Manufacturing content

 

Architectures of control.

Google mission statement: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"

Knol: "encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it."

The most revealing observation on Knol so far is from Google's official weblog:

"But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable."

Knol is a case of not so much of changing the Google mission, but the battlefield. Google now realise it's easier to organise well marked up content and have figured out a way to deal with what is known as metacrap by centralising where content is manufactured.

This is an interesting shift in the way nofollow was interesting shift a few years ago. Before nofollow,  Google felt an entirely statistical approach was sufficient - the idea of marking up a comment to deal with link spam and agressive SEO techniques to help Google technology not be gamed represented a signficant change in technical doctrine.

The vision of being able to pick out authors and other content metadata is akin to the semantic web or metacrap, depending on your point of view. When I reviewed the dev track papers for the W3C's WWW2007 conference, there were a lot of submissions around extending things like wikis with strutured metadata, so it seems this is an area of applied research that Google has bought into. On the face of things Knol also has social graph like qualities to it due to the focus on authors. However what will make Knol viable is centralisation of metadata and content, and that's the most distracting aspect.

Becoming a platform for web authoring has entirely different implications than being an indexing service for externally authored content. You might call it a vertically integrated strategy. Nick Carr has commented, but his angle is as ever is about economics and IT utlisation The person whose opinion I'd really like to hear is Lawrence Lessig.

Manufacturing content.

pearl street station

My first degree was industrial design. In that degree you studied the history of industrialisation, back as far as Wedgewood right up to Japanese mass-customisation with occassional segues into things like TPS, Italian design culture, and Kanban. You learned interesting things like how the shape of a car derives from a  horse drawn carriage, that you can use terracotta and water to refrigerate, that computers and cloth making have a common history, that there is pasta designed to have an optimal surface for sauce, or that the one-piece flossbox represented a major breakthrough in packaging design. You also learned less obvious things like how big electrical companies actively encouraged first the creation of things like irons, kettles and vacuum cleaners to drive electricity consumption, and then their use throughout the day to even out that consumption at powerstations. Right up to my twenties it was a standing joke in Ireland that the the first ad during the Late Late Show caused a massive draw on the nation's electrical grid, because everyone turned their kettles on to make a cup of tea. Basically you learned that the way you live your life in what used to be called "the West" is in part to help make utilities scale to be an efficient proposition globally. Knol is a bit like that for utility computing and associated services like search and storage, except we're writing articles instead of ironing shirts.

 

Studied Inefficiency.

launchpad

A while back I was talking to a colleague about software issue tracking an whether it should be folded in with support desk software. My opinion was that the software issue tracker should be physically separate from front line, as far as requiring a person to rewrite the ticket and for those tasked to have to follow the duplicated information. The counter-argument was that this was inefficient and error-prone. But I stell felt that introducing an "inefficiency" at that point is no such thing - instead it's introducing judgement - it should take energy and thought to push issues upstream due to the associated costs of having to deal with them once they are propagated. In other words introducing a deliberate inefficiency in a process can be useful*. Granted, it's a hard sell in a world when efficiency and optimisation and zero slack are considered to have their own value.  The question remains as to whose problem Knol optimisation is solving, Google's or the readers'.

Tilting.

morpheus

Recently Tim Bray described centralisation as a "bug". Except it's not - centralisation is an optimisation, and when you optimise something you always do so at the expense of something else. Knol seems like such an optimisation, tho' it's not clear yet to me what the expense might be socially. It does seem thought that having your own datacenter and big databases is increasingly like having your own watermill in a world of  powerstations and batteries.

 

* update: happy coincidence; I've just seen that Danah Boyd has a nice post on inefficiency, well worth a read.

  • December 16, 2007
  • Posted by: dehora

Tags:

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