Synthetic

Very cool stuff, monopoly game about the blogsphere: Blogpoly

I may actually print the board and play with some friends. Besides that it may be nice to make an online version of these games.

The only way to resist to China is to join Europe.
The only way to resist to Nazi Germany is to collaborate.
There is no other way.

Have you ever Googled for your glasses? Today it happened to me while trying to locate them. Am I going crazy or was I experiencing the future…?

for cheap gas, movies and chicago crimes.

Here is the pattern of the approach:

Particular service >>> Raw Information >>> Aggregated >>> Organized >>> Other Layers >>> Useful

1) Choose a particular service
movie reviews, consumer products, taxi cabs, sex buddy, dating …

2) Take all possible information sources related to the particular service
humanly select amongst websites, blogs, amazon reviews, printed books, audio files, satellite views …

3) Aggregate this raw information into a uniform information source
a) make a crawler
b) make a pattern recognition module and text matching module
c) make a database fed by the selected information

4) Organize the aggregated information
a) build an API to wrap the aggregated information
b) build a clean website usually of the form of a simple search box.

5) Add other layers
Other webservices may be layered on top, including maps and other visuals.
Layers comunicate with each others thru APIs.

6) Information of the particular service is now in a useful form

==============================================================================
Example: Paul Rademacher wonderfull application

1) Focused on housing
2) He uses craigslist for housing but other sources could also be considered
3) Narrow craigslist down to housing in particular places
4) He built an API to access Google maps and his aggregated Craigslist listings.
5) Google maps is layered on top.
6) Very usefull, with this application I found a place within a day!

Put a search box anywhere you can. I go to the properties of a software and i need to set some settings, all I do is go to the search box and get it. Put a search box anywhere; bookmark, history, search in a website, preferences of a software, help, anywhere. Search is changing the way we deal with computing. Need something, just ask for it. You are in a folder and need a specific file, just search for it. You need an application to do some math, just search for it. Now add to this paradigm a voice recognition engine to understand keywords and here you are speaking to your computer.

A typical application:
—————————
Search Box <<<<< making information ACCESSIBLE
---------------------------
Exploration Window <<<<< making information ORGANIZED
OR
Result Window <<<<< and USEFUL

Here is a crazy example to google my system settings. Imagine the same being possible for any programs, etc… Google as a unix like shell command line.

Information has to be taken the largest way. What makes information is what people write, talk listen, speak, think, it all comes from people doing something. The point of this figure attempts to show that Google accomplishes its goal (”search and organize the world’s information”) by going to the root of what makes information. With the Google Box, Google has an occasion to search and organize all individual’s information (books I read, what I buy, where I go to, what I see, etc..). I then chose to reveal some part of it to the internet. The later information is then accessed by other people world thru a Google Search. I guess what I want to say is that although specific individuals do not have access to the world’s information (some information is private), the entity Google does. Therefore Google accomplishes its goal of searching and of organizing the world’s information. Not sure I am clear, but it is to me.

Our projects could be grouped into six categories. To get these categories, one simply ask questions such as what is information? What could we do with information?

- store
- search
- explore/visualize
- aggregate
- annotate
- infer

The principal components of our software are:

- free
- user centric interface
- running off the web (web application)
- universal access (web based)
- local access (bridge from the desktop to the network (small syst tray daemon))
- personalisation (collaborative filtering)
- check all gains from running on the network
- do it fast
- does one thing but does it very very very very well
- really simple open API (with SOAP et WSDL)

I could very probably have forgotten some. The key, I believe in designing these software is to understand that we are living in the information age. Therefore software should be (re) designed accordingly. Some projects include: a rethought of the historic, bookmark, blog reader (blogs are the next big thing after the web and after email) (blog readers are browsers within browsers), IM, a tool to gather, enrich and dispatch information and plenty more. In fact we have more than 300 projects in stock.