Fingerprints in the booksphere.. and browsing over mankind's knowledge
SIPs: I actually saw them for the first time about one month ago.. but only today devoted some brain cycles to digest the potential implications that they have in the way mankinds' knowledge is organized (or at least the old-order of knowlewge, the one based in books).
Back then I was reading (err... listening in audiobook format) Seth Godin's "The Big Moo: Stop trying to be perfect and start being remarkable" and then stopped in an airline VIP lounge. While being lazy enough for taking by notebook out and connected into the hotspot, I found an idle PC and started browsing in Amazon (in the "anonymous-zone" that doesn't remember my history of book purchases).
That's whey I found them for the first time: SIPs are "Statistically Improbable Phrases". Since i-don't-know-when Amazon started cataloging on the books they sell these collections of phrases that seem to tell you in a single glimpse what a book is about, or at least the terms it usees.
An example might be useful: Pick a recent best-seller, like Friedman's "The world is flat" and search for that book in Amazon.com. You'll see that "reform retail", "call center operators", "global supply chain", "flat world" and "triple convergence" are some of the 15 SIPs listed for the book.
If what happened to me allows some liberal generalization of what might happen to you, I bet that SIPs will READ YOUR MIND!!! meaning: if you read the book and made a list answering "What are the key ideas/concepts of the book?" and then look at SIPs, there is quite a high correlation between the two lists.
But what does that mean? IMHO, SIPs "extract" the key information of the book in less than 200 characters [wow!]. Sort of defining the "essence" of a fingerprint (where the vortex is, concavity, etc. insted of a full scanned image of the fingerprint).
And here's another neat trick: if you click on the SIP (it is actually a hyperlink in that amazon search for anybook), you start navigating the booksphere using the SIPs are links between the books. That might have even more potential than the "people that bought this book also bought XYZ book" for cross-selling, or even better.. for accelerating the positive spiral of knowledge building that we call progress.
Back then I was reading (err... listening in audiobook format) Seth Godin's "The Big Moo: Stop trying to be perfect and start being remarkable" and then stopped in an airline VIP lounge. While being lazy enough for taking by notebook out and connected into the hotspot, I found an idle PC and started browsing in Amazon (in the "anonymous-zone" that doesn't remember my history of book purchases).
That's whey I found them for the first time: SIPs are "Statistically Improbable Phrases". Since i-don't-know-when Amazon started cataloging on the books they sell these collections of phrases that seem to tell you in a single glimpse what a book is about, or at least the terms it usees.
An example might be useful: Pick a recent best-seller, like Friedman's "The world is flat" and search for that book in Amazon.com. You'll see that "reform retail", "call center operators", "global supply chain", "flat world" and "triple convergence" are some of the 15 SIPs listed for the book.
If what happened to me allows some liberal generalization of what might happen to you, I bet that SIPs will READ YOUR MIND!!! meaning: if you read the book and made a list answering "What are the key ideas/concepts of the book?" and then look at SIPs, there is quite a high correlation between the two lists.
But what does that mean? IMHO, SIPs "extract" the key information of the book in less than 200 characters [wow!]. Sort of defining the "essence" of a fingerprint (where the vortex is, concavity, etc. insted of a full scanned image of the fingerprint).
And here's another neat trick: if you click on the SIP (it is actually a hyperlink in that amazon search for anybook), you start navigating the booksphere using the SIPs are links between the books. That might have even more potential than the "people that bought this book also bought XYZ book" for cross-selling, or even better.. for accelerating the positive spiral of knowledge building that we call progress.
posted by dave at 1:46 PM
2 Comments:
Very pretty design! Keep up the good work. Thanks.
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Hey what a great site keep up the work its excellent.
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