Attenuation: Google Information Market and onLife
I've had the ETech riff on attenuation going through my head lately. Google's Information Market is an example of attenuation: taking hundreds of different opinions and boiling them down to a forecast that's probably right. Even the New York Times was impressed (thanks, Marc, for the pointers). Surj pointed me at Onlife, a Mac app that's along the lines of Nat Friedman's Dashboard (not to be confused with Apple's Dashboard). Onlife uses the built-in monitoring facilities of Apple apps to build a single clear view of your interaction with those apps--the mail you read, the IMs you sent, the web pages you visited, the songs you listened to, etc. It also indexes all the web pages you visit, a kind of outboard brain for your browser. It's yet to be shown that this helps me attenuate my inputs: the key is whether I'll use this instead of some other set of features in the apps, or whether it just becomes another input I have to manage (in which case I'll turn it off).
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(my first comment evaporated, let me try this again.) When I first scanned nat's post on Attenuation I thought Google had disclosed a way to boil all the personal data it collects, e.g. search history and emails, into market intelligence. But then I guess they wouldn't publicize that, would they. -- Sorry, it's the conspiracy theorist in me. -- But if they don't, they should. Wouldn't you?
(Sorry about the dup. Firefox was hiding my first comment, just had to refresh.)
One of the reasons we need attenuation is because there is a lot of repetition on the web. I said, one of the reasons we need attenuation is because there is a lot of repetition on the web.
(Dear moderator, please don't delete Sid's accidental repetition above, or else my comment loses its "presence".)
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Sid Steward [09.28.05 12:47 PM]
Whoops. When I first scanned this post I thought Google had disclosed a way to boil all the personal data it collects, e.g. search history and emails, into market intelligence. But then I guess they wouldn't publicize that, would they. Sorry, it's the conspiracy theorist in me. (-: