Doyle Saylor wrote: > The drive in socialist communities is the network production of > knowledge to equalize the process of knowledge production. So in > effect if we look at 1917 the communist sincerely wanted to build a > 'socialist' society, but the production of automated networked > information lay over the horizon.
Doyle: what do you make of this?: Les Schaffer [ from Technology Review http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16526,258,p2.html ] Beyond Google: Collective Searching A new kind of search engine could make the act of Web searching more sociable. By Michael Fitzgerald At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego this week, a new software application was introduced, called Boxxet (pronounced "box set"), which allows online interest groups to form by aggregating content from users, instead of the more traditional way of networking around a person or event. [snip] Social software has blossomed in the last few years, with blogging, social-networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn, and the rise of user-driven content sites like Flickr. But, for the most part, the field is in an awkward, adolescent stage: self-conscious and prone to forming cliques. Furthermore, many users never contribute information to these communities. "Problem number one with social software is that people are lurkers," says Boxxet's founder, You Mon Tsang. Boxxet software is designed to take into account that most people won't contribute to its ratings section. Tsang uses the term "bionic software" to describe how social software can combine even limited amounts of human insight and preferences with software algorithms to generate "focused" communities. [snip] The Boxxet engine, which is built around standard software, such as MySQL and JavaScript, is driven by "thousands" of variables, according to Tsang, which he and his co-founder developed. The primary technology they used for categorizing searches is "support vectors," which break text apart to analyze its patterns, Tsang says. In the future, Boxxet will also learn how to make best-of lists. For instance, if you rated a list of 30 movies, it would return recommendations based on ratings by others who've rated at least some of the same movies. Or the feature could be used to parse news sites and bring back the best stories and blogs on a topic. On a practical level, Boxxet is more like a search engine than a social network. It's a concept that might appeal to people who're tired of trying to figure out how to refine searches on sites like Google. But it could also have some stiff competition from Microsoft, which just announced MSN Macros, a collection of search engines geared toward specific subjects. [snip] The Boxxet engine, which is built around standard software, such as MySQL and JavaScript, is driven by "thousands" of variables, according to Tsang, which he and his co-founder developed. The primary technology they used for categorizing searches is "support vectors," which break text apart to analyze its patterns, Tsang says. [snip]
