Mike Davidson who works in media product development for Disney initiates an interesting discussion on information overload and how a smart aggregator could be the answer to the enormous amounts of data we will (and some are) processi

Newsmap is a graphic representation by Marcos Weskamp of the shape of the news of the moment and of the day.

RSS: a Shift, from What…to What? “He also neatly sort of answers his own question – with greater precision than I can ever muster – by saying: ‘If I visit houses of content, as I seem to do on…

I love this graphical representation of what’s hot in the news: newsmap. [from newsmap description] Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm…

Very interesting: newsmap. Check it out and read Mike's blog post. I need to read a bit closer before discussing further though (I thought it was so cool that I'm posting it right away!). A bit of the discussion is about a push model for ne

News delivery and instant messaging are going to merge – it’s only a matter of time.

Davidson on agents: Mike Davidson (welcome! 8) writes here of having the computer tailor its results to you, and ties it in with the Newsmap tool. Some agents live on a remote machine (Findory, eg), while others live on the…

Is the era of Smart Aggregation upon us?…

Mike Davidson’s article Newsmap as a Model for Smart Aggregation provides an insightful view of the future of information retrieval, presentation and use. I readily admit to being an information junkie – I’m subscribed to several lists (evolt, WebDes…

http://news-bot.net/

Findory is a personalized newspaper and weblog reader. It learns from your interests, searches thousands of sources, and builds a front page just for you.

In a sea of information, Findory provides focus. It helps you find the news you would otherwise miss.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on it, Mike.

First, your definitions of smart agents differ:

ClayWeb crawling agents as opposed to stored preferences in a databaseMikeSits on your desktop and acts as a mediator between you and the world

With this in mind, it can be seen how both your examples of smart agentry sidestep Clay’s constraints:

1. Agents’ performance degrades with network growth
2. Agents ask people to do what machines are good at (waiting) and machines to do what people are good at (thinking).
3. Agents make the market for information less efficient rather than more

Spam filters mediate between the user and an essentially local resource (their mail) so Clay doesn’t really apply at all.

Newsmap would appear to work by piggy backing off a BFW as described by Clay.

Could buying plane tickets be made to work? Rule 1 probably isn’t too much of an issue, as I think the number of physical flights are not growing that fast. Rules 2 and 3, however, would suggest that the only viable solution is another BFW acting as an aggregator. Who ever runs this service would have to deal with the problems that Clay describes, but at least they can do this from a business context, building up relationships and service levels with the providers. I guess this is already happening to a large extent, there is just no super-aggregator that covers all airlines.

p.s. happier, more productive, a Radiohead fan perchance?

I don’t see the up-to-now “failure” of smart agents that Clay sees. I see technology just now getting to the point where it can support such a concept. Don’t forget that Clay’s article was written in June of 1999… before the advent of a lot of the agents we are already starting to see. His opinion back then was probably based on false starts by Microsoft, PointCast, and many other companies who tried to rush things out before smart technology was mature. As I mentioned in the original post, Apple’s junk mail filter and all other filters which act as it does, are already smart agents. I train it to accept or reject mail in the future on my behalf by helping it understand what I consider junk. It comes out of the box “pre-educated” to a certain degree, but it only gets better as it begins to know me. This sort of functionality wasn’t around in 1999 because spam was not even 1/100th of the problem it is now.

Another example of an agent already living on my machine is LaunchBar. If anyone out there is using OS X and hasn’t tried LaunchBar yet, please stop reading this comment and install it. LaunchBar provides keystroke access to every single application, document, MP3, video file, URL, or e-mail address which is stored on my computer. Instead of me traversing through my directories to find a paper I wrote on advertising, I just type in “command-space ADV” and the paper comes up. The word-matching algorithms are impressive, but what makes this program truly smart is that it learns from my behavior. If I have Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator on my machine, I may type in “ADO”, to which LaunchBar will ask which Adobe program I want to launch. After I make my choice, LaunchBar learns and defaults me to that program upon future “ADO” keystrokes. In other words, it intercepts my keystrokes and acts on my behalf, knowing what I’m probably trying to accomplish.

I think Clay is right in that there are certain scenarios where I really don’t want an agent doing my thinking for me. These are typically the types of things I already don’t use the web for: dating women, picking out clothes, etc. There are certain things in life which are so subjective that it is really difficult to take the human element out of them. That said, I’m sure some people wouldn’t mind having their agent set up blind dates for them.

Clay’s other scenario of buying plane tickets actually makes perfect sense to me. Here is the permanent set of rules I’d give my agent for buying tickets:

1. Never book a connecting flight unless absolutely necessary.
2. Never book a departure time before 10am unless necessary.
3. Try and get me an exit row.
4. Use frequent flyer airlines if possible but don’t sacrifice any of the above in the process.

These are all things I currently do manually on the web, and I don’t enjoy doing them. They are also all things which can be expressed programatically and dealt with appropriately by an agent.

So I guess what it comes down to is that I agree with Clay in that I don’t necessarily want an agent to do all of my “thinking” for me… but much of my day is spent not really “thinking” at all but rather performing tasks a computer could easily do.

The more of my time that is freed up for either critical thought or recreational activities, the happier and more productive I will be.