Sampled Person X7-1234: Day 2

A community that is based on random sampling is unusual to say the least.

DadaSP is cool because on the list of my surroundings I see locals and travelers.

Locals are people from the current PSU. PSU is short for Primary Sampling Unit. Travelers are people in the current PSU who come from other PSUs.

Sometimes I am a local and sometimes I am a traveler.

When I am a traveler sometimes I will ask the help of locals -- like to find the best restaurant or the location of a street if I am lost. That happens alot.

I won't ask just any local though. That isn't permitted. Instead locals can volunteer to become Harlequins. And Harlequins protect travelers.

At DadaSP I will pick a Harlequin based on reputation. The reputation of a Harlequin comes from previous encounters.

So DadaSP is a service -- definitely a perk for people who are members of the random sample.



There is something else. We get default personas.

A persona is what the other people in the community see of me virtually. See of me virtually... That is a mouthful.

Noone can change their default persona.

It's like Halloween every day of the year.

At the same time, based on usage, DadaSP will construct one or more additional personas at my direction.

Moi. Me. Me directing my own Identity. It's a bird. It's a plane. No. It's Identity 2.0.

I say the number of additional personas I want. Then DadaSP comes up with candidate interests based on the analysis of my usage. Then I get to accept or reject these interests into each persona via a text message that comes at the end of each day. I've got interests.

At any time when someone is helping me or if I am a Harlequin too, I get to pick my persona.

I pick a persona and people see its avatar and a cloud.

At DadaSP the cloud is the cloud of my interests. Each interest is a label and my labels are organized serendipitously. My main interests appear in large fonts. Lesser interests appear in little fonts.

Click on an interest -- say "science fiction" -- and you get a standard result set. The cloud is operated by Quintura. I have blogged Quintura before.

Technorati Tags: Dada, DodgeBall, Identity 2.0, imaginary friend, random sample

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Google is boring

Google is boring. Quintura is not.

I enter "self-organizing map". Along with the usual result set, I get a cloud. In the cloud I see my keyword along with other ones sized according to their frequency.




If I want to add a keyword to the cloud that is not already there, I just double click:




Now my result set is the product of the two keywords. Pretty cool! It gets better. I hover on "cluster analysis" and preview its keywords:



Finally, I select "cluster analysis". And I get a new cloud and a new result set. They are the products of "self-organizing map" and "cluster analysis":




Not bad. Better than not bad. Not boring...

In a recent post at Read/WriteWeb Alex Iskold wrote otherwise at The Race to Beat Google. He was somewhat dismissive of the clustering solutions saying they were too complex to make it in the mainstream. I don't think we want to underestimate clustering when it is wedded with clouds. Indeed clouds informed by clustering like the ones above can rain on Google's parade. I hear from kids that they always wanted clouds to do the walking. Imagine a swim in clouds that have three dimensions. Instead of "googling", the euphemism will be "I need to check the weather." The rejoinder from Will Smith's wife in Enemy of the State would be: "And just whose weather are you checking?"

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