Creativity in Management

Branching

one of the coolest things about the web is the ability to jump from topic to topic without any real goal in mind... hyperlinking, surfing, browsing... whatever term they are using now... but i'm not talking about the technical nature of the html and the href links... and i'm not saying "just google it" which will bring back far more links then you might ever need... i'm looking at it from the perspective of expanding or creating multitude of ideas from one starting point, word ideation using html and the web.

i see it as a sort of wandering from information or non-information to the next and picking up trivia or doing research without any intention of neccessarily using it. i don't recommend doing this while you're at work - it's one thing if you work for yourself but corporate tends to look down on this sort of "research"... this idea network branching of information gathering is a great way to look at different subjects that may or may not be related to what you originally were looking at. in the end you might find something that is actually worth your time (or your bosses time) clicking through the links... if you're lucky you'll click to something that someone else has followed your train of thought/thinking and clickthroughs and actually came up with something that is viable and useful.

there are companies working on the reverse engineering of this and applying it to profiling customers and the use of banner ads - similar to the other "real world" class project i'm working on in my other class... i.e. this customer looked at this page and clicked on this bannerad, follow the customer's breadcrumb trails of previous links and may, just maybe someone else that followed this "train of thought" weblinks will more then like click this ad so one can serve up the next ad that will more then likely be useful (i.e. make that person want to click on it to buy something)...

so, what's the point...
can we use this "evil marketing" ploy to reverse think the way people search out information to better serve up the next click through of content or needed website or website that they might actually be interested in... why, well someone followed that search pattern at one point in time or within a certain percentage of searches and they may (high probability?) want or think they want, will want to click on the next set of information/website being displayed... an AI sort of search engine that thinks ahead a number of searches for you and displays them.

posted by William Cherry @ 11:57 PM