Surfacing

Probably the number one problem on the web is how to get the item you want people to see to rise to the surface -- be it an ad, a piece of content, or a special offer. It's just like other real estate issues, which all come down to location, location, location.

All over Silicon Valley and all around the world teams of developers, designers, editors, and business people are struggling to find solutions. Much of the work involves complex algorithms, where various factors (timeliness, relevance, quality, etc.) are "weighted" in order to achieve the desired effects.

You don't have to spend too much time around this stuff to gain a new appreciation of the human brain. After all, our brains make decisions involving multiple factors all the time.

Personally, ten years of working closely with computers has given me a deeper respect for human intelligence. We struggle in my workplace every day with how to program automated systems to essentially replicate the judgments about quality and categorization that people make almost casually. When we change one factor, the whole equation can get thrown off.

The truth is a five-year-old child is much, much more intelligent than any computer system I've yet met. While computers are terrific at calculations, at sorting, searching, and cataloguing information, they cannot judge quality, they are incapable of recognizing the all-important connections between otherwise unrelated items.

For a pretty good sense of the state-of-the-art ability of computers to figure out what you, a living, breathing human being, might want, just visit Amazon.com. Assuming you've been there before, and are properly cookie-d, Amazon's many algorithmic sensors will clamor for your attention, presenting a cacophony of options in music, books, electronic devices, etc., based on your previous buying and browsing patterns, as well as relational database functions that basically amount to peeking into the shopping carts of other buyers who purchased or browsed at least one of the items you've perused there in their superstore.

Fine and good, so far. Some of the options Amazon presents me, for example, are right on. But I use Amazon as much as a place to order gifts for others as I do to find things that interest me. Actually, I prefer visiting an independent bookstore to buy books or one of San Francisco's many music stores to buy music.

But Amazon believes I am a big fan of rap. Of course, with so many kids of varying ages, I've purchased any number of rap albums. And, truth to tell, I do like rap sometimes. But I'm hardly the fan Amazon thinks I am.

My real music passion is a dirty secret -- I've always loved country music. I don't know why, I just do. There's one song called "I was country before country was cool." Well, I liked country for a long time when, believe me, it was totally not cool.

Hell, the only singer I asked to be able to interview at Rolling Stone in the 70s was Loretta Lynn. If I'd been given two chances, the other would have been George Jones.

How uncool is that? My point, if I had one, has now eluded me, but it's gonna be a long, long, long, long, long, long time before computers can peer into our private brains and discover our true passions. We are a lot more than we purchase, but then again, in our time, with capitalism supreme and unchallenged, nobody really knows what the hell I am talking about, do they?

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p.s. Yesterday, when I tried to provide a link to that hot new amateur 007 movie, Silent But Deadly, YouTube was down for maintenance. So here it is: The Weirdudes' Latest Hit .