Collective Intelligence

I picked up Toby Segaran's new book: Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications. This brings together two of my favorite technical topics: Web 2.0and Artificial Intelligence methods. I like the way he covers a number of Web 2.0 intelligence problems: clustering, matching, searching ... and provides short mostly statistical solutions to them. First I had seen this done, and that is worth reviewing. Most of the solutions are likely not scalable for real problems, but they are useful examples.

He uses Python as the language to program each solution. Which is a fine choice, though I have never done anything serious with it, it looks appropriate. He points out that you don't need to know Python to understand the examples. But you do need to know programming to understand the logic involved. This is not a how-to book for someone without coding experience to implement these methods. Also, for problems of any scale, its probably not a good choice to roll, debug and embed your own algorithms. Method libraries exist, which he mentions, which would be a good choice. Or hire an experienced programming team. Some statistical background is also requisite to judge the appropriateness of the methods.

Despite the issues of practicality of using the solutions as printed, this book brings together algorithms and Web 2.0 in a very instructive way, and for that reason is worth taking a look at. Also, Segaran's blog.