[via Social Synergy Weblog]
Matt McAlister asks a great question in his recent blog post. He writes:
“I’ve mentioned before John Battelle’s historical view of the search user interface which I really like. He compares it to command line DOS which was followed by the visually rich Mac OS. The OS GUI created a powerful layer of abstraction on top of the hardware which then created an explosion of activity in personal computing.
So the question is, what new layer of abstraction will alter the way we think about information flow and create a similar explosion of activity on the Internet?”
Matt references a paper (PDF), written by Steve Burbeck, that compares biology and computing. Matt writes:
The Internet has altered our view of the computer as an all-powerful tool through breakthroughs like standard web services (HTTP) and common messaging protocols and formats (TCP/IP and RSS). It looks more like a multicellular organism.
(quoted from Burbeck’s paper) “Multicellular organisms thrive because their cells specialize and collaborate in far more complex and information-rich ways than can a single cell organism. Metazoans have cells and organs that are specialized for sensing environment, communicating and storing information and acting upon the environment. Yet, at least for a given individual organism and for its species, complexity is not an end in itself, it is merely the means of improving fitness to survive.”
To relate this to search, a much more efficient body of intelligence and information discovery is one that can both find the right information at the right time but also optimize the method for locating the right information through different means.
I’m active enough online to know the brands that have user-contributed data that will quickly get me to what I want. I know Wikipedia is great for finding commons-based research on just about any topic. I know del.icio.us is great for finding things people like me have seen in their quests. Rojo and Megite do a great job of keeping my finger on the pulse of new things people are saying that matter to me.
But there’s an abstraction layer out there somewhere in the future that will make it easier for me to jump from data pool to data pool more fluidly to find what I need…and to interact with it.
This is highly related to Peter Moreville’s “Ambient Findability” book. I think the abstraction layer that Matt McAlister is talking about is going to come from people refining better and better user-contributed data systems, eventually combined with artificial intelligence. Whether it’s people contributing data by tagging web content or creating a wikipedia entry, or people contributing data by having some way to give feedback on searches. This will be combined more and more with artficial intelligence systems like Amazon’s recommendation engines, for instance.
This is also finding it’s way into the methods people use to store and re-use all of this information and knowledge. The systems are becoming more semantic, using more dimensions of findability. Allowing the user to pull in information from many different “data pools” and knowledge commons. Plus, there is audio, video, and “virtual world” content worth considering.
