[Sigia-l] GoogleNews

[Peter Morville]

A couple of things to keep in mind in this discussion:

* News articles are highly structured to begin with (headline, date,
etc).

* GoogleNews is built on top of 4,000 existing news sources that involve
lots of work by humans (e.g., reporters, writers, editors).

That's not to say GoogleNews won't make waves...but I agree with Victor
that this represents more of an opportunity than a threat to information
architects. 


Peter Morville
President, Semantic Studios
www.semanticstudios.com



-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Listera
Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 1:59 PM
To: sigia-l at mail.asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] GoogleNews


"ryankowalczyk at mchsi.com" wrote:

> Instead, IAs play a role in the design of the template
> itself by helping to decide things like, in this case:

I don't know if humans did or did not have anything to do with the
structural decisions you cited, specifically in the GoogleNews case. But
it's not impossible for me to fathom that such structural decisions can
and will be made in the future entirely by computers as well. Genetic
algorithms are one such method to "organically" generate structure after
a very large set of random iterations, feedback loops and mutations, the
domain of Google. So, I think, rather than being a non-starter, this
might indeed be the first tiny but highly-visible step in that
direction.

Victor Lombardi" wrote:

> I think IAs will increasing need to create algorithms, i.e. we'll 
> design systems rather than design instances. We'll need to think about

> the reasons why we made a design decision and put that reasoning into 
> algorithmic format for the computers to replicate.

What's exciting or scary (depending on your POV) about this is that
computers can and will generate the algorithms that generate the
instances. That is, computers will decide to create a new news section,
when they detect a "need" for it. They will place it in an "appropriate"
spot in the page geometry. They will decide to drop sections that are
not popular with readers. They will introduce sections for serendipity
purposes. They will monitor the popularity of various sections and
rearrange the template in small iterations or in one big swoop. They
will highlight certain sections by the use of color, type, placements,
etc. We're not too far from all this. (I haven't said anything about
whether this is all "good" or not . :-)

Best,

Ziya

------------
When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible. *Plain text,
please; NO Attachments

ASIST Annual Meeting: http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM02/index.html

ASIST SIG IA website: http://www.asis.org/SIG/SIGIA/index.html
________________________________________
Sigia-l mailing list -- post to: Sigia-l at asis.org
Changes to subscription: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l