Intelligent agency.

Buzz is on the phone, quoting something Feedster's Scott Johnson said over dinner in Boston last night, about the RSS+aggregator-enabled blog world. What Scott said (Buzz says) was,

The people I read are my intelligent agents.

Context... Remember the "intelligent agents" scare from a few years back? (Wonder how much VC money got wasted on that one?) Never happened. (Not in a big way, anyhow. Are you using one now? I mean, in addition to the ones you read in your aggregator? See what I mean?)

Now, thanks to RSS, it's happening.

Makes me think back to Doug Engelbart's thinking about augmenting human intelligence, and how the best augmentation in fact comes from other connected human beings.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Buzz and I had the same conversation earlier this morning. Scott has a wonderfully succinct way of describing the power of these new technologies combined in interesting ways. I'm no Scoble, but I do manage to track almost 300 weblogs and newsites using RSS (including Scoble of course). The power of RSS is that the news comes to me filtered by all of those bright minds, who are themselves feeding off of other bright minds. Add tools like Feedster on top of that and you start to have the first tools that promise to help fight the problems of attention.

Trying to eliminate the people from the mix was clearly the wrong approach. Forging a better partnership between people and machines is the trick.

7:45:38 PM •  • comment  

Seth Dillingham posted. When I first posted that I thought it was just a repurposing-DMOZ-problem, so it was a question of how Google looked, not anything they had actually done. But then Seth Dillingham posted a pointer showing that Radio UserLand is actually on the DMOZ list for weblog tools, so Google modified the list to take Radio out. This is surprising, and imho, requires an explanation. Did they modify it? If so why? And do they modify search results to favor their products and services? This is scary stuff.   [Scripting News]

I'm inclined here to view this as a case in point of "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's Razor). Now the stupidity in question may likely be that of some techno-challenged marketing type who still insists on viewing the universe through a lens of "customer as couch potato," where this sort of tweak could and would work because anybody who might catch the "error" would have no effective way to communicate to the masses of other couch potatos out there. Ironic that the error is about the very tools that are continuing the shift in power from organizations to people.

It will be interesting to see how quickly this mistake gets corrected and whether the explanation will be rooted in a classic couch potato marketing mindset or something else.

5:52:14 PM •  • comment