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Wednesday, November 6, 2002
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 Wednesday, November 6, 2002
started 11/6/2002; 9:55:52 AM - last post 11/7/2002; 7:16:42 AM
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Doc Searls - Wednesday, November 6, 2002 
11/6/2002; 1:55:52 PM (reads: 5433, responses: 3)
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For every election, there is an equal and opposite erection 
| | For some reason that headline comes to mind when I see this. |
| | It's good to see folks getting pissed off, but the problem isn't just leadership. It's lack of sex appeal for the Democrats' old issues, and a nearly complete absence of new ones. |
Probably because we haven't been in a real one for awhile
| | But on the whole, the nation is pro-war — as we found out yesterday. |
Let's finish building out the Net's directory
| | Whether we like it or not Google has become the Microsoft of search — in the sense that they now have a monopoly on the business. Who would even bother to compete at this point? Not even Microsoft. |
| | It's a good thing that Google remains a caring steward of the Internet superstructure they provide for us all. But it's not good for all of us to have this much dependency on one company, no matter how nice that company is. |
| | Although we regard it that way in a de facto sense, what Google does isn't Net infrastructure, which is stuff 1) Nobody owns, 2) Everybody can use, and 3) Anybody can improve. They only meet the second criterion. |
| | So let's take some of the infrastructural burden off Google, and start thinking about the infrastructural ideals we've ignored while we've watched Google do such a good job in their absence. |
| | The Net currently conceives its directory no deeper than the top DNS level. Everything to the right of that first / is a free-for-all. All of us have our own schemas, and most of the interesting ones change all the time. So do the contents at each directory level. What's in each directory should be knowable and searchable, if the author wants it to be — and not knowable or searchable if the author doesn't want it to be. |
| | Think of the Net's complete directory as a dynamic public library that is deeply part of the Net's infrastructure. |
| | I want a public card catalog that knows the schema of this site, and is informed (by me, automatically) when I post this item, and that reflects the new facts immediately and automatically. Then I want it to automatically notify search engines like Google, which can then go crawl and archive the contents for listing in their own privately owned but publicly exposed readers guides. |
| | As for the licensing issues, I think this system needs to respect intentions expressed by authors through tools like those recommended by Creative Commons. |
| | This all seems very do-able to me. |
| | And now I want Craig, who has forgotten more about directory issues than I'll ever know, to come in and tell me how it will or won't work. (I've gotta draw him back into blogging somehow.) |
| | The rest of you, too. What do you think? |
And how's the wi-fi?
Clue on
| | A friend wrote today expressing discomfort about a Google employee doing what amounts to user support in a public forum. He pointed to this thread here, where one of the partipants says this: |
| | There's something about a Google representative appearing on a web forum that I don't like. As much as I appreciate that they are giving people information and trying to answer questions, I share Chris' sense of skepticism here. |
| | I'd feel a lot more comfortable with Google if these pronouncements from Googleguy showed up |
| | I disagree. We need to see more employees of more companies talking with customers and users. In fact, we talked about exactly that in Chapter 4 of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Search down for the How to Talk subhead. It's near the bottom. |
We get sent off to the rehab they call "school"
| | I was reading DeepFun this morning and thought I saw a link for "addictive education." Seemed ideal to me. Hey we're all born hooked on that shit, right? Then look what happens. |
Spam what?
I shoulda told you so
| | I was going to say yesterday that I expected a lot of Republican victories, and for the GOP to regain control of Congress. But it was a busy day, and I missed the chance. Doesn't matter. It happened anyway. |
| | What it came down to was that Democrats generally didn't have much to say. None of their issues — fairness, opportunity, human rights, justice, the environment — had any box office, so they said almost nothing about them. |
| | I heard Trent Lott on the radio a few minutes ago, going on about homeland secuity as The Big Issue. Gave me the creeps. But when Gray Davis came on, I had to turn the radio off. |
| | Not a lot to encourage the Democrats among us. |
| | I was actually rooting for Bill Simon to win when he was ahead of Davis in the tally. For all his shortcomings, Simon at least seems human to me. Davis is a political cyborg. |
| | Close to home (like, three doors away) our friend Colleen Sterne lost the race or judge. It's a bummer, but in the paper this morning her opponent praised her campaign and predicted that she'll be judge someday. I'm sure he's right. |
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brian dear - Re: Wednesday, November 6, 2002
11/6/2002; 2:18:45 PM (reads: 626, responses: 0)
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Fred Grott - Scrapping sites in semantic fashion
11/6/2002; 6:52:46 PM (reads: 671, responses: 0)
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Doc why could we not scrap sites just like we do to get rss feeds except it would be in ontology xml such as daml+oil...
sort of boot strap the semantic web..thne interface that with smart agents that go out on your command to find stuff you really need using the scrapped DMAL+OIL ized sites..
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Matthew Thomas - Search engines, and the decline and fall of civilization
11/7/2002; 11:16:42 AM (reads: 1710, responses: 0)
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Doc, you said:
Whether we like it or not Google has become the Microsoft of search — in the sense that they now have a monopoly on the business. Who would even bother to compete at this point? Not even Microsoft.
Actually, if you look at the Jupiter Media Metrix stats from March you can see that during that month, 37 percent of Internet users used Microsoft’s MSN Search, while only 29 percent used Google. (This is, no doubt, at least partly because MSN Search is well-integrated with Internet Explorer for both Windows and Mac.) On the other measurements (time spent per visitor, and total search hours), Google does come out on top, but it’s far from a monopoly.
However, your point on Web search as infrastructure is well taken. Google is a single point of failure, which is unhealthy. (What if they were bought out by Microsoft? or AOL? or Disney?) One way of decentralizing it would be for our CMSes and/or browsers to build up a local index of the sites we maintain or visit, which could then be searched using a P2P network.
To neutralize spammers, such decentralized Web search probably would rely on a Web of trust. Results indexed by (((people trusted by) people trusted by) people trusted by) people you trusted personally would be ranked higher than results from other people.
That would have an interesting side effect: results would tend to be biased to your own point of view. For example, an anti-abortionist searching for “abortion” would get results where anti-abortion sites were ranked higher than pro-abortion sites, because the people this person trusted would be more likely to have visited (and therefore indexed) the former. Such false consensus, in turn, would encourage all sorts of varieties of extremism, which would have rather interesting effects on society … But I digress.
— mpt
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