Nodal points

Yesterday, at the Web and Beyond, Nodal points were part of a talk by Jyri Engestrom. The reference was to William Gibsons use of Nodal Points in his novel Idoru.

The main character Colin Laney has a talent for identifying nodal points.

In brief interpretation: Nodal points come boling up by pattern recognition and state the outcome of an intersaction of events . In Idoru Gibson describes Laney absorbing all kinds of information, even the seemingly irrelevant, and filter out the next main event. This can be the rise or fall of stocks, or the birth or death of a person or new development.
This talent of Laney is leased by different people to predict the possible future.

An important part of the "nodal points" item is chaos theory, of which the most well known example is "the butterfly effect". "When a butterfly flaps it's wings in china, the movements might be the cause of a storm in the United States". In other words, small, seemingly unrelated events might be the cause of something bigger and totally different.

I interpreted "Nodal Points" via "nodes". A node being an intersection or focal point from which new lines emerge.

Pattern recognition
An important part of our brain interprets "reality" via pattern recognition: a non-linear/parallel process overlaying the "new" on the "old" and finding the differences to process. Very likley around 80% we think we see are re-arranged images form memory. It is an economical process in the wiring of our brain that works around the limitations of our processing and storage systems and allows us to keep up with reality around us.

Another part of this wonderful system is the "associative paths subroutine". Our brain is capable of scanning connections to related issues in quite an effective way (taken: apart from how we use this system).
The "associative paths subroutine" in my opinion is one of the sources of creativity.

Al this processing is happening on a "subconscious" level. We are not "aware" of all this processe happening.

Nodal points revisited
Pattern recognition allows us to boil enormous amounts of data down to fields of importance / relevance. The more relevant, the more urgency it will gain. The less relevant, the less urgency.
When Nodal Points are focal points, lines converge and "explode" into a new possible realm. This can be a new insight or - in the case of Idoru - a prediction of possible future events.

To predict the future, there are a lot of patterns to evaluate: from individual and group behaviour patterns to economical, migrational, weather related, demographic and geographic to mention some.

Getting the most likely outcome, you use as much related data and overlay them. Hot-zones are the repetative patterns. Cold-zones the patterns that emerge case-specific. Emerging zones the patterns that seem to move to become repetative and will introduce a change or shift.

To recognize the event or series of events that lead to this change is what I believe the talent of Colin Laney is about in Idoru.

Nodal points in search technology
Based on statistic information regarding my pst searches and "what people with a similar field of interest searched for in the past" you can predict my possible next search and need for information. You can offer me very specific articles regarding the topics that relate to my needs. Taking the speech by Jyri Engestrom (founder of Jaiku, currently working at Google) it might be the next logical step by Google.
You do need the bookmarks people collected, however, to make the connections, since browsing behaviour as Google is tracking now is very "dirty" data.

It is very likely only a matter of time before Google will buy a social bookmarking party like Del.icio.us to be able to make these connections (if they did not do so already).