Call it a law, or dictum, or just a big stick, but it goes like this: The value and influence of an idea or piece of information is limited by the extent that the information provider has embraced the Google Economy; unavailable or unfindable information buried on the second or tenth page of search results [...]
September 14, 2005
Search, Findability, The Google Economy: How It Shapes Us
Just when I was beginning to feel a little on my own with my talk about the Google Economy here, I see two related new books are coming out. The first is Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. The second is John Battelle’s The Search. Findability appears to ask the big question that I’ve been pushing toward. [...]
June 7, 2005
The Google Economy Vs. Libraries
Roger over at Electric Forest is making some arguments about the value of open access to information. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for my edit of his comment (though readers check the original to make sure I preserved the original meaning): …keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered [...]
August 29, 2005
The Google Economy — The Wikipedia Entry
I’m rather passionate about the Google Economy, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that I just wrote about it in my first ever Wikipedia entry. Here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_economy “Google Economy” identifies the concept that the value of a resource can be determined by the way that resource is linked [...]
July 15, 2005
The Google Economy
I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev. In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or [...]
October 12, 2005
Findability, The Google Economy, and Libraries
Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, stirred up the web4lib email list with a message about Authority and Findability. His message is about how services like Wikipedia and Google are changing our global information architecture and the meaning of “authority.” The reaction was quick, and largely critical, but good argument tests our thinking and weeds [...]
September 23, 2005
Ambient Findability And The Google Economy
I’m only just getting into Peter Morville‘s Ambient Findability, but I’m eating it up. In trying to prep the reader to understand his thesis — summed up on the front cover as “what we find changes who we become” — Morville relates his difficulty in finding authoritative, non-marketing information about his daughter’s newly diagnosed peanut [...]
July 31, 2005
Politics And The Google Economy
While I’m anxiously working to better fit libraries into the Google Economy, a few paragraphs of Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear, got me thinking about its role in politics. Glassner was telling of how a 1996 article in USA Today quoted the National Assocation of Scholars saying that Georgetown University had dumbed down its [...]
August 25, 2005
Changing Modes Of Communication
I talk a lot about the Google Economy here, and how that and other ideas are driving changing modes of communication. Today I learned of arXiv. Henry Farrell describes it at CrookedTimber: [I]t’s effectively replaced journal publication as the primary means for physicists to communicate with each other. Journal publication is still important – but [...]
August 13, 2005
The Part Where Speakeasy Cons Me Into Shilling For Them
March 19, 2007
NYT Struggles To Find Young Audience, Online Audience, Audience
The New York Times last week announced that it’s giving away TimesSelect to students and faculty that hold a .edu email address. TimesSelect, of course, is the paid access site that debuted in January 2006 to a confused and critical web. Editor and Publisher repeated the Times’ claim that they’re doing this for the good [...]
November 1, 2005
Is Search Rank Group-think?
Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail. [...]
June 16, 2006
Google Geo News
This post started with Ryan sending me this link demonstrating a KML overlay of county borders of his bifurcated state in Google Maps. Then I found this Roundup of Google’s Geo Developer Day (btw, I so wanted to be at Where 2.0) with tales of the new geocoding feature of the Google Maps API, more [...]
September 15, 2008
Google Minus Google
From The Register: Inspired by a recent New York Times piece that questioned whether the Mountain View search monopoly is morphing into a media company — which it is — Finnish blogger Timo Paloheimo promptly unveiled Google minus Google. Key in the word “YouTube,” and the first result is Wikipedia.
Recently Commented