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Alexa's power of association (this site is like these other sites) emerges out of the desultory travels of the Alexa user base. The understanding of the web doesn't reside with any single individual in that group; it develops, instead, out of the collective intelligence they create simply by surfing.
The fringe benefit of this model -- intelligent software that works from the bottom up, and not from the top down -- is that the software gets smarter the more people use it. If only a thousand people fire up Alexa alongside their browsers, the recommendations simply won't have enough data behind them to be accurate. But add another ten thousand users to the mix, and the site associations gain resolution dramatically. In other words, the software gets better at what it does when more people interact with it. This may have a familiar ring to readers who have been following the recent debate over the Microsoft monopoly, particularly the succession of op-eds and thinkpieces about "network externalities": the self- reinforcing feedback loop that develops when your product becomes more attractive the more people use it.
But as the phrase suggests, those feedback loops are triggered by external properties of the software. Windows95 becomes more appealing with more users because there are more software applications, a wider range of compatible hardware, better technical support, and so on. The core functionality of Windows95 doesn't improve with more users; it's the code that surrounds the OS that gets more valuable. Emergent software like Alexa -- where the core functionality improves with a wider user base -- takes this phenomenon a step further. It may be time for the economists to start talking about network internalities.
Alexa's emergent model is not likely to spawn a monopoly like Microsoft's, of course, and it may not deliver a death-blow to the portal regime. (Or at least it won't without a hundred imitators.) But anyone still enamored by the original ethos of the web -- a mirror world that organizes and expands our collective intelligence -- should find something heartening in the Alexa application. While much of the digital landscape creeps towards the familiar patterns of broadcast television, Alexa serves as a small but potent reminder of what the web was supposed to be, and maybe even an augur of things to come.
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Complete article:
http://www.feedmag.com/html/feedline/98.06johnson/98.06johnson_master.html
Alexa:
http://www.alexa.com/
BTW, Alexa is going to be bundled with a future Netscape release.
----------- Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Town of Almonte: http://www.almonte.com/ Business Web site: http://www.almonte.com/brent/ ____________________________________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------- Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done directly from our website for all our lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
