't challenge them on the algorithm front, where you're bound to lose, but change the ground under them. You wont be surprised to hear that I think the answer is yes. I'm not talking about "beating" Google as a company, but of taking search - and how we work with information in general - to a new level.

I wrote about this at some length, back before it was so fashionable to be me :-)

The main posting is http://www.fluidinfo.com/terry/2007/03/19/why-d...

And there are several others, including some that give very simple examples of why representation is so important, at http://www.fluidinfo.com/terry/category/represe...

In summary, I don't think the words matter much. I think we can achieve amazing results (things that look like real intelligence, real understanding, that somehow capture meaning, etc) simply by focusing on engineering. My best bet about where to focus is on representation. What are the implications of the various new ways of representing information that we're exploring? I've been pondering that for over a decade! :-) My own bet, via Fluidinfo, definitely has some strong advantages and some strong weaknesses. It's a tradeoff, like so many things in computer science. Other approaches represent different tradeoffs. It's far from clear what will "win". But as I said in my earlier comment, it's a vast space we're starting to explore, and, I like to imagine, there's plenty of value to go around.

I hope that's a clearer and a more useful answer.

Re: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

gfcampbell — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 08:51:39 -0000

I love a vigorous debate, but actually there isn't one here. I pretty much agree with you.

We choose to state it differently (I think).

The word "semantics" has been used to cover so many things that it may have lost some precision in its definition. I may be guilty of using a broadened version here.

I think of it this way: Google solved one of the vexing problems of search: Out of millions of results, which one comes first in the rankings? They created PageRank to approximate what *most humans* would find to be the best result. That was a hard problem and they stepped up to OWN the solution, even creating the "I'm Feeling Lucky" to emphasize that they had a solution to the problem.

But it's still wrong a portion of the time for a large percentage of users... So they leave the other 999,999,999 results just in case.

That simple approximation, and the willingness to accept some error while committing to improvement has revolutionized search.

The exact thing applies to understanding meaning. If we can accept error, and use words like "semantics" or otherwise to describe what we're trying to do, we can make progress.

If you want to coin a new term for this I'll gladly use it and give you attribution. ;-)

What we seem to agree on is that there's no room for purity and absolutism here...

Re: We are so F##%^$ked…Continued

howardlindzon — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:35:57 -0000

looking forward to meeting you

Re: Twitter is a new medium.

gfcampbell — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:49:56 -0000

Giannii, there should be 3 comments on this post... lost somewhere in the ether...

Thanks,
G

FIXED - Many thanks. Disqus is great.

Re: We are so F##%^$ked…Continued

howardlindzon — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:14:47 -0000

NYC airports as a goddamn start

Disqus - Latest Comments for gfcampbell

Re: You Won't See The Palm Pre On Me

Re: You Won't See The Palm Pre On Me

Re: You Won't See The Palm Pre On Me

Re: The rise of Sensor Media

Re: The rise of Sensor Media

Re: The rise of Sensor Media

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

Re: Search is broken – really broken.

Re: Case Study - CostToDrive.com - Small and clean | luckyrobot.com

Re: Darwin, DaVinci and Accelerated Change

Re: Zemanta Open Semantic API with commercial support

Re: The Invention Of Air

Re: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

Re: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

Re: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

Re: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

Re: Semantics, Search and Big Honking Databases

Re: We are so F##*%^*$ked…Continued

Re: Twitter is a new medium.

Re: We are so F##*%^*$ked…Continued

Re: We are so F##%^$ked…Continued

Re: We are so F##%^$ked…Continued