Wolfram – The Google Killer

A friend of mine recently tweeted that as the Internet continues to evolve, filters are going to rise in importance.  At first I didn’t really get it.  But the more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes.

Thanks to the Internet, information is being created and duplicated at an exponential rate.  Because of this, people are going to need more and more efficient ways to filter through and access information.   Google is an amazing filter.  In seconds you are put in touch with a webpage, an image, a video, a book, almost anything you can think of.  However, Google does lack strength in it’s ability to serve up rich data.  This is where Wolfram comes into play. When items are searched for in Wolfram.  The results are served up as raw data rather than sending you to links, reports, and academic papers.

Wolfram as an amazing tool for searching for data within fields of medicine, mathematics, science, etc.  The powerful search engine is quickly able to process searches like France GDP divided by Italy, or molecular weight of caffeine divided by water.  I’ve tried searching Google scholar before but it usually directs me to documents and not to the specific information I”m looking for.  Wolfram seems to be serving specific raw data as equations, graphs and conversion tables.  Unfortunately Wolfram isn’t available yet but their website said they’ll be up this month.  I can’t wait.

To my surprise I have also found twitter to be an amazing Internet filter.  Humans comb the Internet for anything that is appealing to them and then broadcast what they find to their followers.  But it doesn’t end there.  Users then have the ability to re-tweet information and talk about what they find.  Conversations about Swine Flu, Apple and Star Trek are trending on Twitter as I’m typing.  What results is the media on the Internet, and the twitter posts about that media, blend into an indistinguishable narrative of what is occurring in real time.  Thus the Internet is simultaneously being created and re-created.

These filters all enable us to sort through the ocean that is the Internet and find what we want.  Luckily, this is only the beginning.  Filters are only going to become more and more advanced as technology continues to evolve and create more and more information.

Lost Generation

I saw this video a while back and thought it was amazing. Earlier tonight it popped back up on viral video chart and, once again, I thought it was amazing.

Youtube Remix

This guys site is amazing.  He’s taken a bunch of people playing their instruments alone and combined them together into an elegant and creative remix.  I like how he says that he was amazed at how many of the videos mashed together without him having to do anything.  Enjoy.

http://thru-you.com/