Repulsed or not, news businesses face a hard reality - there are now many ways to get information - some of them free, some very cheap.
“Information wants to be free as long as you don’t have to pay the people who dug up that information. While the Net has long been associated with free things free e-mail, free personal Web pages, free searches — the news business has been repulsed by the notion that their hard-won scoops and journalism should be given away for free.” — Mark Glaser
I have a slightly different view point - Information wants to be found.
But to be found, it must be discrete - it must be atomized in a world where crawlers have been able to create not just haystacks of information, but haystacks of needles (good luck finding the one you really want). As Google gets better at harvesting more than its 6-8% share of the Web, the propensity for finding anything specific will likely decrease (indexing technology at a constant). The ability to crawl (and scale that harvesting process) presently exceeds the rate of change in machine-understanding of content. This will likely be the case for some time - notwithstanding new tools like clustering crawlers.
In my view, information actually increases in value the more easily it is found. I don’t think there’s a case for any value with information that cannot be found - but I’m open-minded, so tell me if you disagree.
To create an information space where items can be easily found requires that the items become more discrete (i.e., they must be about one thing, and one thing only). And discrete information objects will enjoy additional value if they can be associated with other objects (I’m refering to typed-associations, not links).
The trend to atomize information (no Atom pun intended) has already begun - RSS, blogs, Wiki’s - they are making it possible to reduce the bulk of our thoughts and distill them into narrowly focused content. This is not to say that blog posts should be tiny, but it does suggest they might be more valueable if they’re about one thing.
It’s no secret that blogs increase Internet visibility - how? Blogs tend to help people to write on-message; and remain on-message, thus making it easier for search engines to find very specific things that people write about. It doesn’t eliminate the possibility of bad information, but it does increase the prospects for discovery.
“But the newspaper business has had little choice but to open its gates online so people can read breaking news for free.” — Mark Glaser
Actually, the news industry *did* have a choice - they could have done many things including rearchitecting their information systems to meet today’s requirements while creating greater value in their distribution and discovery capabilities.
“So if information has no value, then people shouldn’t have to pay for it, right? This argument is as old as the Web, and it’s being renewed in many circles in the wake of “long tail” theories about the value of permanent links to online content …” – Terry Heaton
The lack of permalinks alone have provided significant friction and cut major news companies out of the flow of information and discourse. They were caught (not unlike many industries) by disruptive forces.
The future of information is about smallness; smaller objects, smaller spaces, micro-blogospheres,
smaller indices. Unlike most things, information consumers don’t want biggie-size drinks.
1 comment
2/23/2005 at 1:37 pm
Melanie
Welcome, Bill.
I agree with your feeling that much unlike a lot of other aspects of American society, more is not necessarily better in terms of news and information online. Keyword searches can have so many different meanings and associations that it’s really hard to narrow down pertinent information.
I’ve found this a lot while researching for papers and projects… You may mean one thing when you are searching and get lots of other information that is of no use to you at that time.
It really is searching for the right needle in a haystack full of them. It’s the beauty and the curse of searching for information online: most of it would be useful to somebody, but not what you are looking for.
But I’m not complaining either. I think as people get practice in searching and sifting through lots of information they get better at finding what they need. These programs you describe to help customize and narrow searches will be incredibly useful as well.