Thursday, May 10, 2007

personalized computers

We talked in class a few days ago about an article from CNN Money. The article itself was mainly about Digg.com but the thing that caught my eye was the name Nick Negroponte. A while ago my dad had mentioned him so I asked him what he knew about the guy and about the concept mentioned in the article, some sort of newspaper called Daily Me. Turns out Negroponte was my Dad's thesis adviser back at MIT and he had some knowledge of the Daily Me. It sounds kind of like the Amazon.com of the newspaper world in that you tell it what you're interested in or looking for and it will gather articles that are relevant to your interests and also suggests articles that it suspects you would be interested in. With sites like Digg.com, Amazon, and even Google's history program, the world wide web is becoming more personalized every day. My dad said that Negroponte was a big fan of personalizing computers (he gave me the example of a computer advising you to grab an umbrella as you left for work because rain was coming). Personalizing the net also seems like a good way to travel such a huge network with billions of different pages. The only downside I guess is that when it comes to trying to find something completely off the wall, it may be harder to search for unusual things when Google keeps kicking back things it expects you to be interested in and gives you a filtered result of the world. Kind of like living in the Emerald City where everything was green...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Beth! How's it going? Thanks for the comment. I definitely want to go back to Boston again. Taking the Duck Tours sounds like a better plan than having my friends and I drive around aimlessly. I think that's great that your dad attended MIT. This post is really interesting and I completely agree about finding things on Google sometimes. I personally enjoy Yahoo! better, however I feel its search engine isn't as optimized as Google's. Good luck on the exam Wednesday!

Anonymous said...

I agree that having a serach engine optimized to filter through results for you is great; however, I agree more that it may not find exactally what you have been lokking for since the results are filtered. All this technology is so hard to keep up with.

Werch said...

I was thinking that if the daily me were to somehow allow for article results to come those listed under google searches than it could provide those articles that are highly unique requests