digital_love

One day it was Anne's turn. This quiet midwestern girl studied the problem for a moment, walked over to the board, and gave a five minute presentation on how to solve it, mentioning all of the interesting pedagogical points of the problem and writing down every step of the solution in neat handwriting. Her impromptu talk was better prepared than any lecture I'd ever given in the class.

Afterwards we had a little chat.

"What did you do on Sunday?" she asked.

"Oh, let's see... Ate. Brushed the dog. Watched The Simpsons. And you?" I replied.

"My housemates and I decided to have a hacking party. We do this every month or so. Since we have a network of PCs at home, it is easy to get lots of people programming together. We couldn't decide what to build so I said ‘Well, we all like science fiction novels. So let's build a system where we type in the names of the books that we like and a rating. Then the system can grind over the database and figure out what books to suggest.'"

And?

"It took us the whole afternoon, but we got it to the point where it would notice that I liked Books A, B, and C but hadn't read Book D, which other people who liked A, B, and C had liked. So that was suggested for me. We also got it to notice if you and I had opposite tastes and suppress your recommendations."

This was back in 1994. Anne and her friends had, in one afternoon, completed virtually the entire annual research agenda of numerous American university professors and the development agenda of quite a few venture capital-backed companies.


-> http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/user-tracking.html
-> http://www.amazon.com