There has been a lot of hype created around the Wolfram/Alpha search engine – brain-child of Stephen Wolfram, inventor and academic. The promise is that the Wolfram/Alpha search engine will provide answers not just links to articles which might provide answers. Will it work? The site is not generally available but Wolfram did showcase his new baby at Harvard University the other day. The new search engine has been called, predictably enough, a Google-killer and Google does seem to have been rattled enough to release it’s own new approach to structured data to coincide with the briefing.   The verdict, though, was mixed. This, from ZDnet was typical. I do think, however, that we are about to see another lurch forward toward the web of data. Watch this space.

For some reason I’ve found myself reading E H Gombrich’s A Little History of the World and I was struck by this particular passage on the ascendency of the Greeks:

Now unlike the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, these noblemen weren’t interested in preserving the ways of their ancestors. Their many raids and battles with foreign people had opened their eyes and taught them to relish variety and change. And it was at this point, and in this part of the world, that history began to progress at a much greater speed, because people no longer believed that the old ways were best. From now on things were constantly changing.

There you have it: the birth of the innovation culture.

Technorati Tags: innovation

Thought-provoking and self-explanatory presentation by John Pettengill of Razorfish about the mobile web and why it deserves far more attention than it is getting. Well worth stepping through the 128 (!) slides.

I was reading The Observer’s story this morning about how ITV mishandled the opportunity from Susan Boyle’s video. The thrust of the piece was that the video in all its forms – on YouTube, ITV.com or on the BBC – was now over 100 million views and rising and yet ITV has failed to capitalise fully from advertising potential around the global phenomenon. The reason? It has been unable to negotiate a suitable deal with Google, according to the article…

Part of ITV’s reluctance to agree a deal with YouTube could be because it wants to maintain the traffic to its own website. There is also speculation that it is trying to strike too hard a deal, using Boyle’s unique position as a bargaining tool for a better share.

Another explanation could be ITV chief executive Michael Grade’s public loathing of YouTube, which he has branded a “parasite” living off TV shows and content created by the commercial broadcaster.

Last week Michael Grade announced he was standing down as CEO of the stricken broadcaster. It occurred to me that this was probably the end of an era. There was a time when the gifted superstars of broadcasting could be relied upon to ride to the rescue of TV channels which had lost their footing. Grade’s departure after less than two years, proves that is no longer the case.

The internet moves very fast and success happens wherever it happens; ITV’s response to the Susan Boyle phenomenon seems to have been 1. to be have completely taken by surprise by the speed of events and 2. determined to stake their claim to what was there’s “by rights” – i.e. a sizeable share of any advertising spoils and exclusive rights to the traffic. ITV, headed by Grade, just don’t understand the internet (consider Friends Reunited which had an enviable head-start in the UK social networking space and has now been put up for sale.) Maybe a change of managerial outlook will serve the broadcaster better?

Technorati Tags: Google, internet, TV, YouTube

A great article from The Silicon Valley Insider uncovers the secrets of Amazon’s approach to customer reviews. How do you make sure the most useful reviews bubble to top? And how do you make it easy to see the negative and neutral reviews, as well as the good ones? These are the questions Amazon wrestled with an the post shows how elegantly Amazon came up with a solution. Worth a read.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, reviews, user experience

How do you use Twitter (if you do)? It strikes me that a new approach to attention is required that perhaps we are not automatically hard-wired to adapt to.

In the analogue world we would have an in-tray which would fill up with mail and which we would empty. An empty in-tray implied we were on top of things. It was a good thing.

Fast-forward to the electronic world and now we have email. Same thing applies – though now it is harder. The empty (or at least read) inbox is a "good thing" and you are on top of things if you achieve this.

Now we have Twitter. Popular clients like Thwirl have a "mark as read" feature which implies we should be viewing Twitter in the same way. But when you get up to 100, or 200 or even 300 people you are following it isn’t really realistic that you can read everything – assuming you have something else to do in your life.

So perhaps the analogy is more of a river – you dip in when you can, maybe surfing back a couple of hours to see what’s going on now, but you don’t stress if you are not "up to date". RSS has been like this for some time – if you follow a reasonable number of media sources you will regularly have over 1,000 unread items.

It seems to me that there is a real power in Twitter’s kind of background, lightweight information model, but I’m not sure we are necessarily particularly evolutionarily suited to it. Maybe we will have to learn some new skills, as I’m completely sure the future will be more, not less, like this.

Just read the transcript of Stephen Johnson’s talk on the future of news media which he gave at SXSW in Austin, Texas a couple of days ago. In the talk he gives an optimistic assessment of the prospects of news reporting in the future with two possible exceptions: war reporting and international coverage.

Johnson uses the past as a guide to future developments and points out how difficult it was to get information about Apple in 1989 compared to today when there are literally hundreds of sources of up to date information to choose from – ranging from conventional magazines to blogs of all sizes and specialisations. This is true of the whole technology information space.

And what started in the technology information space, and spread quickly to politics, he says will spread to all sectors in time. And in local reporting, where there is currently a lot of angst in both the US and the UK, the situation will also be better in the future, he argues, than in the past. He is co-founder of a hyper-local site called outside.in which aims to aggregate neighbourhood-level information, an example of the kind of development he predicts will become commonplace.

The reason for the current depression, he argues, there should have been a decade-long transition from paper to online business models.

Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two.

Technorati Tags: media, newspapers, financial crisis, SXSW