(one of his astounding notes from the 2007 notebook:)
Micro/macro structure is the first of the challenges that faces the Web: Micro Pattern recognition
What microformats and other forms of structure do is increase the resolution of the Web: each page becomes a complex surface of many kinds of wrinkles, and by looking at many pages next to each other it becomes apparent that certain of these wrinkles are repeated patterns. These are microformats, lists, blog archives, and any other repeating elements. Now this reminds me of proteins, which have surfaces, part of which have characteristics shared between proteins. And that in turn takes me back to Jaron Lanier and phenotropics, which is his approach to programming based on pattern recognition.
So what does phenotropics mean for the Web? Firstly it means that our browsers should become pattern recognition machines. They should look at the structure of every page they render, and develop artificial proteins to bind to common features. Once features are found (say, an hCalendar microformat), scripting can occur. And other features will be deduced: plain text dates 'upgraded' to microformats on the fly. By giving the browser better senses - say, a copy of WordNet and the capability of term extraction - other structures can be detected and bound to (I've talked about what kind of structures before).
The technological future of the Web is in micro and macro structure. The approach to the micro is akin to proteins and surface binding--or, to put it another way, phenotropics and pattern matching. Massively parallel agents need to be evolved to discover how to bind onto something that looks like a blog post; a crumb-trail; a right-hand nav; a top 10 list; a review; an event description; search boxes.
The macro investigation is like chemistry. If pages are atoms, what are the molecules to which they belong? What kind of molecules are there? How do they interact over time? We need a recombinant chemistry of web pages, where we can see multiple conversation molecules, with chemical bonds via their blog post pattern matchers, stringing together into larger scale filaments. What are the long-chain hydrocarbons of the Web? I want Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to be mining the Web for these molecules, discovering and name them.
Micro/macro structure is the first of the challenges that faces the Web: Micro Pattern recognition
What microformats and other forms of structure do is increase the resolution of the Web: each page becomes a complex surface of many kinds of wrinkles, and by looking at many pages next to each other it becomes apparent that certain of these wrinkles are repeated patterns. These are microformats, lists, blog archives, and any other repeating elements. Now this reminds me of proteins, which have surfaces, part of which have characteristics shared between proteins. And that in turn takes me back to Jaron Lanier and phenotropics, which is his approach to programming based on pattern recognition.
So what does phenotropics mean for the Web? Firstly it means that our browsers should become pattern recognition machines. They should look at the structure of every page they render, and develop artificial proteins to bind to common features. Once features are found (say, an hCalendar microformat), scripting can occur. And other features will be deduced: plain text dates 'upgraded' to microformats on the fly. By giving the browser better senses - say, a copy of WordNet and the capability of term extraction - other structures can be detected and bound to (I've talked about what kind of structures before).
The technological future of the Web is in micro and macro structure. The approach to the micro is akin to proteins and surface binding--or, to put it another way, phenotropics and pattern matching. Massively parallel agents need to be evolved to discover how to bind onto something that looks like a blog post; a crumb-trail; a right-hand nav; a top 10 list; a review; an event description; search boxes.
The macro investigation is like chemistry. If pages are atoms, what are the molecules to which they belong? What kind of molecules are there? How do they interact over time? We need a recombinant chemistry of web pages, where we can see multiple conversation molecules, with chemical bonds via their blog post pattern matchers, stringing together into larger scale filaments. What are the long-chain hydrocarbons of the Web? I want Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to be mining the Web for these molecules, discovering and name them.
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