Internet Developments


Forecasting with Visual Displays  
Last week I said:

If you took ALL the articles over a period of time...oh lets say a few years...you could map all the articles to the graphic overlay and create an animated sequence of daily data. You could see the ebb and flow of issues over time, from blip to mountain, and then back again. I have to wonder if there are would be any patterns or cycles in the data patterns that could be created, or if it would be possible to forecast the region in which a new emerging issue would emerge from the data landscape.

Apparently this could very well be the case. This week I tracked down the genealogy of the Newsmaps program I mentioned last week. Their technology is an implementation of a technology that is being developed by the Cartia company, which itself is a spin off of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories. They developed the original (and more powerful) database mapping technologies for the Federal Government (more specifically the NSA and the CIA) and have a couple of interesting projects on the burner.

One project is CATCH, which applies neural net technology to a database of crime data to extract crime patterns and tie cases together. It's not perfect yet, but there the program would seem to have some promise in detecting subtle patterns in a complicated array of data.

It would seem that if you had a large enough historical database - something like Nexis-Lexis - you could somehow generate at pattern of how current issues came to emerge. Then once these patterns have evolved, they can be applied against current issues to identify new emerging issues. In the next few years this could become a nifty new tool for futurists, and it may enable futurists to identify emerging issues with a more systematic methodology, and on a more quantitative and replicable basis. Or not . . . emerging issues might be a bit too random to yield to pattern analysis.. But I sure wouldn't mind a juicy grant from some company or foundation to find out....

Current Trend Monitor - the Lycos 50  
One other site that may be interesting for futurists down the line is the Lycos 50 . The Lycos search engine apparently has a few people on staff tracking which search terms are the most popular in any given week. They filter out stuff like company names, and internet programs, and try to stick with the actual topics that people want more information about From what I saw, they only have had the service up for a few months, so there isn't much of a historical record. But what is there is rather intriguing - it basically offers you a window on what "people" are interested in...unfortunately at the moment these "people" would seem to mostly be 12 year olds, given the popularity of Pokemon, but that's rather interesting in itself.

What I really like about the Lycos 50 is that it gives you an insight into what people are actually interested in, without much of an editorial filter being applied.

For the futurist, a Lycos 50 type of site could be of use in finding emerging issues. But to mature into a real tool the service would need a few things:

•   more online "adults" - one gets the sense reading the Lycos 50 that the kids/adult ratio is pretty biased in favor of the kids.

•   A historical track record. This should be taken care of in a few years if the service continues. With more history, it will be possible to filter out seasonal swings in interest (Halloween) and the issues of the day (Payne Stewart). What should be left are the issues of enduring interest.

•   More sensitivity. What would be really nice would be the Lycos 500, or even the Lycos 5000 - so issues could emerge on the radar screen faster. Issues that are truly "emerging" should climb the charts over the weeks and months as there is more interest by the public.

While the utility of this tool is somewhat limited to certain types of issues, but every little bit helps, right?

Web Scanning Tool - Quickbrowse  
One other site I came across turns out to be a very nifty scanning tool. It's a free service called Quickbrowse, and it allows you to list a group of websites, and then the service will go to each website, and consolidate the content of the listed webpages into one BIG webpage. Then you just click on what you are interested in, and the articles will load in the background. You can also configure it so you can get the conglomerated webpage mailed to you on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Check out the site, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Here is a quickbrowse page that I constructed as a weekly scan of science news...it's certainly worth a look, but be warned that the page takes a while to load. Once it's loaded, the scanning of a week's worth of science breakthroughs can be done very quickly. Click on any of the articles, they'll all load in the background, and when you are done, click on the HERE in the red box at the top of the screen to go to the full text page.

The Quickbrowse service still has a few kinks, but even as it stands it's pretty powerful. The best thing is that it takes much of the discipline out of an active scanning process - since you can get the scanned material in your inbox automatically if you want to. I constructed another one for economic info, using a weeks worth of news posts to CNNfn, and I'm trying to find a good feed for social and environmental news. (finding pages that are structured properly in their URL's and provide a summary paragraph are rather difficult to find). Ideally, I'd like to get the feeds for my STEEP categories coming in my inbox so that even when I'm not on an internet bender (like I've been for the last week or two) I can do some sort of structured scanning activity.
As more text sources come online everyday, I'm coming to think that a tool like this is going to become a necessary part of any scanners tool kit. It really can speed up the work, systematize the scanning of certain sources, and provide some automated structure for the process.

Web Aggregation Sites  
One final note. Quickbrowse seems to be a new type of resource that is emerging on the internet - just to be cute I'll call them Aggregator Apps. Quickbrowse is a rather benign example - it takes an entire external webpage and bundles it into a larger unit, but the context and the advertising of the original page remains intact. No harm - no foul.

But a site like SalonHerringWiredFool, which aggregates the content off of Salon, Wired News, Red Herring, and the Motley fool on an entirely new webpage is a bit different. All the articles on SHWF link back to the original articles on the source website, so it doesn't run afoul of any copyright restrictions. But, in one sense it is somewhat harmful to the original site - after all, after browsing SHWF, you can see if there are any worthwhile articles without actually going to the site itself. This of course would reduce the page impressions of these sites. But on the other hand, I would rarely go to all four sites on any given day, but by looking at the SHWF site I might come across an interesting article that would take me back to the original site. It's probably a wash if you look at the big picture, but if I operated one of these websites I might not be as sanguine about it.

I have a feeling that aggregators like Quickbrowse and SHWF are only going to become more popular. The ability to add customized external content would be a real boon to MyYahoo, or MyExcite, and would certainly be a positive development for many Internet users. These customized portals are all pretty much the same these days, but a single point conglomeration of "external" websites could really set these customized portal pages apart.

A more "destructive" Aggregator App are service would be a service called RUSure.com. This service is both a website and an application that integrates into your browser. What it does is peer over your shoulder when you are making online purchases, and at the very last moment when you have your purchase tallied up and are about to pay - the RUSure application will go and check to see if there are other sites that offer the item for a lower price. I suppose this is the E-commerce version of window shopping, but it must drive Amazon.com nuts. This kind of application aggregates the published price data from other sites, and manages to deliver that data at the very moment when you are making your online purchase.

The trend towards these aggregator applications could go either way for the primary internet big shots. If third parties develop these applications, it would tend to drag people away from the internet portals, reducing their "market share" for online users. However, if the internet portals respond to the challenge by integrating these services into their customized portal offerings, it could tie users even closer into their service, and could even enable people to do their daily internet routine (check stocks, news, email, chat.) without leaving the main portal. The portals are already providing many of these services in-house - we'll see if they can make mange to agree to integrate more external sites into their portal offerings.


Written by Mark Justman
Copyright 1999
Posted 10/29/99
http://go.to/futureplex