When innovators become laggers

I have no faith in this 2.0 trend... and bubbles are made to be popped...

A couple years ago in Austin at SxSW, I used to chat with the guys from wired, technorati, creative commons and other trendy kids about the importance of community driven websites and google's business model.

I was arguing for a more organic AI architecture where objects where dynamically clustered on softer emotional properties.

I was mainly interested to see the beauty of emergent grouping between objects with no apparent hard common property (color, location, size,etc).
In addition to standard hard properties the content was to be categorized by their bi-emotional value (the emotional charge intended by the creator, the one felt by the user).

Practically, this type of clustering may give great insight into the dissonance between the message and its comprehension by the users. Also in the case of artistic content, it enables correlations unintended by the artist. From a marketing perspective, it may reveal new and unexpected types of markets / users.

What did it all mean?
1. Let everybody tag contents. Not only the creators.
2. Emphasize the emotional tags.
3. Have a basic aggregator for hard properties (where, when, who, source, etc)
4. Use AI inspired engine to cluster and present the objects.

But that was then... and maybe everybody was listening my diatribes out of respect (since i was holding in my hands the Best of Show award...)

---
Octavian Mihai

P.S. all the credit and love for those 2 SxSW awards for the MadeinMtl project goes to my old BlueSponge crew. Word up to Nicolas Fonseca from Locomotion - in the photo next to me - :).