Category: Book Related

Thanks for all the posts on questions to ask Jerry and David. Turns out, we spent a lot of time on history and also on looking forward to the next ten years. We didn’t focus so much on the present. When I reminded Yahoo’s founders that they had ten years of experience running the site – they started in earnest in 1994 – both turned reflective. It’s not like they didn’t know it, of course, but there’s something about taking the time to think about that – ten years – that makes for a good conversation. I asked if they still believed in the vision and hype of the mid 90s – about how the internet was going to change everything – and they both said they did, but that timing was everything. It takes a lot longer than we’d like for basic things to change. Then Filo came out with a great line about the early promise of the internet – that we’d all become creators and producers of content – and how long it takes to fulfill:

That was the promise of the internet from day one -when Mosaic came out the whole idea was that anybody could publish now, that was the new thing …yet it took this long to get to simple blogging… If you said ten years ago that you could have blogging in ten years, and that will be the extent of it, people wouldn’t have been that impressed.

Indeed. In 1994, anyone claiming that in ten years, we’d have a robust self-publishing movement like blogging would have been drummed out of the room for a lack of vision. Despite Geocities or Tripod, it takes time for the ship of culture to change course. Makes me rethink my own sense of what might come ten years from now…

Have had a very productive couple of days recently on the book, talking at length with various folks who in one way or another have very unique views on the search world. Before I get to Tim Koogle, who I spoke to this morning, or Shana Fisher and Geoff Yang (yesterday afternoon), I wanted to talk about my visit with Danny Hillis.

On Tuesday I flew down to LA to visit with Danny, who founded Thinking Machines. After that he became an imagineer at Disney for five or so years (“The best ‘real job’ you can have,” he quipped). Danny has a million great ideas and is something of a polymath. He recently founded Applied Minds as a way to put that skill to work (he partnered with Bran Ferren, himself a scary smart polymath).

Danny has a lot of things to say about search, it’s an area he finds rich in implications, in particular as it relates to some of the long-term projects he’s involved in, such as the Clock of the Long Now. We spent some time riffing on the future of search, and its current limitations, but … I get ahead of myself. What I really thought was incredible was the playground Danny and Bran have created for themselves at Applied Minds.

Read More

John Brockman republishes a four-year old essay from Danny Hillis positing “Aristotle,” a tutor program built around a “knowledge web” (not unlike the semantic web, but more specialized) which might revolutionize how we learn. Many luminaries weigh in on the concept. Not light reading, but interesting, and very search-driven. Neal Stephenson fans will hear an echo of “The Primer” from The Diamond Age.

(Part 1 of …?)
This is an idea I’m starting to rough out. As I said earlier, I will be testing your patience over the coming weeks as I do this more frequently. These essays are not intended to be the “book,” but rather sketches that lead to the book. (Lord knows, I can’t assume a general readership will be nearly as forgiving as you hardy souls have proven to be.)

I’m interested in what I’ll call the shift from the ephemeral to the eternal. Gmail is a good example of this, as are Plaxo, social networks, and most ecommerce sites that keep profiles of our browsing and buying habits. And search – in particular, the approach to search that A9 has taken – is perhaps the most interesting and difficult to classify expression of the trend.

In the past few years, a good portion of our digitally mediated behavior – be it in email, search, or the relationships we have with others – has become eternal – in other words, recorded and preserved by one entity or another, usually commercial in nature. And as this information has become eternal, we, as creators of that information, have lost a large degree of control over how that information is used and in what context. In fact, in many cases we have lost ownership of the information altogether – arguably before we even knew it existed in the first place. Whether this matters at all is worth debate – after all, how could we lose that which we never had? It’s not my goal to write a privacy screed here, nor take “evil corporations” to task. But it seems to me the issues raised by the ownership of our collective data exhaust are certainly worth raising and discussing, with a particular eye toward the Law of Unintended Consequences, if nothing else.

Read More