VIA Interaction

Friday, January 20, 2006

Automated Information Architecture

I can remember talking about the Information Age back in college, when they had to train us how to use search engines for databases like Elias and the computer time was charged out to us by the minute.

At VIA, we try help customers navigate Web sites by mapping out relationships among Web pages using a painstaking process that begins with understanding the user, identifying the tasks and goals they have on a particular site, and methodically creating navigation elements that put the right content and links in front of a customer at the right time.

I've been interested in the way machines try to do this, and generally disappointed in the results.

But as the Information Age becomes a reality, there is money in making these relationships. And really smart people are trying to figure out how to do it most efficiently. Here's an interesting Business Week article about it, Math Will Rock Your World:

Neal Goldman is a math entrepreneur. He works on Wall Street, where numbers rule. But he's focusing his analytic tools on a different realm altogether: the world of words.

Goldman's startup, Inform Technologies LLC, is a robotic librarian. Every day it combs through thousands of press articles and blog posts in English. It reads them and groups them with related pieces. Inform doesn't do this work alphabetically or by keywords. It uses algorithms to analyze each article by its language and context. It then sends customized news feeds to its users, who also exist in Inform's system as -- you guessed it -- math.

How do you convert written words into math? Goldman says it takes a combination of algebra and geometry. Imagine an object floating in space that has an edge for every known scrap of information. It's called a polytope and it has near-infinite dimensions, almost impossible to conjure up in our earthbound minds. It contains every topic written about in the press. And every article that Inform processes becomes a single line within it. Each line has a series of relationships. A single article on Bordeaux wine, for example, turns up in the polytope near France, agriculture, wine, even alcoholism. In each case, Inform's algorithm calculates the relevance of one article to the next by measuring the angle between the two lines.

By the time you're reading these words, this very article will exist as a line in Goldman's polytope. And that raises a fundamental question: If long articles full of twists and turns can be reduced to a mathematical essence, what's next? Our businesses -- and, yes, ourselves. ...

posted by Tim Beidel at 1/20/2006 09:08:00 AM

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Thursday, January 12, 2006

Buggy whips

How long did this take? How many years ago was the first digital camera available to consumers. I was still in the news business when professional photojournalists were buying $10,000 digital cameras and sending the pictures back on phone modems ...

Nikon Plans to Stop Making Most Cameras That Use Film - New York Times: "TOKYO, Thursday, Jan. 12 - The Nikon Corporation, the Japanese camera maker, said Thursday that it would stop making most of its film cameras and lenses in order to focus on digital cameras."

posted by Tim Beidel at 1/12/2006 10:21:00 AM

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Saturday, January 07, 2006

Following the Fortune 500

Wired Magazine and Socialtext have created an index to bloggers at Fortune 500 companies: Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki

posted by Tim Beidel at 1/07/2006 07:50:00 AM

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Thursday, January 05, 2006

News you probably can't use

From CNN.com, Researchers discover largest prime number:

"KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- Researchers at a Missouri university have identified the largest known prime number, officials said Tuesday.

"The team at Central Missouri State University, led by associate dean Steven Boone and mathematics professor Curtis Cooper, found it in mid-December after programming 700 computers years ago.

"A prime number is a positive number divisible by only itself and 1 -- 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on.

"The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime known as M30402457 -- that's 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1."

posted by Tim Beidel at 1/05/2006 08:55:00 AM

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Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Dangerous ideas

Not Web related or marketing related - just interesting stuff: The Edge Annual Question for 2006: WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

posted by Tim Beidel at 1/03/2006 12:25:00 PM

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