from KirubaShankar.com
3) Tell us about your research at MIT Media Lab. Would appreciate if you can describe in an easy to digest language.
My background is in artificial intelligence and information retrieval. I had always dreamed of building a robot that ate the web as food and walked around and said smart stuff. But some time over the course of writing my master's thesis I realized that a large part of our
intelligence is derived from our social interaction. There are a billion ideas created every second across the globe, most of which never make it out of their native brain; the majority of the work done to discover and refine the best ideas happens between people, not within them.
I am now focusing on the diffusion of ideas and the ways in which information can be socially contextualized; Blogdex is a platform for studying the evolution of information as it spreads through a social network. At the end of it all I hope that my research enables people to
find each other, and engage about the things they are passionate about.
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5) Ok, I want you to be honest here. Forget you are the creator of Blogdex. Put yourself in the shoes of a normal guy who blogs. Now, between, Blogdex, DayPop and Technorati , which do you think is the best popularity index ? Why?
Well, each of these provides a slightly different take on the problem. As popularity indexes, Daypop and Blogdex have pretty much converged on a similar set of statistics, where the Daypop Top 40 probably has the more usable interface.
For me, the important services provided by each of these systems are more diverse than "popularity index" suggests. Daypop provides weblog and news search, Technorati focuses on giving webloggers their inbound links, and Blogdex is a historical index of link diffusion. As time progresses, I think that the tools and user interfaces will continue to diverge until each of them provides for a unique niche.
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7) What is your future vision for Blogdex ? What are the new features that you are working on? Tell us about them.
I am constantly researching new directions in the data set, some of which might turn into new services, and others of which are purely for better understanding the nature of the community. For instance, my data collection on the characteristics of webloggers' social networks turned
into the Social Network Explorer.
