Author: Hjalmar Gislason

About Hjalmar Gislason

Founder and CEO of GRID (https://grid.is/). Curious about data, technology, media, the universe and everything. Founder of 5 software companies.

The Origins of Our Ideas

english, I like!

“Tell me what you read and I shall tell you what you are” is an anonymous play on a famous proverb.

Every day we take in a lot of information from a variety of sources. This information shapes our ideas, opinions and to some extent our personality. But where is it coming from?

Most of us don’t pay a lot of attention to this. We believe we make up our own opinions about the things that matter to us and leave the rest to professional and / or self proclaimed pundits.

Among the media that shape our opinions are movies, TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, books and of course (and largely for many of us) the things we read on the Web. If we would somehow keep track of all the content that we “consume” this way we could – at least to some extent – trace the origins of our ideas. Who it is that really shapes our opinions and views on the world. I think it would be amazing to see how uniform these origins are for most of us in the Western world. And talking about the Western world, it could be argued that it is the origins of our ideas that defines a culture and separates one from the other.

Tracing ideas
In the last couple of years tools have been emerging that make it possible to trace the origin of ideas more than ever before. This is largely due to the increase in “personal publishing” with blogs and blogging tools. At the same time, the tools are almost entirely limited to the blogosphere, but its a start.

One of the defining things for a blog is extensive linking to the sources and related information to the topic in question. The TrackBack functionality of some of the blogging systems such as MovableType make those links two-way so that not only do my readers know where my ideas are coming from they can also see who’s catching my train of thought and continuing the discussion, linking to me. This allows for some traceability of ideas from one weblog to the other.

But this is nowhere near sufficient. The TrackBack functionality is not that widely used and therefore covers only a miniscule part of all the content that appears online every day, let alone all the content that is already out there.

Many people have spotted this and you can now find several tools on the web that are dedicated to tracing links to and from web pages, especially weblogs. I think Blogdex was first in that line (coming out of MIT’s Media Lab), but others followed such as DayPop, Popdex and last but not least Technorati, probably the largest such index now tracking almost 3 million weblogs on a daily basis.

Theses tools allow you to enter a url or domain and see who have been linking to it. As an example I can see who’s been linking to Spurl lately. Interestingly enough none of these tools seems to allow you to see a list of the urls a given weblog has been linking TO only who has been linking TO IT. Such a list would be very interesting to do a quick “background check” on a blog you come across as ideas generally flow in the opposite direction of the link. When I link to a news article on BBC that almost certainly means I’ve read the article. Instead I suspect that the majority of searches on Technorati and co. are self-centered (ok self-conscious) bloggers trying to find out if anyone is linking to them. It should be very simple for the Pop-Day-Dex-Ratis to add this functionality.

Keeping track of the consumption
Obviously not everybody has a weblog and even those who do don’t write about everything the read. In fact it is interesting how bad the browsers we use every day are at helping users to keep track of the information we consume using them. Ever spent frustrating minutes or hours on Google or in the browser’s history list trying to find again that vital piece of information you read the other day?

Even the bookmarks / favorites that are designed to capture those “What a great page!” moments are very limited. They are only stored locally, so you don’t have access to your home bookmarks at work or in school and they usually get lost when the computer is upgraded or the hard drive crashes. In some browsers, bookmarks can not even be searched, let alone searched using a full-text search of the actual contents of the marked pages. The result is that few people use the bookmarks except maybe as a shortcut to a dozen or two of their most used web sites.

This problem has also been spotted and in the last few months, tools have been emerging that far exceed the traditional bookmarks in terms of functionality and usability, and even tap into some of the interesting social aspects emerging from the fact that thousands of other users are also using the same tools. Among these tools are Spurl.net (of which I am a founder), del.icio.us, Furl, Simpy and a few others.

To a varying degree, these tools offer functionality such as for example full text searching in all the pages users have marked, storing the entire contents of a marked page (addressing the “linkrot” problem), browser sidebars and toolbars for quick access, recommendations by matching user profiles, and of course access from any Internet connected computer (there is a lot more). Combined this makes the tools not only a replacement for traditional bookmarks, but rather a permanent record of the content a user has consumed during his or her browsing. The user can then use this record almost as a memory augmentation to later recall the information.

And there we have another piece in the puzzle that can help us seeing where our ideas are coming from.

Drawing the flow
Stephen VanDyke wrote a very interesting blog entry in the beginning of March, touching up on the same subject: “How News Travels on the Internet”. He even drew a flow chart of how he sees the flow of news online.

Obviously the flowchart only shows a fraction of the entire news-flow and the graph is rather centric to the blogging world, leaving out some of the more traditional ways news travel, such as press releases from the Source directly to the Traditional “Big” Online Media or even all the way to the Offline Media. A very thought provoking graph none the less.

The material that travels in the “Dark Matter” is especially interesting, i.e. emails, chat and instant messages where people are sending simple messages saying “Hey check this out.”. In the end, what captures the attention of the Big Media is largely coincidence, but as they reach a far larger and broader group, their coverage feeds into the blogosphere again and the circle can even repeat itself.

Another interesting attempt at drawing the flow of ideas is the Blog Epidemic Analyzer from HP. The project has indexed the flow of some 20,000 URLs as they go through the blogosphere from one blog to the next, spawning more blogging until they gradually fade from the discussion (and a new “hottest thing” emerges).

All the way to “The Source”
…sounds a bit like the plot for Matrix 4 – doesn’t it?

What I dream of is that I can one day – using tools similar to those described above – find out where the news and other information I’m consuming is really originated. That way I can see if my sources are colored by the influence of a single media company, religious group or government; the Bush administration or Michael Moore; the WWF for Nature or Texaco; the fans of the Pistons or the Lakers.

And if my sources turn out to be uniform I can at least say that it is on purpose or spend a little time studying the arguments of the opposite party. Then I can say in good faith that my opinions are formed after taking the arguments of both sides into account and making up my own mind, but were not deliberately or accidentally forced upon me by a like-minded group of people with a single view on things.

There is still a long way to go, but these tools and other similar attempts hint that this may very well be an achievable goal.

Related spurls per category

english, features

The database is finally reaching significant size so I decided to start playing with some of the things that I’ve been planning to do when a critical mass of spurls were reached.

The new addition is very small on the surface, but I suspect it may become a favorite feature for a lot of Spurl users: suggesting pages based on category contents. To see the related pages for one of your categories, open the category (in the main window, not just the Spurl bar) and click the “related spurls” link besides the category name at the top. Spurl will fetch 20 relevant pages, based on other users’ categorization.

The results are better than I even hoped for. If you choose a category with 5-10 or more links, the “related spurls” usually turns up a pretty impressive list of pages. The better defined the category is and the more pages in it, the better the results. I hope you will agree with me.

Addressing this from a more philosophical point, I’ve always had problems with the “one-size-fits-all” category structure of web directories such as Yahoo, dmoz, etc. Even with the cross referencing (the @-sign after the category names), it does not serve its purpose. I know only a handful of people that ever use these directories – people simply have so different mind-models of the world that categorization that makes perfect sense to one user, the next one finds totally irrelevant.

At the same time users tend to group related things together even though the exact hierarchy is totally different. So the thought was: What if I could simply browse my own category structure and yet find pages that I did not put there myself? Every Spurl user has put up a unique category structure – and believe me, there are as many such structures as there are users and people have fundamentally different approach in how they organize their bookmarks – yet there are often close matches between the contents of two categories even though they have different names, in different languages and are a part of a totally different category structure.

This way, everybody can use their own structure, yet tap into the power of the user base – and it will most likely scale nicely. The more users and categories, the closer matches this method will find.

All and any comments are welcomed, good or bad.

Setting the Scenario

english, The Brain Revolution

This is a chapter from a book that I thought I was going to write, called The Brain Revolution

It is an odd scenario. In a room that looks like a cozy TV-room, three people are sitting in chairs back to back in a rather tight circle. On the floor in the middle of the circle stands a computer. The computer is connected with wires to what looks like swimming caps on each individual’s head. All three look as if they are sleeping, in the comfortable looking chairs.

These people are designing a house. One of them has just bought a little piece of land, and is sitting here with her architect and an engineer laying out the details of her future home. Using the equipment in this room, these 3 people can think as one mind. The equipment enables them to pool together their different fields of expertise and preferences, giving “brainstorming” a whole new level of meaning.

As they work out more and more details of the house, the computer in the middle gathers their thoughts, creating on the fly the architectural drawings, the wiring plan, the color codes for the paint on the walls, the kitchen interiors and so on. The product of the session is a detailed three dimensional drawing of the house including all the details they have thought of so far. If it later needs to be refined, another session will be started and changes made as needed. Others will also come in to work on the finer details and give artistic input. What is certain is that once someone is connected to the equipment he or she will have as clear picture of the design as anyone involved in the project thus far has thought them through. The equipment also makes sure that when more than one person is working on the project simultaneously, their communications are completely seamless and the time spent on explaining different views and possibilities is reduced to the time it takes to think of them.

This is roughly the thought that I spent one night in the spring of 1997 thinking about, marveling at the possibilities that technology like this would enable if it existed. I allowed it to go wild in my mind, not bothered by the fact how utterly impossible it is to implement.

You can probably, just as well as I, improvise around the narrative above and find numerous different and more interesting samples of how such technology could be put to use. I will get back to more examples of my own later on.
This idea has ever since kept popping up in my head. This has been one of those ideas that rather feels like it had you, than you had it. I started looking into the practicalities involved. What would be needed to implement this kind of technology? What is the status of the sciences and technologies that would be involved? What would be the stepping stones on the way from here to there, and would these stepping stones maybe be of significant interest in themselves? Is there maybe an impossible hurdle somewhere on the way? If so, what is it and how close could we get?

On and off during this time I’ve been seeking the answers to these questions and even though I don’t have much of the answers yet, my findings on the way have been interesting in themselves.

In what follows, I want to share some of these findings. As you will probably already have realized, the opening scenario is still far-fetched science fiction. At the same time the building blocks for it are being made and what will be made of them will be fascinating, regardless of whether we will ever reach this opening scenario or pass far beyond it.

We are at the dawn of the Brain Revolution.

The Brain Revolution

Brain technologies, english

Once I was going to write a book. As a matter of fact I started writing a book. The subject was brain technologies from technical, philosophical, historical and futuristic standpoints.

As all of my time now is devoted to developing Spurl.net further, I realized that this book is not going to be finished. At the same time I have a lot of material that I have already written and it won’t do any good lying around on my computer, therefore I’ve decided to publish this material bit-by-bit on the Wetware blog (that has also been neglected due to Spurl).

Take it for what it is – more or less provisional work, unedited and not necessarily in the order it would have been in a completed work. The first chapter follows and other bits and pieces will come in during the next weeks.

The latest batch of updates + policies

english, features

A few updates in the last couple of days worth noticing.

  • Moving multiple spurls: I finally got around doing this. Should have been done ages ago. There is now a checkbox in front of every entry in the lists on the My Spurls page. Check the appropriate boxes, select the category these entries should be moved to in the dropdown box at the bottom of the list and click “Move”. As easy as that. I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a major usability enhancement.
  • Faster recommendations and now time sensitive: The recommendations now take into account that your interests may be changing over time and bases the recommendations more on the last things users have added. The recommendations are also faster now, but still need some work on that front, especially for users with a lot of spurls. I’m becoming happier with the quality of the recommendations but there is still a list of improvements that I think will make them more relevant. The most involved of you will notice that there is a new scale of measurements for the recommendations, ranging from 1-5, where 1 is a vague connection and 5 a very strong one. Obviously the longer the period you choose for your recommendations, the more relevant matches you are likely to get.
  • Recommendations in Spurl bar: You can now access your recommendations on a new tab in the Spurl bar. The recommendations there are additions from the last week. They will therefore be gradually changing, so you won’t miss things that Spurl thinks you will find interesting.
  • Speed improvements: I spent quite some time during the week on optimizing various things. The database has been growing really fast over the past two weeks and that resulted in some things – especially database queries – becoming quite slow. I’ve been focusing on the most used things, such as the front page, and the tabs on the Spurl bar and am working my way through other, less used parts of the system.

As for the practical part, Spurl now has Terms of Use and a Privacy Policy. I don’t think there will be any surprises there, it’s basically: We’ll be good to you and you should be good to us 🙂
The main points are:

  • We don’t collect personally identifiable information and we’re not interested in it.
  • We use cookies to make the service more user friendly, nothing is stored there other than a few preferences and an id to recognize a revisiting registered user.
  • We may study collective trends and information in the database. Such studies will not involve the trends of individual users and will only be used in an aggregated way. And btw. anything that is marked “private” will be left out of any such studies, and is for your eyes only.
  • You’re not allowed to store illegal material. If we become aware of such data, it will be deleted immediately.
  • Don’t try anything stupid.

Even though it doesn’t say in the ToU or PP, I want to emphasize that Spurl is and will always be free of charge and free of ads for personal use. See the FAQ for details

Spurl.net grows fast

english, Spurl.net

After a quite positive article about Spurl.net in Lockergnome – Windows Fanatics newsletter, Spurl.net saw a lot of new faces last week.

Traffic has grown significantly and a lot of uploaded bookmarks should be making the recommendations and other Spurl features that use aggregated data from the Spurl community even more interesting.

Spurl.net welcomes all our new users and we hope to see you spurling a lot in the future.

We are always working to make Spurl.net better. An upgrade is scheduled by the end of the week where the latest improvements and additions will be revealed. Stay tuned.

– – –

BTW: Several users have been posting ideas and support requests to the blog, which is fine, but not ideal for keeping track of them and for other users to find the information later on. I’m therefore looking for a good bulletin board solution to install on Spurl.net. Preferably PHP/MySQL based. Any suggestions?

Multiple categories and other updates

english, Spurl.net

The last few days have been spent on some good rearrangements. Most of them will not really show on the surface, but here are some of the changes you might have noticed:

  • It is now possible to put a spurled page in more than one category at once (press the “multiple” link in the Advanced spurling window).
  • I’ve been simplifying the setup process and putting more emphasis on that users also install the Spurl bar which seems to be a real hit with everybody that installs it.
  • The front page has been changed somewhat to try to better explain what Spurl.net is and does (only new/logged out users see that bit). As you know, Spurl is many things so all suggestions for a short and catching description of what Spurl.net is are welcomed!
  • The help and tips and tricks have been updated a bit, but there is more work to do there.

Introducing: The Spurl bar

english, features

Spurl steps aside…

I just completed wrapping the core functionality of Spurl.net into a neat toolbar that sits on the side of your browser.

At the top of the bar is a search field, for searching your spurls (spurls are essentially “Bookmarks on steroids” for those of you that need a tagline).

Below the search field there are 4 tabs:

  • My most used: A list of the pages you have most frequently visited through Spurl. After using Spurl for a couple of days, this tab will hold more or less all the pages you visit on a regular basis. I have found this to be a personal favorite.
  • My spurls: A treeview holding all your spurls in categories.
  • Hot now: The pages that Spurl users have spurled the most in the last few days.
  • Just in:The freshest spurls from all users.

Note: The icon in front of a spurl ( ) is a link to your details on the spurl, and allows you to change them.

This new bar gives an extremely easy access to the spurl functionality with minimal interruption to your normal browsing behavior. I don’t know why I didn’t implement it like this from the beginning, but here it is.

Enjoy!

– – –

The installation is as simple as it gets.

For Opera and Mozilla (etc.) users it is a single click of a link.

Explorer users must restart their systems for the full installation (why is Bill so difficult?), but they are in for an extra treat. The installation will also create two new buttons in the Navigation bar (next to the Back and Home links, etc.). One for toggling the Spurl bar on and off, the other one for spurling pages. So in that case you don’t even need the good old Spurl! link in the Links bar any more – the new button has all it’s functionality.

And don’t worry, no software is in fact installed on the computer, just a few registry changes and the install page holds a link to uninstall it as easily as it was installed.

To install the Spurl bar, go here. If you are a new user – go to the front page of Spurl.net and register. The last step of the registration shows you how to install the Spurl bar.

Note: If the buttons in the Navigation bar (Explorer only) don’t appear after you have restarted the computer, you have to go to View / Toolbars / Customize… and locate them there. This only happens for those that have previously customized their Toolbar somehow.

– – –

Update Apr 14, 2004: Mozilla / Firefox / Firebird / Netscape support now completed as well – unfortunately Safari does not support sidebars, but a workaround is in the making.

Right click to Spurl!

english, features

Internet Explorer users can now add a Spurl! link to their right-click context menus.

This has several traits:

  • It allows users to spurl pages that appear in frames.
  • It saves space on the desktop for those users that don’t use the Links bar for anything else.
  • It bypasses pop-up blockers

To install the right-click option, go to the Spurl link page and see “Version 3” at the bottom of the page.

Hope you like it.