Category: Book Related

Google, India, Yahoo, Paul

I spent most of yesterday working on the book, talking to folks at Yahoo, Google, and with Paul Saffo. I met with Terry Winnograd, who was Larry Page's professor at Stanford, worked with Larry and Sergey early in the project, and is still on Google's technical advisory board (scroll down)….

I spent most of yesterday working on the book, talking to folks at Yahoo, Google, and with Paul Saffo. I met with Terry Winnograd, who was Larry Page’s professor at Stanford, worked with Larry and Sergey early in the project, and is still on Google’s technical advisory board (scroll down). While I was there I ran into Yossi Vardi, who is always a joy to see. The man is always beaming, and this was no exception, he was touring Google’s new building with Sergey and telling enthusiastic stories about Sergey’s recent trip to Israel (Yossi of course played host). In any case, internationalization is clearly a theme at Google. The company recently announced a new R&D center in India. I asked David Krane (Director of CC) why, and he said he company can’t expect everyone to come here, and there’s a lot of talent in Bangalore. Makes sense.

Terry is an energetic man, he was a founding member of CPSR and has done a lot of work on natural language and HCI (human computer interface). He recently took a sebbatical from Stanford to work at Google full time, and is now moving back into the academic life. I won’t go into all we discussed (gotta save something for the book!) but it was a good meeting, and I heard some funny tales of the early days, among other things.

At Yahoo I met with Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo’s Editor in Chief. She’s been there almost since the beginning, and we had a robust and lengthy conversation about the role of editorial in search, the role of the directory at Yahoo (very interesting) and challenges ahead for the industry and the company. I really enjoyed Ninj, as she is known. She’s only 32, but has spent nearly 9 years thinking about this stuff as EIC at Yahoo. Prior to that, she worked on Doug Lenat’s CYC project, which for those of you unfamiliar with it was a very brave, arguably foolish, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to solve AI’s “brittleness” problem. CYCorp still exists, applying some of its early work to corporate data issues.

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The Database of Intentions

So nothing really new in the news today, I wanted to take a graf or two and explain what I mean by The Database of Intentions, referred to in this post. That way I can use it again and again and just link the phrase to this post. Hey, we…

So nothing really new in the news today, I wanted to take a graf or two and explain what I mean by The Database of Intentions, referred to in this post. That way I can use it again and again and just link the phrase to this post. Hey, we love the web, Ted Nelson lives….

The Database of Intentions is an idea central to the book I’ve been working on for the past year or so, which is tentatively titled “The Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google” (Penguin/Putnam/Portfolio 2004). As with many in this industry, it all started with the Macintosh. Back in the mid 80s I was an undergraduate in Cultural Antropology, and I had a class – taught by the late Jim Deetz,which focused on the idea of material culture – basically, interpreting the artifacts of everyday life. It took the tools of archaeology – usually taught only in the context of civilizations long dead – and merged them with the tools of Cultural Anthropology, which interpreted living cultures. He encouraged us to see all things modified by man as expressions of culture, and therefore as keys to understanding culture itself. I began to see language, writing, and most everyday things in a new light – as reflecting the culture which created them, and fraught with all kinds of intent, controversies, politics, relationships. It was a way to pick up current culture and hold it in your hand, make sense of it, read it.

At the same time I was making extra money beta testing some software on a brand spanking new Mac, vintage 1984. Anthropology and technology merged, and I became convinced that the Mac represented mankind’s most sophisticated and important artifact ever – a representation of the plastic mind made visible. (Yeah, college – exhaaaaale – wasn’t it great!).

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