Ruminating Out Loud

An insightful and impressive information on the ingredients necessary for the making of a successful venture in the social media space. It is regarding Stack Overflow, a free question and answer site built by developers for developers that has fostered a strong and committed online community in under one year. It was founded by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Attwood in an attempt to fill in a void that is not successful exploited by search engines. It is the perfect example of a service built to expand reaches in the vast and largely unexplored Null Information. Below is an excerpt from the article:

Why Search Engines are Failing when it Comes to Collaborative Sites

According to Spolsky, there are certain reasons why search engines are failing when it comes to Q&A sites, and they are the same issues Stack Overflow is trying to solve.

1. Sign-up scams: Sites that a search engine may send you to where you must first sign up and pay, if you want an answer.
2. Register: A “road bump” that many sites have, and one Spolsky thinks reduces participation dramatically
3. Wrong answers: When searching for highly technical questions, a search engine may send you to a forum that has multiple answers. If you are unsure which answer is the correct one, you waste too much time working through the wrong ones.
4. Obsolete results: Google, for instance, will oftentimes give an older page priority. In turn, the page you are served is often outdated and no longer relevant.

How did Stack Overflow address this issue? By applying and implementing what they call “The Nine Building Blocks of Social Engineering” in an effort to create a site that was anthropologically correct and would encourage people to behave in a way that would work.

Below is a talk given by Joel Spolsky on this issue:

Paul Graph has an instructive essay about what it takes to be a good startup founder. He is advice is “Be Relentlessly Resourceful.”

Be relentlessly resourceful.

That sounds right, but is it simply a description of how to be successful in general? I don’t think so. This isn’t the recipe for success in writing or painting, for example. In that kind of work the recipe is more to be actively curious. Resourceful implies the obstacles are external, which they generally are in startups. But in writing and painting they’re mostly internal; the obstacle is your own obtuseness.

There probably are other fields where “relentlessly resourceful” is the recipe for success. But though other fields may share it, I think this is the best short description we’ll find of what makes a good startup founder. I doubt it could be made more precise…”

This strikes me as being a good way to look at a recipe for success not just as a startup founder, but also in any avenue of interaction where one party offers a service that is consumed by another -  specifically in the new age of information explosion and super-expansion of Null Information.

We have recently looked at this issue from the perspective of publishing, in which it was argued that the interdependence between a blogger or any other generator of synthesis of information and a reader and follower is one that is symbiotically sustained and strengthened by the exchange of the pleasure of intellectual stimulation, on the creator’s part, with the source of inspiration for further creative engagement, on the part of the consumers. The creator accomplishes the ability to attract a certain level of interest from the audience by being resourceful. The good ones, you might say, are proportionally more relentlessly resourceful than others.

I think that this concept can be expanded to any avenue of creativity and business where the chances of success are directly tied to the ability of the creator or business person to offer the type of service or good that is relevant and useful to the consumer. In succeeding at being resourceful, there is an inherent accomplishment in figuring out what the needs are of the the consumer of information, service, or good. That level of understanding is the catalyst for a successful venture, to which a startup is just one of the many examples. Endowed with the keen awareness of what ticks a consumer, a properly tailored offering can be made. The genius in the phraseology Paul Graham has come up with is in the marriage of that understanding in being resourceful and the drive it takes to succeed, as in being relentless.

In the age where Null Information is expanding and growing at a rate faster than our ability to make sense and use of it all, there are some precious tools that make it easy for one to stay on top of major developments in human endeavors. In the area of science and technology, one such place is EurekaAlert!, which is “an online, global news service operated by AAAS, the science society.” It provides “a central place through which universities, medical centers, journals, government agencies, corporations and other organizations engaged in research can bring their news to the media… EurekAlert! offers its news and resources to the public… and features news and resources focused on all areas of science, medicine and technology.”

A particular gem is their Breaking News page, which features information about latest reports on advancements in various fields of study. Enjoy!

Here is a wonderful piece of information about staying informed by Jenna Wortham of NY Times. Not including the traditional news sources, the article discusses about news aggregators such as Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Delicious, NewzNozzl, Mixx, Newsvin, Addictomatic, Yahoo Buzz , BuzzTracker, BuzzFeed, Google Reader, FeedDemon, Bloglines, ReadBurner, RSSMeme, LinkRiver, Tabbloid, Feedbooks, … It is incredible to me how there are so many of these services available and how they all manage to stay relevant and useful. Given how gigantic Null Information is, I guese we can use all the help we can get to sift through and sort it all.

Why blog at all? That is a fair question to ask. A detailed discussion on the social implications and the meaning of blogging is not the intention of this post. It is rather a reflection on the consequence of active blogging in the patterns of information consumption. In a previous post, I have discussed the concept of Null Information, the untapped and unaccounted for reservoir of knowledge and wisdom, and the never-ending battle between the explosive pace at which content is being created and the efforts being made to make information more relevant and accessible to the masses.  Here, what I would like to ponder on is the consequence of blogging on the transformation of receiver of information from a passive to an active consumer. I think this could have a far reaching consequence in terms of the development of communication skills and building of intellectual capital. Let’s take the example of writing. Most of us work in an environment where one is rarely forced to synthesize and describe information that is outside of our area of expertise. So, all one gets to build in a day-to-day basis is really fluency in a limited language. Then, there also is the advent of instant messaging where written communication in a truncated word or sentence construction format is commonplace. It does not take a stretch of imagination to believe that a great many of us gradually forget how to write in complete sentences, how to think, how to articulate thoughts and communicate them. The direct consequence of this is that one is transformed into a passive consumer of information.  In this paradigm, the act of reading an article or a book, watch a program on TV becomes a one-way flow of information, where the substance and meaning of that piece of information is not thought about or synthesized concretely. To me, blogging is the antidote to this. The act of blogging forces one to gather, synthesize, and, at the very least, describe pieces of information. The process of selection of and writing about a given topic forces one to think and reflect on the piece of information under consideration. It provides the venue for expansion of knowledge on topics of interest; the “schooling” ground where learning takes place. That is where the merit of blogging lies: the transformation of oneself from a passive consumer of information to an active one.

A Google Search for "information" on 12/17/08

 A given individual is at most going to be able to check out information contained in the first few pages of this result. Let us assume that the Google search engine is an all-too-powerful one that scavenges all over the internet and returns all the relevant information for a given search inquiry. Let us also say that that one would have the patience to review and digest information from the first 1000 results, which would be 100 pages of search results. I understand that almost no one does this. But, for the sake of argument, let assume that it happens. If that is the case,  the 1000 search results would be less than 0.00004 % of the overall outcome. The remaining 99.99994% of the information returned is what I would consider to be Null Information. It is not that this astounding amount of content does not have any intrinsic value. It is just that it has not been properly tapped into or made relevant to what is currently being searched for. To put it in perspective, let us consider the population of the U.S. On 12/18/08 at 01:14 GMT the population of the U.S. is projected to be 305,904,346. The equivalent of the search result would be taking ~ 100 people to be representative of what the American people are like. The remaining  305,904,246 people are completely left out of this outcome. All the intricate and unique information about these people is not really accessed or accounted for. This body of knowledge is what is the Null Information. It can be argued that it is possible to come up with 100 Americans that are a good representative of the general population. However, we can agree that whoever decides who gets to be one of the hundred better be really good in order for the outcome to have the most consensus. There are a few ways to ensure that this selection process come as close to being good as possible. One is to go ahead and undertake a massive census of all the people of the country and find out about the characteristic traits of each and every American; if not all as, many as possible. Endowed with this knowledge one can synthesize the data to filter out the most common traits that are shared by the people and select the top 100 people having them. This requires that a centralized entity undertakes such an effort. This would be the equivalent to how search is evolving, where the likes of Google are amassing as much personalized information as possible so that they can customize the delivery of services to the interested party. The other option is to leave it up to the people of the U.S. to decide who get to be their representatives. This would be much like the elections, but with an important twist. The election is not to select a member of the House of Representatives or the Senate, but the equivalent of selecting 100 presidents with as close to a 100% participation rate in the election as possible. Already one can see how messy of a process this can be. If it can be pulled off, this would give a direct platform for the people to make their desires be known. It also provides a direct access to the collective individualized-wants-and-needs of the people, and would truly provide for as an accurate a representation as possible. There are information retrieval approaches developed around this concept. The advent of tagging of information and bookmarking are attempts in creating a platform for democratic expression of interests and desires. Using this gathering of information, entities can then provide services back to the participants that are directly applicable.

The decision as to which method is the most effect is a difficult one to make. On the one hand, the first approach puts all the power of decision making on one entity. Although such an entity can aspire to take into account the ways in which one piece of information is more relevant than the other (in the case of Google the taking in to account not only the content of pages, but also the degree of inter-linking between the other pages and the one in consideration), the final decision remains exclusively with that entity. Reliance on a method of deciphering relevance through a particular approach has its own pitfalls as it gives incentive for other parties to come up with a way to essentially game the system. A very good example of this could be the budding industry in “search engine optimization.” Incidentally, a search for “search engine optimization” by itself returns > 27 million results. On the other hand, the process of allowing participants to express their interest is an involved process that is prone to high level of inefficiency and difficulty in consensus building. If there is not a 100% buy in to the process of selection, then the same problem of few deciding what is best for all is encountered. In the long run, both approaches will likely continue to develop and find ways to stay useful for the masses. Either way, there remains a core problem in tapping into the Null Information. Whether it is for companies to acquire as much personalized data as possible so that when individual X makes an inquiry about Y, (s)he is not inundated with billions of irrelevant data wasting the resources required for storage, retrieval and review of data or the case of building a large-scale platform for as many people as possible to participate in a democratic process of self-expression, there is a lot to be done about the Null Information. There is an astounding need for not only search for information, but also sorting and customizing it. As search technologies become more powerful, this may be accomplished with ease granted that there is an existing data connecting individual with pieces of information. There is also a need for providing venues for expressions of one kind or another. With the rapid rise in content creation and dissemination, it is going to be a battle fought over a long period of time with the aforementioned entities playing catch up with the population at large. Now that is a battle for the ages!