First came the Nature vs. Nurture debate: what makes us who we are? Is it nature — what our parents, at the moment of conception, brought to the genealogical table (or, bed, for those of us with more traditional parents)? Or is it where we lived and how those parents treated us in our early years and beyond? Then came the Taste Great, Less Filling conundrum. Today, at least in the web universe, rages the human versus machine controversy. At its core, the questions is: what returns the best, most relevant results (search results, relevant news, etc.)? Machine-generated algorithms or human “editors”? Google, with its mysterious search algorithms and millions of servers, is the poster-child for the “Machine” camp (although the reality is that their algorithms rely on human editors). In the “Wisdom of the Crowd” camp are the Web 2.0 likes of Digg, Wikipedia and del.icio.us. Like in the early days of the Nature vs. Nurture debate, (or Taste Great, Less Filling, for that matter) people are polarized over the issue — as if it’s one or the other. John Battelle sparked another round of debate on the matter just last week. Of course, the right answer is “both”.

Machines can do things that humans just can’t do very efficiently. They can process huge amounts of data very quickly (like the massive amounts of consumer-generated media that exist) . And machines don’t need to sleep or take latte breaks, so they can monitor things around the clock, in real-time. Of course, the categorizations and the kinds of processing that machines can do are very “gross” — they can count things, extract links, and look for patterns and run analyses that humans devise (like, say, an Influence algorithm or a Significance algorithm or patterns in language to determine sentiment). Machines can also count, measure and incorporate HUMAN (user) actions and behaviors — both explicit and implicit — along with the technical data, and that’s where the lines begin to blur and where things get interesting. So, we desperately need smart machines, directed by far-smarter humans, for complex things things like search or monitoring the voice of the customer out across the Internet.

But people, especially teams of like-minded people with a common purpose, can do what no machine could ever do — draw conclusions, add insight and strategize. Humans can add the “so what”. A founding belief of Scout Labs is “Let technology do what it does best, and people do what we do best. Together, we’re a pretty good team.” We have architected the service to offer the best of both worlds, working together seamlessly. Of course all this is a means to an end. Our users just want to know what stuff she needs to pay attention to right now and to collaborate with her team to do something about it. We are excited that very soon, everyone will get a chance to use Scout Labs and see Man and Machine working together in peace and harmony. Taste Great vs. Less Filling will still be there to fight about.

A few months ago, Kevin Burton of Tailrank and Spinn3r paid us a visit and walked through a number of his ideas for new features and enhancements. At the end, he asked for our thoughts on prioritizing them.

I asked him about something that didn’t make his list but seemed like an appropriate future step for a service like Spinn3r - and, by extension, Tailrank: I wondered whether he had ever thought about building a directory or some kind of taxonomy for the blogs in his index. I’d been thinking about this for a while because such a taxonomy would make a number of things on my Scout Labs wish list a whole lot easier.

Designing a taxonomy for the blogosphere would be a huge undertaking, and actually putting it into effect might be impossible. In my mind though, it’s something that would fulfill the true promise of services like Tailrank, Techmeme and Technorati. I imagined that someone must be working on it.

Or maybe not. Directories as a concept are very Web 1.0. Rigid hierarchies that once formed the foundations of companies like Yahoo have given way to open and therefore more flexible - if a bit messy - tagging schemes powered by large communities of users.

Today, however, Read/Write Web pointed me to Blogcosm, a new company aiming to tackle the job. There isn’t much to see at the moment - just a simple directory built around the Technorati 100 - but if the Read/Write Web post is correct, it’s good news. I’ll be watching closely.

I hope they plan to have an API.

Read/Write Web posted today about next generation search, discussing some of the work that has been done with semantic search, natural language search and search agents. A new entry into what has been a fairly regular topic on R/WW is a group from the MIT media lab who have been working on something they call “goal-oriented UI for personalized semantic search.” I haven’t read the whole R/WW post yet, and I’ve only skimmed the surface of the materials produced by the MIT media lab, but it looks interesting.

One bit that doesn’t have much bearing on what we’re doing, but would be an awesome enhancement to web browsing, is the notion of a macro. These guys are proposing something that works like macros in programs like Photoshop and Microsoft Office where you can record and save a series of actions. For example, you could record the whole process of checking your bank account balance online and save it as a macro that would enable you to repeat it (play it) with one click going forward. They build on this concept and address some more complex searching and browsing use cases that involve dynamic steps and variables.

You can find the abstract here, and a collection of videos and screen shots here.

The concept behind We Feel Fine - and the execution for that matter - is both rich and simple. These two qualities naturally conflict with each other, so it’s rare to find them both at work in a single piece of art, craft or engineering, and that’s the main inspiration I want to take away from WFF.

Of Jonathan Harris’ projects, my other favorite is WORDCOUNT (and it’s sister site, QUERYCOUNT). I love the way all of these encourage me to wander but also enable me to find specific things.

Another ambitious project along the same lines is 6 billion others, by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. It features thousands of videotaped interviews from people around the world. The navigation needs work, but you can browse individual people, countries or subjects (laughter, fears, love, dreams, etc.). There’s not much content there as of this writing, but it’s set up nicely, and I assume it will grow. I can’t wait to check back in a few months.

Bill Marriott, CEO of guess which hotel conglomerate, has recently joined the blogosphere, and in his inaugural post, he recognizes the power (and value) of consumer generated content with respect to the travel industry. His very savvy response is to participate, with honesty and enthusiasm.

The result is a very engaging blog that provides a window into how at least one industry wrestles with things like environmental impact, immigration and cigarette smoking. Along with each written post is an audio version, which is a nice touch.

This is a blog to watch.

My discovery of the day is Vidmeter, a new service that tracks views, comments and movement (up/down) across the major social video sites: Atom Films, Break, Brightcove, Daily Motion, Google, Grouper, iFilm, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, Veoh, vSocial, Yahoo, and YouTube.

Videos are sortable across a basic set of categories and by date, or rather, “age.” This distinction is important, I suppose, as a way of addressing dupes and copycat posts, which is also why it’s expressed imprecisely as “New Today,” “…This Week” and “…This Month.” This is an issue we should think about at some point.

Vidmeter’s business model seems to be tied to a premium service called “Tracker,” which is billed as a way to track and analyze an online video campaign.

Marketing itself as “The Leading Keyword Research Tool,” the Wordtracker service does a pretty decent job of returning keywords related to what you plug in. For free, the service generates up to 100 keywords ranked by estimated search volume. For a fee, you can sign up for their premium service and “mine over 1000 long tail keywords.”

Via Read/Write Web

A company called ClearForest offers some interesting tools for moving toward a semantic web. Their Firefox extension, Gnosis, looks particularly interesting. It analyzes web pages and attempts to identify things like companies, geographies, people, products, technologies, industry terms, etc. Then it highlights them on the page using different colors. Even cooler, it places these items (words and phrases) in a categorized tree in a sidebar.

ClearForest provides an API for their semantic web service (SWS), which is probably worth playing with.

A student named David Huynh at MIT cooked up a nifty AJAX application that presents simple XML data as an interactive timeline. I love timelines for their power to plot a lot of information in a way that’s instantly easy to understand and explore. His example implementation presents all of the events surrounding the assassination of president Kennedy, but it’s super simple to plug in any data source and run your own experiments.