"Tyler Cowen: I don't think it's a useful description to say autistics are only focused on on thing, but I would say there's a lot of tasks you can give autistics, like picking out small details in locked patterns, or picking out different musical pitches, where autistics seem especially good at attention to small detail. So if you think of the web as giving us small bits, like a tweet or a blog post is shorter than a novel, if you think of that as the overall trend, like an iPod, a song is shorter than an album. It seems that we're now all living in a world where we manipulate small bits effectively, it doesn't mean any of us is just interested in one thing, but we manipulate these small bits to create bigger ideas that we're interested in, and those bigger ideas are synthetic, and I think it's another way in which we are using information technology to mirror or mimic capabilities of autistics without usually people knowing it. "

http://www.wrongplanet.net/article380.html

This is what I suspected when I envisioned Strands in the late 90s, before Twitter existed. That shortening the length of information might be another instance of the medium being the message, that it might broaden the number of people writing by lowering the barrier (less memory, organization required to write), and that there might be some way of using the "many small pieces loosely joined" to create some kind of better, large paradigm of writing than the book. And perhaps we could give to writing the same kind of flexibility we give to data in relational databases, for combining, recombining in novel ways, mining and analyzing.

What if we could create a Twitter Query Language? Enabling virtual documents consisting of projections and selections of real time status streams?

The Swicki: Collaborative Search

I've long thought that the fatal flaw of what library science calls "finding aids" is that they only organize information according to how it relates to other information. What I've always wanted is a search that relates information to what I care about, to my interests, to me. I've thought about "personalized searches" but the trouble with this approach is that it is time consuming to express to a computer exactly what it is you want. You must set up some kind of criteria and the the search returns results for you based upon it, such as the simple eBay search notification. If lots of people are going to use this with the efficiency they now get from Google, something else is needed. We don't have expert systems and artificial intelligence yet, so what is a possible solution?

Some are experimenting with attention. By tracking what you look at online, a profile of your interests can be built, which can then drive a personal search engine. People are really bad at expressing what they really want (as product developers and marketers have discovered) so the non-intrusive method of observing behavior may just work.

Another experiment takes a different approach. Why not let other people help refine your search? That is what the people behind Swicki seem to have done. If you could gather like minded individuals into one location where they could influence the accuracy of the search, the "search in a can" model could be improved. It goes farther than that. By becoming an aggregator of search results the system can ride on top of the web and use it as a database in a way similar to Yahoo Pipes. The most revolutionary aspect of Swicki is user created search engines. Instead of needing millions of dollars and massive servers, Swicki piggy backs on existing search results to enable anyone to create a web search engine. This kind of democratizing is a defining quality of web two point oh applications.

I see how the canned search model can be turned inside out, by allowing a group of users to collaboratively refine the canned search to improve it. Instead of empowering the computer to be smarter, it empowers people to create a smarter resource. It definitely becomes a kind of search-wiki. It competes in some ways with the idea of folksonomy. We have now user created taxonomies and now user created searches. What I like about both developments is how it democratizes the organization and finding of information. The folksonomy enables people to create their own vocabularies, perhaps multiple vocabularies for the same subject area. The wiki search enables people to create alternative search results for the same subject. My background is in a subject where unresolvable disagreement is commonplace. It's called genealogy, where there are no facts, only interpretations and sometimes two families claim the same individual. This is not something for concern in genealogy and I like the way more than one truth can exist within the same framework, it's much better than declaring one view right and all others wrong and working hard to keep your opponent's views out of view. Despite what some may claim, there can be more than one version of the truth. Let an idea gain mindshare on its own merits.

I've thought before about a search engine where you could search the web by creating predefined searches, but never thought of letting everyone edit your predefined searches, that is novel, just as with social bookmarking

You can see the Swicki I created in a few minutes in the sidebar of this site (as long as it's there).