Wednesday, September 07, 2005


one of the coolest things about the web is the ability to jump from topic to topic without any real goal in mind... hyperlinking, surfing, browsing... whatever term they are using now... but i'm not talking about the technical nature of the html and the href links... and i'm not saying "just google it" which will bring back far more links then you might ever need... i'm looking at it from the perspective of expanding or creating multitude of ideas from one starting point, word ideation using html and the web.

i see it as a sort of wandering from information or non-information to the next and picking up trivia or doing research without any intention of neccessarily using it. i don't recommend doing this while you're at work - it's one thing if you work for yourself but corporate tends to look down on this sort of "research"... this idea network branching of information gathering is a great way to look at different subjects that may or may not be related to what you originally were looking at. in the end you might find something that is actually worth your time (or your bosses time) clicking through the links... if you're lucky you'll click to something that someone else has followed your train of thought/thinking and clickthroughs and actually came up with something that is viable and useful.

there are companies working on the reverse engineering of this and applying it to profiling customers and the use of banner ads - similar to the other "real world" class project i'm working on in my other class... i.e. this customer looked at this page and clicked on this bannerad, follow the customer's breadcrumb trails of previous links and may, just maybe someone else that followed this "train of thought" weblinks will more then like click this ad so one can serve up the next ad that will more then likely be useful (i.e. make that person want to click on it to buy something)...

so, what's the point...
can we use this "evil marketing" ploy to reverse think the way people search out information to better serve up the next click through of content or needed website or website that they might actually be interested in... why, well someone followed that search pattern at one point in time or within a certain percentage of searches and they may (high probability?) want or think they want, will want to click on the next set of information/website being displayed... an AI sort of search engine that thinks ahead a number of searches for you and displays them.

Monday, September 05, 2005

Creativity During Crisis

This man is blogging from downtown New Orleans, using power from a generator and jury-rigged communication channels... It amazes how quick creativity takes an exponential leap during a moment of crisis or life/death emergency. People used any means neccessary to get from one place to another - converting shopping carts into wagons and tubs into rafts... call it creativity, ingenuity or neccessity... When communication was at a standstill due to flooding why didn't someone drop ship several hundred cheap FM radios (and MREs) into the flood zones for stranded people to listen in on what was being said/done in the outside world... to notify people not to bother and hike their way to the stadium because they would be better off on their own... to let them know that people were actually concerned and that they weren't forgotten. I understand time, money, politics and logistics are all an issue but it still amazes me that we can fedex items overnight and get Japanese camera crew into the center of the flood zone but we couldn't somehow manage some local or federal coordination of resources - what if it had been a terrorist attack on the levy system!? It seemed an awful shame that civic groups have been much more creative in their efforts to get organized, take the lead and do something. It looks like following the straight and narrow standard operating procedures (if any) put in place by a bureaucratic system doesn't necessarily work in real-time or under intense pressure and public scrutiny.