As far as the Digital space goes, a mountain of information has been absorbed into the collective consciousness of the world in the last couple of weeks. So much so that it’s hard to measure or even comment on exactly what it means.

The Chinese government hobbles Google, Twitter becomes the de facto source of connection for the Iranian election conflict, Bing says hello world, the Palm Pre makes a surprisingly impressive entry into the marketplace, and the web itself felt the strain of half a dozen celebrity deaths.

With each of these events comes the maelstrom of online commentary, as people attempt to reflect and organize the information into digestable units. But in recent weeks it seems that there hasn’t been enough time to consume one event before another explodes onto the scene.

How do you think this affects our overall ability to communicate about events that occur all around us? Do these things go into a queue for future processing? Do some things get filtered out? Is it possible to process them all in parallel? All of the above?

My memory is a strange animal. The various bits of mental flotsam that occasionally come to the surface for most people, take up permanent residence in parts of my brain that should be reserved for useful tasks, like remembering to tell my insurance company to fax me over a copy of my car policy (which I no longer have to remember, thanks to this post).

YouTube has not helped in any way, shape or form to resolve this issue. In fact, it has exacerbated the problem. Prior to YouTube, the fleeting memories of “that thing with that guy in it” would pop in and out of one’s consciousness without any need to investigate further. Now, especially for people like me, that becomes an impossibility.

The following videos are the result of several hours (though not consecutive, thank goodness) of trying to scratch that mental itch that comes from such memory fragments:

1) Night Walk – Night Ride: Aired between 3 and 5am on Global TV in the late 80′s. Yes, I was up during those hours as a kid.

2) An anti-drug PSA with a voice-over from Mark Dailey (Local celebroty -Toronto news anchor for City-TV, and former Police Officer).

3) The new Heinz campaign is responsible for planting this jingle back in my head, and I’m not even a fan of ketchup.

4) There’s a part of this video that’s shot in black and white, where a guy’s reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover. It’s always been in my mind, and would I have realized it was from a song that I actually know, I might not have searched as hard to find out where it was from.

Perhaps that’s what YouTube will eventually evolve into – a repository for all the little bits and pieces of mental confetti that prevent one’s memory from performing more efficiently. … Or at least that’s the story I’ll stick to.

The first thought from many of you is going to be “Yup, he’s on the sauce again.”

10am Drambuies notwithstanding, hear me out on this. I was thinking about the way technology is moving forward and how we’re all collectively responding to our innate need to find stuff. The internet is built on a system of requests and responses. The very first “computerized” searches came in the form of relatively crude algorithms that were designed to brute force their way through reams of information to return the closest match to a given query. Present day search systems are much, MUCH more sophisticated. Predictive algorithms, organic search mechanisms, and multi-modal search engines (voice search for example) are just some of the ways that we’ve attempted to make “finding stuff” easier.

There’s just one problem. Finding stuff isn’t really easier because overall, people still don’t know how to search. Think about it. There’s still a massive disconnect between the way that the average person thinks, and the mindset that’s required to search for something “properly” online.

Take for example, a question that’s the de facto litmus test for a search scenario; “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” Now, if *I* were to start searching for the answer (and yes, I am somewhat snobbishly excluding myself from the general public in that I think differently when it comes to online searches), I would go to Google, make sure I’m cookied for Canada by signing into my Google account, and then I’d type something like the following into the query field:

The first result is a rather simple site, but it’s a list of lots of restaurants with links to their website. For a general query, it’s not that bad. However, if you type in a much more natural query like: “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” (still signed into my google account mind you), the results are markedly different. The first result is a Yahoo Answers page from Australia:

http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071130191037AAZmpb2

Now, there are of course some very valid reasons for the differences between the two sets of results. My question is a qualitative one, for starters. By asking a natural question, I wasn’t explicitly asking for a list of restaurants. How would the system know which restaurant I “should” go to? It doesn’t necessarily know what I like (yet). The system also doesn’t really know where I am unless I tell it (either through the query itself or via GPS if I’m using a mobile to execute the search). There are in fact a lot of variables that make “natural search queries” quite difficult to handle by a system that doesn’t know who you are.

A ha. Therein lies the reason why the current method of search engine optimization (from the search engine’s perspective) is flawed. It starts off by assuming that the system is completely disconnected from the person asking the question. The goal is to provide enough information to this blind user in order to make the search result more relevant. Queue meta-tags, content strategies, and any other number of mechanisms to make this happen, and make “possibly relevant” results float to the top.

Well, why bother with that assumption in the first place? The only other activity that rivals searching online, is social networking. Ok, fine. It’s actually porn, but we’ll just assume that’s a given and continue on with the story. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone with access to the internet that didn’t have some kind of profile or identity online. Between Facebook, Twitter, … and all of those other communities, nearly everyone is linked to one of them. Everyone’s got some kind of profile online, and most of those will continue to evolve as they accumulate history. Now, before I go on I’d like to clarify that I know the reasons why profile-related search results are perceived as a scary concept to some. Regardless of the fact that many are quick to enable things like search histories and information-sharing between websites, there are some that focus on the potential dangers of doing so. There is merit to these concerns, but it also represents a whole other series of potential material to cover. So for now we’ll move forward.

Think about it like talking to your Doctor or your Lawyer, your Accountant or even your friends. All of these people could be considered systems which are profile-aware. They know you in some specific context and as a result, they can provide you with answers to pretty vague questions (“I’ve got like…a thing on my arm, and it hurts. What’s wrong?”). With the exception of your friends, they’re legally bound to keep your information private but if you think that they all adhere to those regulations 100% of the time, I’m sorry but you’re fooling yourself.

Now think about how this translates to an online search. All of a sudden, “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” doesn’t seem all that unreasonable, does it? If there is a shift in focus from making disconnected information “possibly relevant”, to making relevant information accessible, the way we all “find stuff” could drastically change in the next few years. All of the pieces are already there. The same sophisticated search mechanisms I mentioned above wouldn’t have to change at all. Social networking is already set up to gather information about us. The only bit that’s left to do is to connect the two properly.

Though, I guess the whole thing is really going to get weird when you start seeing stuff like this in response to a dinner selection query:

Thoughts?

“Can I send you a link?”

“Nah, I’m at work. Email/Facebook/Twitter it and I’ll grab it when I get home.”

That’s probably a conversation that many of you have had before over IM. Conversations over IM have typically been laced with some type of sensitivity regarding the content that’s transmitted, especially when one of the participants is at work, or somewhere else where the potential for “eavesdropping” or snooping of some kind. Most companies are gradually allowing the use of IM clients in the workplace, but not without a system to monitor traffic and content over what they view as a “company owned resource.”

The internet is rife with stories recounting embarrassing situations involving risque material that would have been better viewed outside of work. All it takes is one click to trigger content filters or other software designed to keep an eye on what people are viewing online.

Don’t ask me why this particular image was included. I just found it amusing.

The latest version of Windows Live Messenger, arguably the most popular IM client in the world, was recently released with a long sought after feature which could change the way IM conversations take place (especially if you’re nerdly leanings resemble my own). You can now sign-in to WLM from mulitple locations at once, and have completely separate settings for conversations in each place. If you have a machine at home that’s always on for example, you can use it to save your conversations while you log on from work, or when you’re mobile.

I think this is interesting because save for Google Talk (which is massively underused), no other messenger client has this as a native feature. There are several 3rd party plugins that are available to accommodate this, along with some registry hacks that can accomplish the same thing. But why muck about in the registry when you don’t have to?

Anyhow, it’s a handy little feature, and I thought I’d give it a mention.