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As if surfing the web didn't already consume enough of my time, I've now discovered the online Google tech talks (on Google video). So far I've seen Doug Lenat talking about Cyc (now there's a long-term AI project). I should have skimmed more of it, but you never knew when he was going to say something very interesting - the stuff about using Cyc to generate fragments of English then feed those to Google to generate more knowledge for the Cyc ontology; the large number of special purpose reasoners within Cyc (Lenat: if we have to fall back on the general theorem prover then we're doing something wrong); and the presumably funding-related quest to make Cyc think about terrorist plots and attack and defence plans.
The other one I saw was Seth Godin's All Marketers are Liars. Godin says something like "great technology gives you a chance at marketing", which I thought was quite insightful. There's quite a bit of good stuff in this one too - particularly where he talks about the "new" model of attracting an audience to your core product, then getting permission from them to tell them about something new, and then letting them spread the word because your product is so remarkable (a purple cow, as Seth would put it). Of course, first you have to catch your purple cow.
Posted by MFreestone at July 18, 2006 08:23 AM