by Rob Paterson
September 30, 2009 at 11:35 am · Filed under
Emergence, Emergent
For those that do not know – Netflix held a multi year competition to find a better search and ratings system – many teams competed.
In the final stretch the breakthrough came when many of the teams joined forces – the big difference was made by adding teams that up to then had “got it wrong”. A great story of this competition is on Wired.
The secret sauce for both BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos and The Ensemble was collaboration between diverse ideas, and not in some touchy-feely, unquantifiable, “when people work together things are better” sort of way. The top two teams beat the challenge by combining teams and their algorithms into more complex algorithms incorporating everybody’s work. The more people joined, the more the resulting team’s score would increase.
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“It’s been quite a drama,” said Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt at Monday’s awards ceremony. “At first, a whole lot of teams got in — and they got 6-percent improvement, 7-percent improvement, 8-percent improvement, and then it started slowing down, and we got into year two. There was this long period where they were barely making progress, and we were thinking, ‘maybe this will never be won.’
“Then there was a great insight among some of the teams — that if they combined their approaches, they actually got better. It was fairly unintuitive to many people [because you generally take the smartest two people and say 'come up with a solution']… when you get this combining of these algorithms in certain ways, it started out this ’second frenzy.’ In combination, the teams could get better and better and better.”
Ironically, the most outlying approaches — the ones farthest away from the mainstream way to solve a given problem — proved most helpful towards the end of the contest, as the teams neared the summit.
For instance, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos (methodology here) credits some of its success to slicing the data by what they called “frequency.” As it turns out, people who rate a whole slew of movies at one time tend to be rating movies they saw a long time ago. The data showed that people employ different criteria to rate movies they saw a long time ago, as opposed to ones they saw recently — and that in addition, some movies age better than others, skewing either up or down over time. (Finally, someone has explained why Snakes On A Plane seemed more fun at the time than it does now.)
By tracking the number of movies rated on a given day as an indicator of how long it had been since a given viewer had seen a movie, and by tracking how memory affected particular movie ratings, Pragmatic Theory (later part of the winning team) was able to gain a slight edge, even though this particular algorithm isn’t particularly good at predicting which movies people will like when run on its own.
Another example: According to Joe Sill of The Ensemble, Big Chaos (the Austrians who also became part of the winning team) discovered that viewers in general tend to rate movies differently on Fridays versus Mondays, and certain users are in good moods on Sundays, and so on. The team essentially devised a three-dimensional model that incorporated time into the relationship between people and movies.
Taken on its own, the fact that a viewer rated a given movie on a Monday is a horrible indicator of what other movies they’ll want to rent — a crucial part of Netflix’ business (it says its recommendations are better indicators of what people will rent than their “most popular” lists). But combined with hundreds of other algorithms from other minds, each weighted with precision, and combined and recombined, that otherwise inconsequential fact takes on huge importance.
“One of the big lessons was developing diverse models that captured distinct effects,” said Sill, “even if they’re very small effects.”
This approach is the opposite of how we have been taught to solve problems. There has to be a plan and a few smart folks working to the plan.
What I see here is the power of setting in place the conditions that allow for “emergence”.
Science and Research is going to explode by going down this path.
What will be needed are great supporting tools – watch this space!
by Rob Paterson
September 30, 2009 at 10:29 am · Filed under
Adoption
Scott Monty is the head of Social Media at Ford – he is really in the thick of it in terms of how best to adapt and adopt Social Media in a large corporate environment.
Here is a link to his brilliant post that shows the linkage for adoption to the Kubler Ross Stages of Grief. For to adopt SM, your old world view has to die. Do you see yourself along this continuum? Scott has much more in his post – please go there.
The 5 Stages of Social Media Grief
- Denial – first stage of social media grief in which the marketer refuses to acknowledge the existence of social media. This was the case early on in the industry’s development. Luckily, I don’t think there are many companies left that think like this.
Common phrases: “It’s just a kid’s thing,” or “It’s just a fad.”
Common behaviors: avoiding the Internet, putting hands over ears and singing “I can’t heeeeeaaaarr yoooouuuuu. La la laaaaa.”
- Anger – In the second stage, jealousy and rage are misplaced and rage ensues.
Common phrases: “This is stupid,” “I’ve got better things to do with my time.”
Common behaviors: full-fledged slave to work email; increase in print or television media buy to show effectiveness and superiority.
- Bargaining -Anger gives way to hope that incremental adoption of social media will be enough to make a difference.
Common phrases: “If we have a Facebook page, we should be covered,” “Let’s just create a blog,” or “Let the agency figure it out.”
Common behaviors: the use of social media only in time-limited campaigns; half-hearted efforts on a limited number of social sites.
- Depression -The fourth stage manifests itself in an understanding that the inevitable cannot be delayed and the marketer becomes doleful.
Common phrases: “Twitter/Google/Facebook is taking over the world,” or “We’re overwhelmed with choices.”
Common behaviors: moping; pacing; complaining to friends on Facebook.
- Acceptance -With the final stage, the marketer finally realizes that social media is here to stay and begins to determine ways to integrate activities and craft strategies that are truly integrated.
Common phrases: “Let’s craft a comprehensive social media strategy,” or “Let’s spend some time listening to what consumers are saying about us.”
Common behaviors: integration of marketing and communications functions, determination of measurement goals, online and offline alignment from the beginning of projects.
by Hylton Jolliffe
September 29, 2009 at 2:04 pm · Filed under
Event Announcements, Obama, Webinars, Whitehouse.Gov
At the bottom of this post you will see a link to the recording of today’s conversation between Beth Simone Noveck, the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum.
The discussion, which was sponsored by Microsoft and moderated by Renee Hopkins, the editor of Strategy & Innovation, ranged far and wide in discussing how new collaborative technologies are driving a critical cultural and technological shift in the U.S. from closed to open government.
Stay tuned to the FASTforward Blog for the transcript and a highlights piece we’ll be publishing here in the next week or two. And please feel free to chime in in the comments section here with follow-up reactions, thoughts and questions.
Open Government and Government 2.0 webinar with Beth Noveck and Andrew Rasiej [60:16m]:
Play Now |
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by Hylton Jolliffe
September 28, 2009 at 1:23 pm · Filed under
Event Announcements
A reminder that tomorrow, September 29, at 1 p.m. EST the FASTforward blog will be hosting “Gov 2.0: The Collaborative Opportunities of Open Government.
The discussion between Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, will be moderated by Renee Hopkins of Strategy & Innovation and explore how a new wave of innovation is changing the way the U.S. government gathers and shares information, provides access, manages risk, enables collaboration, and more.
Find out more and register here.
by Bill Ives
September 23, 2009 at 3:54 pm · Filed under
Event Announcements
I enjoyed Paula Thornton’s post, E 2.0: Unleashing the Potential, especially the comment, “Digital technologies labeled Enterprise 2.0, will not provide 2.0 results if implemented with 1.0 thinking.”
But what is 2.0 thinking? Paula mentions that it embraces dichotomy and that structure is minimized, but not eliminated. I would agree on both counts.
There has been a lot of other discussion about what is enterprise 2.0. People have said that it is not about the technology and Andy McAfee has said, It’s Not Not About the Technology. Again, I would agree on both counts. While it is largely not about technology there has to be some consideration for technology. After all, it is enabled by digital technology and not smoke signals or telegraphs.
While I wrote that Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0, there are common conceptual assumptions: transparency, connectivity, and participation. Within enterprise 2.0 this occurs within the enterprise. I think the greatest of these three is participation. Enterprise 2.0 are application are often referred to as bringing in the social side of whatever they are supporting (e.g., search, CRM).
Some smart person said something to the effect that Web 2.0 is about sites where the value is determined by the contributions of participants. So stealing from them here is my simple definition of enterprise 2.0.
“Enterprise 2.0 is about applications where business value is determined through the contributions of participants.”
You can quote me on this. Apologies if some one already said this.
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