Want to see something incredible? Got seven minutes?

For techheads, this video is a phenomenal representation of what can happen when software takes advantage of collective information. Why does Photosynth work? It’s not just because it’s spectacular technically; it’s because it uses the community as its data source.

As Marc Andreessen writes in his blog:

No single closed service, no matter how good, and no matter how big, could compete with the diversity of thousands and then millions of web sites that were customized to every conceivable user interest and need.

Marc was referring to FaceBook and the ability of developers to create custom apps on their platform, but I think that statement can be easily applied to this general concept:

Software and products that take advantage of our collective dataset and creativity will always be more powerful than software with a private dataset.

If you don’t believe me, try Apple vs. PC, Britannica vs. Wikipedia, or, for that matter, Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0.

For car buffs, notice anything about the content of the Bimmer ad? Like that it doesn’t refer to BMW at all? The German auto manufacturer quashed rumors last year about being interested in buying Aston Martin, but I can’t imagine that this ad could be a coincidence or a mistake, especially since it’s at a conference sponsored by BMW.

Ford recently sold their stake to a consortium including some Middle East heavyweights—could they be looking to flip it?

I took the VortexDNA survey very early on in my interaction with the company. Here is what it told me: my circumstances were not in alignment with who I am.

I’ve always felt quite strongly about values, but I had never articulated them for myself. “I don’t know what they are, but I’ll know if something goes against them,” was my thinking.

That’s true, of course: that I’ll know if something goes against them. It’s true for everyone. My friend Karen calls it a ‘values grate’, when your stomach sort of twists and your spidey-sense perks up and something just doesn’t feel right.

The problem is that, if you don’t articulate them and you only go by your spidey-sense, you have no advance filter. You can’t say, “Don’t bother to send me your resume if you’re a volleyball player because volleyball players go against my values.” (I’ll use a sports metaphor here because I’m not trying to suggest what is or isn’t a ‘right’ value to have. We can have that discussion another day ) You have to investigate each and every option to know what is and isn’t okay for you.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you check into everything, you’re bound to have some pretty interesting experiences along the way. You can stumble across opportunities that you never would have considered otherwise.

The thing is, you can also have some interesting experiences if you have your purpose and values clarified. Some would suggest that the quality of the experiences you can have when you are staying true to your values exceeds anything you can imagine.

When you’re acting in line with your values, you increase your efficiency. Instead of spending days interviewing volleyball players, you advertise immediately for the bocce ball player, hire her, and get to work. Because you share your bocce values, you can get up to speed faster, make better team decisions, and create a mutual vision.

You can also feel when you’re really aligned, can’t you? You kind of accelerate and everything seems effortless. You don’t constantly wonder, “What the heck was I thinking?” or “How did my life end up like this?” Your actions make sense.

And this isn’t just airy-fairy stuff either. Living consistently with your values has proven to be the difference between an ordinary life and a legendary life, from obvious icons like Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr to visionary organizations like GE and IBM.

Thanks to having this topic at the forefront of my consciousness since I became involved with VortexDNA, I’ve managed to articulate my own purpose in life. Here it is for all the world to see:

My purpose is to be an uplifting presence.

What does that mean? It means that when I talk to people, I want them to walk away smiling. When I work in a team, I want the team to feel more energized for my presence. When I am long gone, if anyone remembers me, I want them to feel they were better for knowing me.

I haven’t articulated a list of values yet, but I’ll get there. For now, I invite you to share your own purpose with me. If you already have your values defined, all the better.

Let’s help each other live legendary lives.

Where do you sit on the bell curve? Are you an early adopter, in the early or late majority, or are you a laggard?

I like to think I’m in the early majority, although there are probably a lot of gurus out there who would place me firmly in the late one. I’m definitely not an early adopter—it just seems like a lot of effort, especially when it turns out that the first iteration wasn’t the best one and now you’ve got to start all over from scratch. But I suppose if you’re an early adopter, you’d want to start from scratch anyway, constantly. So you probably don’t care if the latest greatest thing you just invested gets quickly superseded. On the contrary, it gives you a reason to buy something new, hooray!

Right now, as I type these very words, I’m trying a new technology; I’m using Word 2007’s blogging function. It looks just like the document interface, with a few additional web-specific bells and whistles, and I assume it will publish the same as if I had logged into WordPress the way I usually do. Here’s my commitment to you, though; I will leave the post exactly as is when it gets published, even if it looks completely Picasso. Of course, I do have the option to publish it as a draft, but instead I’m going to live dangerously, throw caution to the winds, and let the chips fall where they may.

What does this have to do with Spock, you ask? Nothing. I’m just rambling, sorry. Now I’ll focus.

Alex Iskold reported on Spock for Read/Write Web this week, detailing the intricacies of their vertical search and their success at implementing semantic relationships:

The only kind of search result that you get from Spock is a list of people; and it interprets any query as if it is about people. So whether you search for democrats or ruby on rails or new york, the results will be lists of people associated with the query. In that sense, the algorithm is probably a flavor of the page rank or frequency analysis algorithm used by Google - but tailored to people.

I think this is a brilliant approach. The narrow focus allows Spock to really perfect the technique. One of the challenges with generalized semantics is the nearly infinite number of interpretations. Because the engine already knows the search is about people, all of the relationships and tagging and additional knowledge is confined to a highly specific set of possibilities. Keeping tight boundaries is conducive to success.

Iskold says tagging is the best part of Spock:

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Spock is its usage of tags. Firstly, all frequent phrases that Spock extracts via its crawler become tags. In addition, users can also add tags. So Spock leverages a combination of automated tags and people power for tagging.

But I think the real master stroke is making their focus people. Really, they could have chosen anything: cars, bunny rabbits, or cargo containers. But by choosing people, they’re that much more likely to have the concept take off. Let’s face it, we love people. We love to talk about them, hear about them, read about them and gossip about them. We also love to talk about, hear about, read about and gossip about ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s human nature. So if a search engine like Spock allows us to tag ourselves and clarify our relationships to the world, we’re likely to enjoy it, and perhaps recommend it to others.

This is exactly the sort of activity that leads to viral spreading. Imagine if you discovered that you could type in “beach volleyball California” and your own name would come up. That would be pretty exciting—I’d certainly want to show somebody.

We say it all the time at VortexDNA. The Internet is about people. This isn’t The Matrix; without people, the Web is nothing.

Perhaps you don’t agree, or perhaps you think that more players on the Web need to remember that people are the purpose. Either way, I’d be delighted to get your opinion.

I’ve been writing about privacy issues regularly: about Google’s sorrows and joys, about the Aikido approach to privacy, about the worst-case repercussions of making your opinions public.

At the same time, this is the VortexDNA blog. So I think it’s time to bring the concept home. What will privacy look like in a VortexDNA-enabled world?

Privacy
Much of the debate about privacy, particularly in search, has centered around clickstream and history. Which sites have you visited? What searches did you run? The reason behind this is simple: websites live or die based on this data.

Either the site sells something itself, like Amazon, or it makes money through advertising goods and services sold by others, like Google or eBay. Either way, in order to succeed in these business models, the sites have to become highly effective at pairing the visitor with the product or the ad. Historical data, whether it’s aggregated, personalized, or unique but non-identifying, is the primary tool these sites use to increase the relevance of their content and the accuracy of their recommendations.

Unfortunately, people don’t always want their search history to be stored, but they do want relevant content. So how can you reconcile those two things?

How VortexDNA fits in
Although VortexDNA also increases relevance and accuracy, the technology works based on the user’s core purpose and values rather than on historical data. The difference is subtle yet profound. If I use your history to recommend things to you, I have to know your history and continue to track it forever, or at least as long as I stay in business. If, on the other hand, I recommend things to you based on your purpose and values, then it doesn’t matter what your history is or what you do tomorrow.

It’s like the difference between using an X-Ray machine and having X-Ray vision. To use an X-Ray machine, you have to go to the hospital, go into the room with the machine, position yourself or whatever you’re trying to X-Ray… but if you have X-Ray vision, you take it with you wherever you go. Historical data is the machine; VortexDNA is you. Instead of giving you X-Ray eyes, though, it gives you Relevant Eyes. That’s why we say, ‘You are the filter.’

You can take your Relevant Eyes with you wherever you go. So when you visit a site for the first time, it doesn’t have to begin to compile a history or buy information about you from somewhere else. Your core purpose and values will filter their content and create the most relevant experience for you.

What do you think of this model? Do you think it has merit? And what would you do if you had X-Ray vision? Try to keep it clean, please

From my friend Zsolt:

Imagine a person’s home, her belongings
and the richly varied nuances of her lifestyle,
being plucked from her grasp one by one –
even those dearest objects and daily customs
she’d carefully packed in a valise placed
near the door in case the uninvited
angel of death arrived sooner than later.
Imagine a person being ineluctably stripped
of his distinctively accumulated wardrobe;
his favourite shoes and eyeglasses;
his prayer wheel, yarmulke, or crucifix;
along with the means to shave himself or clip his nails.
Imagine a person being inexorably divested
of most everything that expresses her sense of self;
including her intangible name, her discursive gestures;
her cosmetics, her idiomatic language;
her honorific and social titles;
her hairstyle, whether flamboyant or demure;
the successful fruition of her generous desires
and ardent hopes,
the subtle articulations of her innermost feelings
or her wit and wisdom…

Now,
my friend,
attempt a human definition of this person’s nameless,
irreducibly naked existence.

Good on you, Google! Google Blogoscoped has picked up a story that the kings of search may close their German Gmail operations if forced to abide by a new law requiring email account holders to be personally identifiable.

As usual in these circumstances, the law is pushed through in the name of fighting ‘terrorists.’ But Heise quotes Google’s Peter Fleischer to have said that this law goes against Google’s policy to offer anonymous email accounts (actually, you need to give your first and last name upon Gmail sign-up, but then again you can fake that). Peter says,  “Many users around the globe make use of this anonymity to defend themselves from spam, or government repression of free speech … If the web community won’t trust us with handling their data with great care, we’l go down in no time.”

Assuming we can take this story at face value, it is a highy admirable move for Google—and, I believe, a wise one.

Over decades and centuries, organizations with a purpose and values beyond profit have been rewarded with greater profit and long-term success. VortexDNA itself is founded on this science.

It’s not enough just to define a purpose and stick it in an annual report, though. A company has to live by it, make decisions in accordance with it, be aligned to it. You have to live your values in sickness and in health, to the extent of being willing to turn away business or, in the most dramatic extreme, refuse to operate if operating would compromise what you believe in.

Another example came up in story I reported on a short while ago, when TorrentSpy said they would rather shut down than collect personal data on its users specifically for the purpose of turning it over to the MPAA.

Some of you might think—perhaps cynically, perhaps correctly— that these Brave Stands are little more than PR stunts. If they are, though, I think they’re the right PR stunts. If a company that states it respects its users’ privacy generates PR by acting out to guard that privacy, there is nothing wrong with rewarding them with a little PR.

Coherence is the thing. Consistency is the thing. When a person or an entity behaves coherently, they build trust. They build trust because their actions and their words reinforce each other.

What’s your take on it?