Information Has Always Been Dynamic Rather Than Static

from the fascinating dept

AllThingsD points us to a very long, but quite fascinating article by Robert Darnton, Director of the University Library at Harvard, ostensibly about what it means to be a library in the new age, but the article covers a lot more ground than that. In fact, I'd argue that really, only the last paragraph discusses the role of today's library (in a slightly rushed manner), while the previous 48 paragraphs (5,814 words) are a variety of interesting snippets that act as prologue to that final paragraph. Within those first 48 paragraphs, however, there's probably enough material to write about four or five entirely separate posts, from the history of newspapers (they aren't trustworthy, they tended to copy each other and make up stuff, they're not very useful as a record of history -- but are useful as a look at the prism through which people viewed their events), about book publishing (it's always been a mess) to how you determine what's important either for news or a book (no one really knows).

But what comes through is the idea that information is a much more dynamic presence than most people consider. Especially today, people seem to think that once something is written, it's somehow set in stone -- and, in fact, that's why we give automatic copyright to that content. But that's rarely true in history (since the days when text was literally set in stone), even when it was more difficult to "change" a text compared to these days. For example, Darnton tells the following story of Voltaire:

In order to spice up his text and to increase its diffusion, he collaborated with pirates behind the back of his own publisher, adding passages to the pirated editions.

That doesn't seem all that different than seeing folks like Trent Reznor today release his own works on BitTorrent and encouraging others to make mashups with his content. What it comes down to is the idea that most packages of information are recipes. They're a general description of the work, but to make them "spicier" or "sweeter" or (in some cases, we need to admit) "better" people will change and adjust that information. Sometimes it will be by the original creator of that content, but more often it will be by others. And that's not a bad thing (even if strong copyright believers claim it's somehow "immoral"). It's just the nature of information. And while that represents challenges for anyone who's trying to archive all of that information, on the whole it's a process that should be celebrated, rather than feared.

Filed Under: dynamic, information, libraries

Google Decides Organizing The World's Information Is Easier If That Info Is Online

from the so,-please,-put-your-info-online dept

Google has always stated that its mission is to "organize the world's information." Of course, the problem with that is not all of the world's information is online, meaning that Google has needed to reach out and try to pull more information online. That explains some of what it's done with Google Maps/Local as well as Google's various book scanning projects. Now Google has announced another initiative, perhaps aimed at that same goal: it wants people to contribute static pages of information, which Google is calling "knols," short for a "unit of knowledge." It's certainly not a unique idea. In many ways it sounds quite similar to projects like Squidoo or Mahalo -- both of which involve getting people to create "pages" of information. Of course, both Squidoo and Mahalo (whether they intend to or not) really come off as Google arbitrage plays. They seek to create static pages that will rank high in Google in order to bring in traffic... which is then monetized by Google AdSense. The goal is that if you get ranked high enough, the cost of acquisition is lower than the income from the ads. Unfortunately, when you set up that type of incentive system, what you tend to get is borderline (or, in some cases, not so borderline) search engine spam.

Squidoo has been around for quite some time without getting much traction and Mahalo is too early to call. So, it's certainly reasonable to question whether or not knols will really take off beyond spammers (which, Google insists it will keep out). If it were any other company doing this, it would make sense to be quite skeptical of how well it would catch on, but you have to provide Google at least the benefit of the doubt in terms of being able to leverage its brand to make this take off in some form or another. Certainly, Google has had its fair share of failed projects -- and I'm not yet convinced that people really want to create pages of info just for the hell of it. However, of any company trying this sort of thing, Google probably has the greatest chance to make it work.

Of course, no discussion on Google's knol project would be complete without comparing it to Wikipedia (as many smart commentators are noting). However, in looking over the details, this doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia "competitor" so much as another reference for static information. It seems that the goals of this project are quite different than Wikipedia's -- which is focused on narrowing in on a clear, factual description of something. The idea of knols is almost completely antithetical to that concept. It's about recognizing a single individual's perspective on things, and allowing multiple people to put forth their perspective. Google is even hoping that people will create knols based on opinion, rather than trying to create factual pages. That's quite different. Neither approach is necessarily "better" -- they just serve different purposes, and assuming these knols catch on, what may be most interesting is to see how useful the combination of knols and Wikipedia are together. I've always believed that a Wikipedia-type approach works well for factual information, where you have to zoom in on a single point -- but it runs into trouble when you want opinion, insight and analysis, where you want multiple separate opinions rather than a merged one. That, at least is the theory behind our business as well, so it's nice to see Google appears to have a similar perspective. However, much of the work that we've done with the Techdirt Insight Community has been in aligning various incentives for people to provide useful analysis and insights (rather than useless or meaningless ones) -- and it will be interesting to see how much Google has thought through the various incentives at play.

Filed Under: information, knol
Companies: google, mahalo, squidoo, wikipedia

Putting Google Library Into Historical Perspective

from the information-is-a-good-thing dept

Reader Jon writes in with a link to a fascinating New Yorker article that really puts Google's book scanning project into historical perspective. While there are all sorts of ongoing legal scuffles about the efforts to scan and make books and information more widely available, when viewed in the context of history, the legal arguments look even more ridiculous. The benefits to making content more widely available and more easily accessible are so big that it almost seems crazy not to do it. The article goes through all the struggles cultures have had over the ages just trying to classify and organize all sorts of books and information to make it usable -- and here we are with the tools and ability to go beyond everything that's been possible in the past... and we're stymied by a disagreement over copyright law? That just seems sad.

Filed Under: book scanning, google library, history, information
Companies: amazon, google, microsoft