Earlier this week Google released their Buzz. Essentially it’s a Twitter-like system (service is probably the correct now a days). The essential component of the service is to provide a means to type in what you are doing, what you are thinking or similar in few or limited characters. This is nothing new. Facebook has it, Twitter has it, and probably 20-50 others.  Of course each has their own elevator pitch – the one thing the other does not have, although marginal differences and only small additions to the service not affecting the core component greatly.

I have observed this phenomenon for many services. If you remember in 1999-2000 the web search market was like this – a lot of actors fighting for the market, more recently the social networking scene was also like this, Facebook won (although others exist very well also). However, what is happening more and more is that the users (us) are avoiding to choose one service, we believe we are capable of updating all services at the same time and also keep track of everything at the same time. Both of these notions are in fact possible through feed-readers and meta-social systems where you can post to several systems at once or get the newest update from several systems at one place.

However, I’ve also noticed, and experienced, the extreme redundancy of this. Say, if user A is posting something to her blog, which is fed out on her feed, simultaneously she posts to Twitter and Facebook something in the lines of “posted new blogpost at http://trata.ter.te”. Say that user B is interested in A and follows her on Facebook, Twitter and the blog feed. Well, user B is ending up with the same information 3 times – at least. Expand this to the average distinct friend rate on users have on all their social systems – it is becoming a lot of redundancy.

So what is the problem with this? I think users are more and more eager to get only the relevant information – and they want it as it happens – this is what triggers us to join all services – we do not want to miss out. However this is somewhat of a paradox, we are pursuing more information but we only want a small subset of it. So how do you manage this? Are you a deliberate redundance-oholic? Are you manually aggregating and filtering the information?

More importantly – is there a service or system that actually tries to manage this information pool through aggregation and filtering – which works?

I certainly does not possess the answers to this – but I do predict that this kind of service will be the “new trend”, we have enough ways of putting the information into the pool – now we need a way to get it back, filtered and smooth. I think location is one important asset in doing this – although not alone, but in conjunction with very clever algorithms. So who will take the challenge?

Wolfram recently launched their new service for information retrieval. The service is, as far I am concerned, not a search engine – but a fact engine. And a very clever fact engine.

I am deeply impressed by the service, probably due to my awe for anyone trying to overcome the barrier of artificial intelligence (or close to it) – I certainly strive at not embarking on AI:)

In short Wolfram|alpha lets you ask a question, or provide some keywords and in return you get a set of facts that (the engine believes) are relevant according to the input. This looks fairly similar to what Google provides; enter keywords and get relevant results. However, the huge difference is that Google only provides documents that it does not understand, and it provides results which is believed to have some relevance which they might or might not have. Wolfram on the other hand provides you either with facts (which the machine knows) or they provide you with nothing. So the precision of the result is bound to be better (i think). However they do not know everything, actually very little (in the large sense).

There is much headlines which essentially is of the kind; “Google competitor launched”, “Wolfram takes on Google” etc,etc.

Well, are they competitors? I think no. Wolfram|alpha is for me an advanced (dare to say intelligent?) dynamic encyclopedia. A place where you know more or less exactly what you want and you get an answer – or not. Google on the other hand not a place where you get answers, you might even not know what you want (!) – it provides a way to navigate an enormous information space – but does not give you any answers.

In my opinion the two services are orthogonal. Both are very solid information retrieval services, but also very different, which differentiate them and make place for both. But that’s my opinion. Are the two services (direct) competitors? Will both survive the harsh climate of the internet?

Today (or probably yesterday) an interesting phenomenon appeared on the internet. A teacher in a small town, in an even smaller primary school had published a text on the topic of science. The text was published at the official web page of Moltemyr school and was, well, quite radical in the way we usually think about science. The text is now removed from the official page, but of course Google had cached it, and so did I, and Google is ready to translate it.

In general the motivation of the text was clearly to shed light on the topic of critique of science and that not all “sciences” are necessarily true – and one should have a “built-in” scepticism towards scientific texts and in general any other information. The principle is great – and I support it strongly – one should always have a sense of scepticism towards new knowledge – however, common sense is necessary – neglect and denial are not.

Briefly summarized the text by Trond Baugen critiqued Darwin’s theory, the Big Bang theory and in general the scientific method of measuring time (i.e. C14 dating method). Which is quite bold topics to aim at. Best case scenario could be a revolution in the way we think and perform science! Unfortunately that was not the case. The argumentation of the text was quite ad-hoc, and well, not scientific – which is a bit paradoxial. From my perspective it was clearly a statement of the authors personal belief, lacking of solid arguments, and appeared to me more entertaining than a source of knowledge.

The fact that it was published on the schools official pages quickly got snapped up by several bloggers and twitterers (?), as a response to this social shaking on the web several of the largest news papers in Norway and other large web pages published the story – and well, the witch hunt had started. Of course throughout academia the text was refuted, critiqued, teared apart and mocked. The author was of course also “reviewed” by a storm of critique on being a Christian fundamentalist, creationist, fanatic intelligent designer (?:) and similar.

Personally, well, yeah, I support the witch hunt. However there are two fundamental reasons for my support. (1) It was published on the official web page of a primary school. Which signals that the school has accepted this as information that is suitable to include in the education. (2) The text is extremely one-sided. Highly subjective with a lack of proper argumentation. Every text, especially propositions of radical thoughts, must include an argumentation which discuss and preferably favours the reasonableness of the ideas presented. If not – it is just a subjective idea that potentially is very difficult for others to grasp – or find the reasonableness in.

Another interesting aspect of this is the Internet’s role in this.  Without the internet this text would never, ever, ever, received this much attention. Unfortunately Moltemyr school is clearly not up for this rapid “peer reviewing” of their published material. When they received the attention – they removed the text – and all similar “radical” texts. Well, this is a decision that can be argued in favour of – maybe it was an error that it was published, maybe they got hacked – who knows. And it’s just that! Who knows? Well, not me, because all I see when I go into Moltemyr’s web pages is that they got a new fax-number, then there are some news on the new swimming program, some adventurous adventures – but nothing, not a note even, on the extreme amount of attention they have received the past 48 hours, nothing except removal of the texts.. What is this communicating? Lack of control? Lack of courage? Lack of proper mechanisms for dealing with attention?

Why not admit that an error occurred? If that was the case.

I’m deliberately not going into the discussion on the ideas presented in the text by Trond Baugen – as that is something already done, by several others, and a whole other discussion.

A plea to everyone – especially teachers of any sort: If you have a radical idea that lacks a solid acceptance and argumentation – make a blog – write it there! Do not publish it as part of an educational material – and do not force your personal views on children!