Re:well, I doubt it will be like that anymore (Score 1)

I had the same thought (that the Wired story would likely ruin another pristine -or not- space). Any pure little paradise, once it hits the big time, will be turned into a godforsaken wasteland of burmuda-shorts-wearing tourists leaving swaths of dreck in their wake. When the masses get wind of something good, they'll trash it for sure. It's basically just the law of entropy in action.

But does it really have to be this way? Perhaps slashdot is better at filtering signal from noise than IRC in some respects, but not all. Any napsters or del.icio.us's coming out of this collective? I haven't seen signs of collective intelligence emerging for innovative solutions in this space, but granted, I am a newbie. Also granted, this forum isn't really geared for that level of collaboration.

Or isn't it? Here's a brain[emmission]; judge for yourself whether its aroma is appealing or repugnant:

Imagine an environment that is instantly responsive to your predilections based on the context you provide. Context is determinined heuristically based on your interactive participation, like adaptive steering through a meaning/value space.

The problem we're trying to solve, as always, essentially boils down to separating signal from noise. We want to do that more effectively. The situation is complicated by the fact that one person's signal may be another person's noise. The designation of signal or noise isn't universally objective. In fact it is inherently subjective. Complicating the picture further still is the fact that one person's present goals may be different from another's, even if their tastes are similar (I may agree that a post is funny, but I'm really more interested in finding something informative right now, so I'm not in the market for funny at the moment).

So, what if we enable *every user* to tag a given post as "signally" or "noisy" on a variety of spectra. If I find a given post funny, and I want find more funny posts, then the system should interactively display more posts based on querying "users who find the given post funny" joined with "other posts this group finds funny." Similarly, if I find this post funny, but not informative, and I'm looking for informative, the total posts are filtered, parsed and displayed for my viewing pleasure accordingly.

For each new post that I rank for signal/noise correlation (based on any spectra of my choosing), the total collection is reparsed for each user individually, and so each post viewed is another chance for a new bifurcation in the meaning/value space.

There are two simultaneous but distinct activities going on here: the first is differentiation of the value/meaning space based on individual signal/noise assessments; the second is integration of the space into clusters based on heuristic participation and querying.

There is an extremely important, but very tiny innovation involved in this system: the fact that all of my rankings are motivated by what I want to see more/less of, I'm not tasked with the chore of trying to decide what other users would like to see. There is no need for centralized control. The system is set up to let decentralized control flourish.

Basically, each user becomes a Maxwellian Demon (http://www.maxwellian.demon.co.uk/name.html), reversing the forces of entropy, and making the space more useful with increased participation rather than less useful. Not only that, but the system basically creates parallel mini-universes; rather than one single box in which everyone sees everyone, you've got a potentially unlimited number of boxes based on the evaluations by each user assigning and seeking meaning/value for their own selfish benefit.

One of the beautiful consequences of this kind of interaction is that the space become richer with prolonged usage instead of becoming more noisy (harnessing negative entropy). I don't even think that it would be necessary or useful to classify given users as "noisy" or "signally." That information would be inferred from the ranking of their posts. But what would be useful is to be able to discern which users you would like to keep on eye on so that you could follow them to other threads/venues that would be of interest to you. And if your friends similarly are watching your behavior, the bounds of that box are no longer limited to a given thread, but essentially expand to the limits of the web itself.

Hmmm, can anyone help me learn the windows APIs so I can code this up??? ;)

dls