I’ve been pondering a couple of points. Those thoughts that are akin to industrial output (commodity a.k.a concepts, ideas, keywords, tags) need structuring tools so that they can be ‘used’ in some ways, are IMO addressed beautifully by PrimalFusion. And I’m sure the concept will mature over time as an intelligent research assistant and publisher. No doubt about that. If we could add the value of thinking as a process – if smart algorithms could ‘guess where I’m coming from’ and help me articulate this (guess my thinking ’style’ and become better and better at doing so over time, much like speech recognition) … hey I like the sound of – “thought recognition”! – Primal Fusion would be a true world beater.

My two bit.

I do not want to detract from the main argument but sadly, this is the kind of thinking that brought about the current state of the world economy. We need to work towards a balance between quality and volume instead of one or the other. Mindless pusuit of efficiency leads to unheeded consumption and this erodes basic human values – caring for the environment, working within cultural sensitivities to name a couple.

@Linda, I’m speaking of content as both containers and nodes (chunks of content elements). Text is obviously more accessible than multimedia, but as the latter becomes semantically annotated, machine-document synthesis will extend into these areas as well. Machine mash-ups are already a reality.

@Linda, @Chad, good points about quality. I was speaking of machine-quality relative to human experts, not lay people. I agree that the quality of machine manufactured content could quickly surpass most lay people, technically if not artistically.

@TreeMagic, thanks for the links. I’ll check it out.

This got me thinking about the notion of quality vs. elegance. The topic of this article reminds me of a similar (albeit on a much smaller scale) debate about GWT (Google’s Javascript compiler). GWT really shook up the Javascript community (and in particular the “Javascript Ninjas” — the artisans of the JS world). Many JS Ninjas were concerned that machine-generated Javascript code would be slow and bloated (read “lower quality”) compared to hand crafted JS, and that ultimately, it would decrease production of software. As it turns out, GWT typically produces Javascript code that is faster and smaller (and often more maintainable given the fact that it compiles cross-browser) than human-generated JS. Assuming code quality is measured by its speed, size (smallness), reliability, and ease of maintenance, GWT-generated code can be considered higher quality than the human-generated counterpart. I think the JS Ninjas were actually arguing that the machine-generated Javascript was not as elegant (i.e. clever and stylistically composed) as their own code — and I would tend to agree with this argument.

Similarly, while PF’s synthesized content may not necessarily exhibit the elegance of human crafted content (e.g. the ordering and layout of the content in a way that might be more intuitive/clever/entertaining), it might at some point exhibit higher quality (e.g. produce more novel and focused results).

-Chad-

An explanation of the approach may be found on the pages linked to: http://ambientwebs.com/web-30/

The first is what you mean by “content”. I come from a content management background and have seen how that concept has changed in my field these past few years and I’m not sure that people are using the term consistently. There’s a lack of ontological precision in the definition of this class right now and I can’t tell if you’re taking into consideration content formats such as video, images, audio, as well as text, or if you even mean something as granular as that or if “content” lies at the level of a web page, which for me, is an aggregation of content, a container. If the latter, I agree that traditional aggregators, such as newspapers, will be affected by Web 3.0, and already have been. If the former, I don’t know how Web 3.0 can create video or audio on the fly. Although the result could be quite interesting.

The second is your assertion that the IR made more things but of a lower quality, and people became happy with “good enough”. The first area to be industrialized was textile production, starting with spinning and weaving. Machine-spun thread was finer and stronger than hand-spun and made finer woven products at lower cost. Machine-woven cloth produced finer products in far greater quantity than hand-woven, which lowered the cost and enabled the middle-class to afford luxury fabrics like silk and cashmere, and the lower-class to afford finer and strong cottons and woolen fabrics. The IR actually increased the output of quality products, at least in textiles. What it changed was a business model that went from selling a few things at a high profit margin (the pre-Industrial boutique model), to selling many things at a low profit margin. In fact, entrepreneurs would actually sell certain items at a loss to get people into their stores and buy. Loss-leaders–sound familiar to open sourcers?

The Industrial Revolution didn’t just change the production model; it changed the business model and the concept of wealth, and who has access to it. The Information Revolution may also change the way we produce information, but it is also changing the business model and the concept of wealth. What they’re changing into no one knows yet, but what’s interesting is just how many people are in the conversation.