With the enormous volume of information available on the Internet the question of who would organize all of this data used to be a tough one. Websites like del.isio.us and Stumbleupon provided great tools for people to do that, giving the answer on the question above.
However, even with the millions of users using the tags to teach the machine, their audience have been significantly smaller then the number of Google users. Finally the biggest search engine does its greatest step ever to engage the groundswell into organizing the Internet.
IVSyd
3 Comments
At the risk of being pedantic, is this really “organizing” the Web? It’s more like “cataloging” in my opinion. You can organize your shoes by putting them all on a shoe rack in your closet, or you can catalog them by making a list that says “shoes, Nike, crosstrainer: right hand shoe under couch; left hand shoe on top of refrigerator” and thereby helps you find them even though they aren’t really organized in any common sense of the term.
The Web is a messy place so cataloging is important, and I’ll be interested to see where this ends up. But when I think about organizing, I think of things more along the lines of the Semantic Web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
If I had to bet on which will see the most success though, I’d put my money on cataloging. The same human impulses that make the Web a mess to begin with are likely to keep it that way. On the other hand, imagine intelligent publishing platforms which mine crowdsourced cataloging information and use it to update the semantic structure of the information being cataloged. Now, that might lead to some organization…
Eric von Hippel explained in his book that giving the right tools to users will enable them and they will create their own content. Looks like Google provided a new tool for its users to organize the content they are looking for. Who knows, maybe these 3 tiny icons (an arrow, a cross and a circle) will advance a lot in organizing all the available data.
If Google launched its free 411 service to teach the machine, they wouldn’t be stupid enough not to use this opportunity.
Think of the billions times per day users click the icon on a search results page as a way of teaching the machine what we think is important.
Think about it this way: why would you need to organize “your” web this way with the tons of new content appearing every day? Why would you need Google search engine to return you the content you picked a month ago as the best result for your search? What if something newer is available?
That’s not about organizing the Web in a traditional way. It’s more about teaching the machine how to do that.
I’m just saying that conceptually, organization and cataloging are not the same thing. Organized data the way the Semantic Web Project thinks of it is data that advertises it’s meaning and its connection to other data in a machine-readable format. Cataloged data, like what Google returns, is data from which meaning and connections have been inferred. It’s very cool that they are engaging directly with humans in cataloging instead of leaving it up to the machines, but the data underneath is still basically a disorganized mess, which means there’s a lot of value getting lost no matter how well it’s being cataloged.
Maybe it’s just a semantic point to most, but to me these sorts of things are very important in understanding what’s really happening. There have been a lot of startups that failed because they didn’t make fine distinctions and found themselves with much tougher jobs to do than they thought. Conversely, there may be business opportunity in solving the problem of how to organize data at the time of publishing. If you assume that Google is organizing it for you, then you never look down the road to where those opportunities lie.
One other thought is that this is a nice full-circle return to the days when Yahoo was the best information source because they were cataloging the Web entirely by hand. Their model didn’t scale, but now Google’s created a new take on it. Perhaps this will give Jerry Yang something to do with his free time.