WEB 2.0

October 11, 2007 on 2:40 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

WHY WEB 2.0 SPELLS A RECKONING FOR GOOGLE AND MASS MEDIA

“Who, now, is content to merely surf the web? We seek to swallow it whole, to process it, filter it, repackage it, redirect it, and spit it out with our name on it.”

This editorial was a very big project for me. It began as a blog post and finally, through many editing stages has reached this article.

It covers a lot of issues emerging in the word of information structuring and retrieval. It touches on how social structures and social search will be the trust filters of the future for many forms of knowledge retrieval.

The fundamental techniques of Web 2.0 according to this editorial are:

Open Standards – allowing functions and platforms to emerge around data sets.
The blogosphere’s version of open standards is structuredblogging.org

The distribution process takes place through the following processes:

1. Syndication – this is the process of distributing your information.

2. Aggregation – this is the process of assembling information.

3. Retrieving / Filtering – This is the process of requesting and viewing information.

For the blogosphere, the corresponding structures are:

Feedburner.

Technorati.

Blog Readers

The editorial explores how these techniques will change the world of social networks, wikis, and media networks.

The crux of the article’s argument is that Google is inherently limited by it’s reliance on a rules-based system of making decisions.

These rules are predictable, and not subject to “common sense”, and are easily – and extensively – manipulated by large players on the web. The article shows how Google’s rigid system is not suitable for all kinds of searches.

Google is only really useful when you are charting absolutely new territory, looking for collections of documents that no one has every tried searching for. If there is a large number of people searching for your topic, the idea is that there can exist a richer corpus of data that is inter-referenced, and informed by the trust of your social network, and various expert communities that you choose to trust.