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| Friday, May 9, 2003 |
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Other realities 
Juice Reduction?
| | Speaking of Google Juice (see Goodvertising, below), Andrew Orlowski in The Register suggests that Google will ghetto blogs to their own tab, since Eric Schmidt says Google will soon offer a blog search facility (according to a Reuters story): |
| | It isn't clear if weblogs will be removed from the main search results, but precedent suggests they will be. After Google acquired Usenet groups from Deja.com, it developed a unique user interface and a refined search engine, and removed the groups from the main index. After a sticky start, Usenet veterans welcomed the new interface. Google recently acquired Blogger, and sources suggest this is the most likely option. |
| | While Google may give blogs their own tab, doing so would hardly give them a reason to remove blogs from unfiltered search results. Usenet groups were were never part of the Web. (Among its other extant tabs, only Images is Web-original.) If anything, owning Blogger gives Google one less reason to to dismiss the authority that many blogs clearly possess, no matter how trivial the content of some other blogs may be. |
| | "I just want a search engine that works," laments Chris Roddy, a politics and linguistics undergraduate at the University of Emory. |
| | "I can get a Google search with porn turned off; why can't I get blogs turned off too?" he asked on Slashdot . |
| | "The main problem with blogs is that, as far as Google is concerned, they masquerade as useful information when all they contain is idle chatter," wrote Roddy. "And through some fluke of their evil software, they seem to get indexed really fast, so when a major political or social event happens, Google is noised to the brim with blogs and you have to start at result number 40 or so before you get past the blogs." We'd noticed. |
| | A little logic flaw here. Roddy says "all blogs contain" and Andrew agrees, based on one of his own stories. |
| | Given Andrew's history of causing nondebate around blogs, this latest post is mainly about stirring the shit. I wouldn't worry about it. |
| | [Later...] By the way, lest we think that The Register has a thing against blogs generally, here's a post that tells otherwise. |
Why a distributed DigID infrastructure is a better idea
Goodvertising
| | I've signed so many nondisclosure agreements in my life that I'm surprised my reflection still appears in mirrors. |
| | Most of those agreements were required by a corporate paranoia about competitors — or anybody — "stealing" an idea. In most cases, however, there was no real cause for fear, because everybody qualified to steal the idea was 1) too busy trying working on their own ideas, and 2) possessed by the belief that their own ideas are, prima facie, better than everybody else's ideas. |
| | Once again, good to know people are reading what I have to say. Now hopefully not too many people read it and attempt my idea before I do. But I know it's likely. |
| | So I'm wondering: Is it? And if so, will that be bad for Grant? |
| | Just asking those questions begs a visit to the economy of ideas that thrives on the Web, which is very different from the one that preoccupied industry since the dawn of the patent. By blogging and otherwise journalizing the shit out of everything, it's as if we all signed a social contract that amounts to a disclosure form. |
| | I think this has to do with all-ends nature of the Webosphere, which puts every writer and reader in a starting position of equal power to leverage the third clause of the Net's three founding virtues: 1) Nobody owns it, 2) Everybody can use it, and 3) Anybody can improve it. |
| | See, even if we can't ultimately own our ideas, nobody else can own their source. We are the exclusive wellsprings of our own originalities. This fact finds extraordinary grace on the Web, where we often depend on others to improve on our original ideas. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, the doctor says; but at the same time, hyperlinks grant authority. Thus the point-and-credit nature of journalizing on the Web increases originality more than threaten it. |
| | In a way, Grant's advertising idea is already old hat for Google, which is busy putting adwords on countless free BlogSpot blogs. But Grant's idea is different. He's leveraging Google's belief that text ads — classifieds, essentially — may actually add value to a blog rather than subtract it. He believes there is business to be made for intermediators other than Google. And not just for the intermediator. |
| | In Grant's scheme, the blogger makes money. In Google's scheme, the blogger gets to use software for free. Two different businesses, two different economies of scale, two different attractions for bloggers, one identical attraction for advertisers, more business for everybody in a brand new category that Google (a) invented but doesn't own, (b) everybody can use, and (c) anybody can improve. |
| | I'll be curious to see where this goes. |
discuss
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