Digital intelligence.
This hilarious article about TiVo is a good illustration of the power of Digital Video Recorders, and it explains why I think that in one or two lusters, they will have totally replaced VCR's in our living rooms.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
This is typical TiVo behavior. Note that there is actually no real harm since shows taped by TiVo on its own initiative have the lowest priorities, and they will be the first deleted if space is needed for your own shows. But this anecdote brings up an interesting point that is very relevant to our digital lives: adaptive scoring.
As I mentioned in a past column, I used to use a very smart Usenet reader called Gnus which was one of the first to introduce the notion of dynamic scoring. In short, this program monitored which articles you read and assigned weights to several criteria. For example, ten points for the author and two points for the subject. If a new article is posted with that same subject, it automatically gets a score of 2. If the same author posts another article (not necessarily in the same thread), this article automatically gets a score of 10.
Dynamic scoring associated with static scoring (where you are the one assigning scores) gives amazingly good results. The only scheme that can top it is the recommendation algorithm used by Amazon or Netflix, which simply uses the choices of people with similar tastes to make recommendations. You can't beat that.
I have recently seen a similar attempt for weblogs, where you type in the URL of your own weblog (or of one that you like) and it gives you a list of recommended logs. Nowhere near the beauty of adaptive scoring, but we are getting there. [Otaku, Cedric's weblog]
7:09:01 PM 
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