"As conceived by its creators, Siri was supposed to be a “do engine,” something that would allow people to hold conversations with the Internet. While a search engine used stilted keywords to create lists of links, a do engine could carry a conversation, then decide and act. Had one too many drinks? The ability to coordinate a Google search for a ride home might elude you, but a do engine could translate a muttered, “I’m drunk take me home,” into a command to send a car service to your location. The startup’s goal was not to build a better search engine, but to pioneer an entirely new paradigm for accessing the Internet, one that would let artificially intelligent agents summon the answers people needed, rather than pull relevant resources for humans to consult on their own. If the search engine defined the second generation of the web, Siri’s co-founders were confident the do engine would define the third."
SIRI RISING: The Inside Story Of Siri’s Origins — And Why She Could Overshadow The iPhone
the fiscal cliff What is my ip What is obamacare What is love What is gluten What is instagram What does yolo mean What is the illuminati What is a good credit score What is lupus It is a list that indicates anxieties, not least the ways in which we are restlessly fixated with our money, our bodies and our technology – and paranoid and confused in just about equal measure. A Prince Charles-like desire for the definition of love, in my repetitive experience of the last few days, always seems to come in at No 4 on this list of priorities, though the preoccupations above it and below it tend to shift slightly with the news. (via Google and the future of search: Amit Singhal and the Knowledge Graph | Technology | The Observer)

the fiscal cliff What is my ip What is obamacare What is love What is gluten What is instagram What does yolo mean What is the illuminati What is a good credit score What is lupus It is a list that indicates anxieties, not least the ways in which we are restlessly fixated with our money, our bodies and our technology – and paranoid and confused in just about equal measure. A Prince Charles-like desire for the definition of love, in my repetitive experience of the last few days, always seems to come in at No 4 on this list of priorities, though the preoccupations above it and below it tend to shift slightly with the news. (via Google and the future of search: Amit Singhal and the Knowledge Graph | Technology | The Observer)

But having made that concession, let’s recall the benefits of actually looking around. The culture we live in, from streets to screens, is already overloaded with prompts and cajolery designed to direct your gaze, control your attention, and on some deeper level distract you from seeing. Not a few of these prompts are commercially driven. Thus it remains not just instructive but vital to look for, and at, the stuff that no “crowd”-driven system or proprietary algorithm or combination thereof has “rated,” sponsored, or entered into a “database of interesting things.” It is important, that is, to make the effort to look for precisely that which you are not supposed to notice. (via The maps of the future will tell you what to see! (Wait, what’s good about that?) : Observatory: Design Observer)

But having made that concession, let’s recall the benefits of actually looking around. The culture we live in, from streets to screens, is already overloaded with prompts and cajolery designed to direct your gaze, control your attention, and on some deeper level distract you from seeing. Not a few of these prompts are commercially driven. Thus it remains not just instructive but vital to look for, and at, the stuff that no “crowd”-driven system or proprietary algorithm or combination thereof has “rated,” sponsored, or entered into a “database of interesting things.” It is important, that is, to make the effort to look for precisely that which you are not supposed to notice. (via The maps of the future will tell you what to see! (Wait, what’s good about that?) : Observatory: Design Observer)

The result of Simon and Swartz’s collaboration was Image Atlas, a visual search engine that performs real-time queries in 17 different countries. Internet search results can vary depending on what part of the world they originate from — if you’re sitting in Paris Googling the words “Jew” or “Breaking Bad,” the results will be different than if you’re searching the same terms from, say, Tel Aviv. Image Atlas first translates any search term into the language corresponding to each country; it then uses each country’s most popular search engine to run an image search. The result is like Google Images with international context — it forces us to think about what we are and are not seeing when we browse online. (Try it for yourself). (via Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz’s Experiment with Images - NYTimes.com)

The result of Simon and Swartz’s collaboration was Image Atlas, a visual search engine that performs real-time queries in 17 different countries. Internet search results can vary depending on what part of the world they originate from — if you’re sitting in Paris Googling the words “Jew” or “Breaking Bad,” the results will be different than if you’re searching the same terms from, say, Tel Aviv. Image Atlas first translates any search term into the language corresponding to each country; it then uses each country’s most popular search engine to run an image search. The result is like Google Images with international context — it forces us to think about what we are and are not seeing when we browse online. (Try it for yourself). (via Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz’s Experiment with Images - NYTimes.com)

London-based artist Ben West thought it would be nice to have a hardbound version of that graphic mélange, so with the help of some friends, he decided to make one for himself. His book, Google, shows the first image result for every word from the Oxford Pocket Dictionary. (via 1 | A Dictionary Whose Definitions Are Google Image Results | Co.Design: business innovation design)

London-based artist Ben West thought it would be nice to have a hardbound version of that graphic mélange, so with the help of some friends, he decided to make one for himself. His book, Google, shows the first image result for every word from the Oxford Pocket Dictionary. (via 1 | A Dictionary Whose Definitions Are Google Image Results | Co.Design: business innovation design)

‘ve seen hundreds of these posts, and the reason is that, even with all the power of Google, there are just some things that your friends know better. They know your tastes, your budget, and they might have experiences that are similar to your own. And, if they use Facebook a lot, they might have at some point “liked” a book they read, recommended a doctor, or checked in at a pub in London. That data is there, but without a search tool, it was hard to access. That’s why people posted these queries, hoping people would see them and respond. (via Facebook’s Graph Could Be OkCupid, Yelp, and LinkedIn, All in One - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic)

‘ve seen hundreds of these posts, and the reason is that, even with all the power of Google, there are just some things that your friends know better. They know your tastes, your budget, and they might have experiences that are similar to your own. And, if they use Facebook a lot, they might have at some point “liked” a book they read, recommended a doctor, or checked in at a pub in London. That data is there, but without a search tool, it was hard to access. That’s why people posted these queries, hoping people would see them and respond. (via Facebook’s Graph Could Be OkCupid, Yelp, and LinkedIn, All in One - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic)

Based on the few queries I’ve tried so far, oldtweets seems like both a fun nostalgia machine and a trove of historical trivia. (Yes, 2006 counts as history in Internet years.) And who wouldn’t like to return to a time when there was no such word as hashtag? (via Oldtweets: Search engine finds tweets from Twitter’s first year)

Based on the few queries I’ve tried so far, oldtweets seems like both a fun nostalgia machine and a trove of historical trivia. (Yes, 2006 counts as history in Internet years.) And who wouldn’t like to return to a time when there was no such word as hashtag? (via Oldtweets: Search engine finds tweets from Twitter’s first year)

“Take the drink called the mojito,” he said. “Mojito has ingredients and mint, rum, ice. We’ll create a catalog entry for that entity for that human concept ‘mojito’ and then we’ll create a connection between the mojito and its ingredients.” The key difference between their catalog and a standard database is that the connection between the mojito and mint is itself an entity, an entity that says, “This thing is an ingredient in this other thing.” The edge between the two nouns contains meaning and that makes all the difference. “We can talk about the representation of knowledge with the knowledge itself,” Giannandrea said. Whoa, Meta! I thought. Hence, Metaweb. (via Technology - Alexis Madrigal - Inside Google’s Plan to Build a Catalog of Every Single Thing, Ever - The Atlantic)

“Take the drink called the mojito,” he said. “Mojito has ingredients and mint, rum, ice. We’ll create a catalog entry for that entity for that human concept ‘mojito’ and then we’ll create a connection between the mojito and its ingredients.” The key difference between their catalog and a standard database is that the connection between the mojito and mint is itself an entity, an entity that says, “This thing is an ingredient in this other thing.” The edge between the two nouns contains meaning and that makes all the difference. “We can talk about the representation of knowledge with the knowledge itself,” Giannandrea said. Whoa, Meta! I thought. Hence, Metaweb. (via Technology - Alexis Madrigal - Inside Google’s Plan to Build a Catalog of Every Single Thing, Ever - The Atlantic)

"1. The discovery process is remarkably social, and the social interactions come in amazingly diverse forms. Sometimes it’s overhearing a conversation on Twitter between two complete strangers; sometimes it’s the virtual book club of something like Findings; sometimes it’s going out to lunch with a friend and bouncing new ideas off them. It’s the social life of information, in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s wonderful phrase — we just have so many more ways of being social now."
stevenberlinjohnson.com: Anatomy Of An Idea
"Pre-Internet, of course, the reports remained on paper, intact and inviolable — but also inaccessible to the casual viewer and probably unknown. The Internet has opened up the past and made it fungible with a few keystrokes. The offended know it’s physically easy to change a story online."
Will The Past Last In The Digital Age? - Miller-McCune