From Documents to Experiences

Mike Elgan interviewed me for their Great Mind series on DevSource. You can visit this site to see the interview.

Mike is right in expressing my views:

We’re all slaves to the keyword, Jain says. “This is a very primitive and poor mechanism” for finding information, he believes, and our understanding of what people are looking for is still very poor.

And he brings out the role of events:

Today’s Web, says Jain, is a document Web. Everything is presented as a page. Yet, audio and video are becoming easier to store and disseminate, what Jain describes as an “event.” Figuring out how we’ll search through “events” is only one small piece of the problem. For example, as mobile phones become the primary client, people will use the devices to look for information: how do you design search tools for that platform?

Overall, it was a good experience to talk to Mike and I am happy that ideas have come out well. After many of these, you are worried whether your ideas will be correctly represented. In this case, I am definitely happy. Well, that is the difference between documents and experiences or between text and video. You could be misrepresented more easily in text. Videos are more realistic representation of the event.

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