Perry

Hewitt

Tag: filter

  • Friday 5 — 8.22.2014

    Friday 5 — 8.22.2014

    instagram analytics

    1. Brands are active on social networks to reach engaged audiences, and the networks are finding creative ways to monetize their involvement. SoundCloud this week announced a new advertising platform, just as Instagram rolled out its analytics tools for brands. Both SoundCloud and Instagram have afforded brands huge organic growth; the challenge will be to offer them new business tools without alienating individual users.
    2. We’re all suffering from The Stream, a deceptively gentle term for the firehose of ideas and links aimed at us every day by well-meaning friends, colleagues, and social network connections. Can radical scarcity improve quality? That’s the premise behind This., a social network incubated at the Atlantic which allows users to share a single link each day.
    3. Twitter is addressing onboarding issues to make the platform more compelling, but both the 140 character limit and a longstanding, insider-y community can mean that new users encounter daunting jargon. If you’re struggling to tell your RT from your MT, here’s an illustrated guide just for you.
    4. Launching a digital project can be like pulling the thread on a sweater — the more the new site/app/service makes possible, the more internal processes get disrupted and ideas get awakened. In a newly-launched responsive design podcast, Miranda Mulligan of the Boston Globe describes the politics between the newsroom and the design team, and how responsive design brought them together.
    5. In far too many organizations, potentially transformative digital and social strategy is outsourced to agencies or relegated to interns. Or at least, it’s reliably blamed on the interns when it all goes horribly wrong.

    Weekend fun:  Take your pick: you can watch a fascinating brief look at texting and the internet in film, or while away the hours with Serendipity, a gorgeous visualization of songs played simultaneously on Spotify.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.

     

  • Unpacking the algorithms behind online experiences

    Relinquishing human free will to the machines generally gets a bad rap. In the media, all kinds of scientists are nefarious in their data-driven ways — even well-intentioned science yields Frankenstein’s monster far more often than the reasonable paleontologist in Jurassic Park. The Terminator franchise in the 1980s was among the first to introduce the concept of the Singularity to mass media — what happens to humans when their systems become self aware? — with predictable dire results. (According to futurist Ray Kurzweil the Singularity is now only 17 years away — so look busy.)

    And yet in our online lives, we cede more and more to algorithms and machine learning. Eli Pariser highlighted the risks of our collective inattention to the use of algorithms in his 2011 The Filter Bubble. He pointed out that applications like Facebook show us only a curated subset of our friends, just as Google in 2009 began to filter our searches for us — even when we’re logged out. Apart from intermittent outrage in front page stories (“Target knew my teen daughter was pregnant before I did!”), we don’t often question the convenience that all these behaviorally-fueled algorithms offer us. We may cringe at ads that re-target us around the web, but as long as we use the conveniently-timed coupons offered to us, we are encouraging rather than curtailing that behavior.

    Recently I’ve been reading more about Echonest, the technology that sits behind music discovery applications like Spotify and Vevo. In many ways this feels like a highest and best use of an algorithm. Who has time to manually curate playlists for everything from a workout to a night out? The algorithms go further to infer musical compatibility among friends, and have even taken a swing at how musical tastes align with political leanings – handy for those throwing national conventions or debate watch parties. The risks seem low compared to algorithmically-led access to one’s friends, but of course there’s the opportunity to skew music discovery to industry-backed new artists à la Clear Channel. While some analysts are bullish on Pandora’s music genome approach (similar to Art.sy’s attempt to map the art genome – h/t Cesar Brea), other investors are betting heavily on Echonest. A few weeks ago Echonest made public their Discovery playlist, which updates each week with emerging music from around the globe. Algorithms find out what people are listening to and taking about, and offer a great way to find new music around the world in a ways most humans can’t scale — well before it’s piped to you in the mall.

    In the end, it’s all the same acknowledgement of the impossibility of the big data in our lives. It requires admitting the information overload is too great, and a degree of outsourcing selection to the machines. So maybe algorithms are less creepy when we know they’re out there working for us, and when they are finding needles from the broadest possible haystack — music we might like, seeing friends through the lens of musical compatibility — rather than surreptitiously defining the status updates we get to see.