If somebody would ask us what a perfect panel would look like in autumn 2007, it'd had to be focused on the upcoming Open Protocol and Algorithm ideas in a world based on, but beyond, the current mainstream web trends. We'd first think of our very own Tom and very dear Dirk Baecker as foundation, invite Sean Park because of his views and brilliant Amazonbay video and also Jean-Paul Schmetz as Burda's digital renegade. When it comes to eloquently gluing all that together, Ms. Bunz would be the host of choice.

Well, thanks to Brady Forrest, the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin and the people mentioned above this will come true on Tuesday, November 6th, as we've been invited to organize said panel, more information here. The abstract:

"Google's commercial success is based on the idea of identifying a variety of factors, from text analysis to human interest, and use them as variables in a giant mathematical equation that generates billions of revenue, widely known as AdSense. But how would a traditional corporation look like when it'd work like AdSense? Will we offshore intelligence to machines? What are the opportunities and threats? What happens when the whole world, from culture to politics become financial markets driven by algorithms? A joint state-of-the-art review of a new breed of businesses relying on mathematical models, potential scenarios how this approach will become mainstream and what this might mean to you and your business."

Would be a pleasure to see you there, and also a week later at the second X-Organisations: Berlin Biennial for Systemic Management.

Thanks to some recent extra hours by our team we're ready to release our latest labs prototype to the public in a hipness compliant alpha-state:

Infolust is a new context search engine. It's for all those moments when you sit in front of a website and think "Now that's interesting" and would like to know more. Now this "More" is just a single click away. It compares existing web-pages with all Wikipedia pages and fetches up to 10 related ones. It's a first step of bringing our Similarity Engine to consumers for free.

While we're still working hard on improving things like the IE6 bookmarklet capabilities, especially for pages that contain frames, it's necessary to gain as much statistics (of course no personal or address related whatsoever) as possible to optimize it for additional content sources than Wikipedia and improve the backend efficiency.

So far the results are surprisingly good for a third of the queries, quite OK for another third and not so good for the last third. The main issue isn't so much to determine the similarity itself but distinguish between the actual content on a query page and things like navigation, footers etc. especially because we don't do any "lookup wikipedia page titles in text" tricks but rather rely on a full semantic analysis and comparison of pages.

That said we'd be more than happy to hear your suggestions /sightings / comments and hope you enjoy what Infolust is doing so far!

A few weeks ago we published our screencast, and so far the feedback has been tremendously good:

Techcrunch writes "The UI is as beautiful as the concept; it’s very simple to understand and use, the kind of thing that non-technical users won’t be scared of at all. ... Many people really like online collaboration and document development systems, but security has been a major impediment for enterprise use. The option of getting a SystemOne box on site could be a great solution to that problem. ... the fundamental concept of SystemOne is great."

Thomas Vander Wal says "System One has all the web 2.0 buzzwords under the hood, but they focus on a simple to use tool that pulls together the best of the new components, but only where it makes sense to create a simple tool that addresses complex problems."

Jerry Bowles draws a wonderful analogy "Think of how much more productive your organization would be if everyone worked at the same level of your star performers. Imagine an industrial-strength enterprise app that is so simple to use that it requires no training or special knowledge to learn and so smart that it makes all users instantly more productive? Imagine the knowledge office equivalent of the supermarket revolution that turned every checker into a whiz."

"Nowhere in the description of System One does the word "wiki" appear. And that's a good thing. Because "wiki" as such is an Albatross. ... Looking forward to seeing the benefits of wikis leave their garden of semi-usefulness, and permeate the way we interact with information." Nadav Savio asserts.

Chris Shipley's observation was "Software, particularly those applications delivered as a service, is increasingly taking advantage of its inherent connectivity to build collaboration into applications. We see this new trend in several applications at DEMOfall, and none reflect it more clearly than System One."

Richard MacManus' take is "The concept of a search engine that can search across the many and varied systems inside a company firewall is a very appealing one. System One does this, but also extends it to a true read/write app - enabling people to take notes and share them with their workmates. This is a very promising piece of software..."

And Danny Ayers was the first one to notice "For a start there's seamless integration of enterprise info and authoring with real-time analysis of what you write. Although there are some familiar technologies involved as well (Wiki/blogging, syndication etc), the tech is presented in a way that from a user's point of view, it gets out of the way and just works. "

Thanks to everybody who wrote so far, we'll continue to work hard!

Something new from the Labs: "Wikipedia³ is a conversion of the monthly wikipedia database dump into RDF. While it has always been our test dataset of choice, its wealth of information created by thousands of people all over the world also opens up new perspectives when put into a Semantic Web format: How to not (again) put structure or ontology, but people and their data first. How to meaningfully infer from the already known. How to scale real-world graph platforms. It's a foundation for a lot of interesting work."

Special thanks to Andreas Bolka (aka earl) & lowi for the hard polishing and automation work. We'll be releasing more labs stuff based on that dataset during the summer (especially visualizations). As always, feedback strongly welcome and hopefully this triggers loads of other good projects!

A few days ago we silently released our first contribution to System One Labs, the place where we test and play with new ideas that might become features of System One. Retrievr lets you find Flickr images by drawing rough sketches, and this must have hit the mark according to the feedback so far:

John Battelle thinks "Oooo, i like this...", Tara Calishain got it with "You won't be able to find electronics schema screenshots with this, but it's an awesome way to browse", Matt Haughey is over-enthusiastic "...retrievr is so good, I'd venture to say it's getting close to Turing Test territory" and Jason Kottke says "Retrievr is a simple, amazing use of the Flickr API". Special gratitude for the "All my wasted years of practicing drawing Goatse Man on MS Paint has just paid off." comment on the metafilter post, this also made our day. Thanks for all the appreciation, we'll try to continue what we started here!

Deepest thanks to Chris Langreiter for the idea to merge a 1995 paper with 2005 flickr and of course then executing it brilliantly.

From today until saturday the MZW will host the first "Berliner Biennale für Management und Beratung im System". We will be there as well, so just call (+43 512 574749 1010) if you're up for a chat. Short translation of the neat conference description:

"So far, modern day society has relied on its organizations and institutions: public authorities, businesses, schools and theaters, curches and armies have established and sustained law and order; they have coordinated socially necessary labour and work, generated taxes and allocated goods and services of this world to all of us.

However, these organisations cannot rely on society any longer. ... read full article.

Last week we had the pleasure to talk at this years Accelerating Change conference in Stanford, alongside Ray Kurzweil, Thomas Malone, Esther Dyson, Peter Norvig and others. Especially having Doug Engelbart in the audience was a great honor. Here's a  summary of the talk:

Why does it make so much sense to bring together Social Software, the Semantic Web and Information Retrieval, what is the current state and are the limitations, and what are some implications? If your background is in one or more of the areas, you might want skip some parts. ... read full article.

So we finally made it out there. Probably the best starting point is to tell what happened so far:

The team behind System One has always been driven by technology, its context and what it's able to do. In 1998 Tom Fuerstner was technical director of ORF ON and responsible for bringing the so far reluctant media house to the web. He quickly discoverd back then that it makes more sense not to replicate traditional formalisms to the new medium - instead taking advantage of the new opportunities. Based on UserLand's Frontier he developed a prototype utilizing the back then rather unknown concept called weblogs for traditional reporting.

Soon it became clear that the technology couldn't handle the demand (the front page of ORF ON still looks mostly the same as back then, but traffic rose from 1,8 to 230 million pageviews a month), so Hannes Wallnoefer proposed porting some Frontier concepts to a Java-based platform, mixing them with a lot of new ideas. This was when Helma was born, one of the first highly scalable and rock-solid Java-based application servers.

Around 1999 Chris Langreiter didn't belive that creating a weblog system was a herculean task, so for fun he created his own little system during the Christmas weekend. To add some spice, he came up with a stunningly simple,  yet brilliant idea: Wikis and weblogs can not only be joined together, they are essentially the same system: Title, Author, Message and Links. So Vanilla, the first truly integrated Wikilog (aka Bliki) saw the light of the day. A simple Wiki where pages can be given the attribute of a weblog-entry, resulting in a reversed chronologically ordered display of these pages, and thus a weblog.

... read full article.