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| Saturday, May 17, 2003 |
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The missing Web 
| | When he first told me about it, and tossed off the line World Live Web, my mind was blown. In a World of Ends, we should all be able to find each other and talk, or corresond, live. (And not just on computers.) |
| | What I'm talking about is something entirely different. What I'm talking about is using the Web to find actual people in the world at large that you can talk to right now, about whatever you¹re specifically searching for. There's nothing like that yet. Nothing. People aren't searchable. They're the most important resource in the world, and they¹re not searchable, they're scattered to the wind. There's no "people" tab at Google (and "groups" isn¹t the idea at all). That person you want to talk to right now (and that wants to hear from you right now) that needle in the haystack of 6 billion, is out there, I promise, but you¹ll never find them, because the magnet you need to do so doesn't exist. I want to build it. |
| | To a significant degree, he has. With GlobeAlive, Allen is prototyping the idea very nicely. The hundreds who have joined in, and are also passionate about it, bear witness to something. |
| | Allen has bootstrapped this thing on a shoestring. Somebody needs to come in with some money and help take it to the next level. If I had it, I would (even if he wasn't my son). I don't, but maybe one of you do. If so, jump ahead to Allen's closing paragraph: |
| | The bottom line is that when we restrict our interactions to people we already know or the people that happen to be in the chat room or community we join, it's like restricting our information-gathering to the books in our personal libraries at home, it's a mathematical certainty that we¹re selling ourselves utterly short. The island mentality is the root of this problem. There¹s an infinitely better way of going about our interpersonal interactions. It would change the web by making it live; it would change the economy by making it personal; it would change the world by making it smaller; and it would change you and I... by helping us meet. |
Maybe it's about the ratio of linkable to unlinkable pages
| | It sounds very clunky, but the fact is that I'm very interested in blogs reaching some sort of point of general credibility because I still believe they can be agents for democratizing the Web. But if they can't be counted on to do something as simple as provide a reliable way for readers to learn when an error has been made and corrected, it's going to be hard. Like or hate professional, institutional journalism as it's constituted itself at the moment, one of the more useful things to come out of the development of a self-aware news press is a sense of responsibility to the truth, and a willingness to give up some ad space or time to make sure that mistakes get corrected when they're identified. If the public can't trust you to do that much, I don't care if you're the NYT or Andrew Sullivan: people will eventually realize they'll get at the truth elsewhere. |
| | To bring it back around to what instigated this entry, I don't think the instance we're talking about here is a case of correction: it's a case of amplification. But I continue to believe that blog noise is a problem, and that Andrew Orlowski hits it on the head when he says it's partially because of willful or unintentional gaming of Google's algorithms. |
| | Here's a thought. What would happen if the archives of all the print publications out there were open to the Web, linkable by anybody, and crawlable by Google's bots? Would the density of blogs "above the fold" (on page one) of Google searches go down while hard copy sources go up? I'll betcha it would. |
| | My point: Maybe this isn't about "gaming" algorithms, but rather about a situation where one particular type of highly numerous journal has entirely exposed archives while less common (though perhaps on the whole more authoritative) others do not. |
| | Not sure here. Just thinking out loud. |
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