In this session we will explore and discuss how the application of chaos theory to this issue can help break the silos of information and allow the emergence of meaningful awareness for better decision making. 

This new paradigm moves beyond Page Rank to reduce the impact of traditional SEO techniques that elevate low quality content.  We will look at how the visualization of connections between content related to a particular theme can reveal new relationships and help with the discovery and awareness of trends, both anticipated and unanticipated."

I started by saying that we do not see Chaos Theory as put in practice through our Darwin Awareness Engine™ as a replacement for Google. We see it as a complement. It is an awareness or discovery engine not a search engine.

For example, when I want to find the TV schedule for the NBA playoffs or the Web Site of the Boston Celtics or even the Los Angeles Lakers, or an article I heard about at this conference, I turn to Google.  I use Google when I know what I am looking for.

If I want to find the stories I did not know to look for about a topic of interest, if I want to discover new things, if I want to see the breaking news in real time, the stories generating the most buzz, I turn to Darwin. Chaos theory does not offer a precise answer, but it reveals a movement or trend as it occurs.  I use Darwin when I want to explore any area of interest in more depth.

Now if I go to Google I get a linear list of results rank ordered by its external framework. Google decides what is important for you. Darwin provides an overview of the 100 top themes related to your topic of interest visualized in a tag cloud type structure and allows you to explore the ones that appeal to you. You become the decider and we will show some real time examples.

Rather than taking a linear, deterministic approach to finding content through seeking repeatable patterns on the Web with an external framework like page rank as done by Google, we use Chaos Theory to find non-repeatable patterns in Web content that come and go in real time. Rather than using an external framework, we look for self-organizing patterns within the content itself.

Sometimes external frameworks and measurement have their place. Other times it can be an obsession that gets in the way. For example, Fred Taylor tired to systemize work processes and this approach led to profits in some cases but has alienated most workers. In his Atlantic article, Will Google Make Us Stupid, Nick Carr quoted Google CEO Eric Schmidt, that Google is "a company that's founded around the science of measurement," and it is striving to "systematize everything" in the same spirit as Taylor. This can be useful; but it also has its limits. It depends on the use case. Robert Parker has tried to systemize wine reviews and in my view is a clear over step. How can you say with any certainly that one wine is a 94 while another is a 92 and be serious about it?

We offered this video showing Robin Williams in The Dead Poet's Society discussing the value of a measurement system for poetry. Here is a link to the Measuring Poetry episode on YouTube.

Now I am not saying that Google is like Pritchard on poetry or Robert Parker on wine in that it is useless. Often you have to lay pipe in Robin Williams terms. It is the default home page on my laptop and I use it everyday. However, I do say that its quest to systematize everything and make it serve all content discovery functions is a delusion. 

 Google has its limits. For example if I type in - Sardinian beach bars - into Google I find that my blog post is number one out of 349,000 as it has been for the past five years since I wrote it. I have even used external frameworks myself.

On the same trip my friend and I where sitting at one of these beach bars and over a few glasses of wine devised a measurement system to rate the beaches of Italy. Now if you type rating the beaches of Italy into Google you will find that my blog posts are number one and two out of 691,000.   

Of course I offer these examples with great humility. I have no delusion that I offer the best content here or that I am the world's expert. I was just better at speaking Google's language than the others on the topic.   This is a problem when you use an external framework. People learn how to game it for good and bad reasons. SEO and spam are byproducts of Google.

I must confess that I have done some consulting over the past three years helping firms get their blogs on the front page of Google, using respectable methods I add.

If you use chaos theory to let the content self organize there is no external framework to game or approach through legitimate methods. There is no SEO or even spam as it would serve no value. 

To set the stage we went back to the creation of the text we use to create content. One of the greatest information technology inventions remains the phonetic alphabet. The Greeks came up with it in the early 8th century BC. The same twenty-four letters have been used to write the Greek language ever since. It is the first and oldest alphabet to note each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol.  This invention provided great flexibility and unprecedented accuracy of linking symbol to word and thus on to thought.  Now we moved from relying on informal communication through conversations to formal documents.

One of the great flexibilities of the phonetic alphabet or text was the wide range of vehicles that can be used to convey text. Most of the technological advances since the work of the early Greeks have been on the vehicles to convey text, such as paper, and the means to produce these vehicles, such as the printing press, rather than the alphabet, itself.  Text remains king on the Web and the darling of search engines.

In the past, the effort to create text acted as a filter but a series of inventions such as the printing press cut into this difficulty reducing the barriers to creating formal context, generally for the good of most

Now with Web 2.0 the barriers to creating permanent content through text have been mostly shattered. You still need a computer or a mobile phone or some other electric device and access to the Web.  But much of what is being added is closer to the informal conversations of the pre-text world, than the type of content normally taken to print. This has both good and bad consequences. As Plato said in reaction to a possible over-reliance on documents, conversations can clarify intensions. On the plus side we have much more to look at. One the negative side we have much more to look at.

Next I showed the evolution of content delivery channels.  In 2008 more content was created through the Web than in the history of content. The same thing happened in 2009.  We are now in danger of being overwhelmed by content and sinking into chaos. Why not turn to Chaos Theory to help pull us out? Instead of imposing an external framework to attempt to make sense of content, why not let content self-organize itself. Instead of looking for repeatable patterns, why not look for correlations between content to discover new relationships beyond what you where initially looking for?