Web 2.0 is Natural Intelligence

Aggregation of individual insight and experience realized via communication networks: natural intelligence (as opposed to artificial intelligence) defines Web 2.0. Conversely, Web 1.0 was the communication network while Web 2.0 is the “sur” above layer of connected individuals via any device or any wire/wireless. It’s both a market and non-market social, business and action exchange. This is my unpolished fluid take on Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is not a VC myth with a hidden self-serving hype to exit agenda. It’s still in the nascent early stages, as adoption and daily use propogate, you will have a natural intelligence search and communication engine available to you: that’s something!

Call to developers: improve comment sorting and display. Add data mining capabilities to comments. We need some innovation in this area. It’s too flat as it is. Creating API’s that link the Community platforms of like Friendster, LinkedIn and Tribe, etc. distinguished by layer: Social, Business or Purpose(non-profit). This is one big party my friends. Use it. Spread it. Download Firefox while you are at it. Cheers.

How to retain value in the future, and resist commodification? One advantage is time-to-market… it takes awhile for a good or service to become commodified. Another is a unique connection to the customer, which resists the mass-market angle of the commodification curve.

Google just illustrates this general principle, oui?

Word of mouth via Web 2.0 is a better arbiter of quality than commercials and brand. Who do you trust more? Some celebrity actor or 5-6 of your friends, family and colleagues direct experience. In summary, let the commodified by Google begin: we are better off.

Online advertising is going to change dramatically when everyone is “LinkedIn.” Imagine how easily you can critique products and services through trusted friends and not just trolls and company plants. Products and services are going to improve and prices will drop in my view in the future due to this transparency. We will wipe the floor with you if you put out a shit product or service. Brand elitism will be eroded via Web 2.0.

People don’t talk about this much because it is an unpopular perspective, but as an example: Apple doesn’t have the smallest and highest quality Portable Music Player on the market even though they lead in sales. Apple is definitely capitalizing on its brand and industrial design. If brands were commodities, we would have a market where higher quality products raise the bar and marketing budgets would be re-allocated to research and/or a lower price point. Look at big Pharma, sales and marketing is double research costs. Do we need or are served by having Pharma brands? No. Would we be better off if big Pharma were not allowed to advertise or offer gifts/incentives to physicians? Yes.

I don’t see commodification in any material way. Google still can’t trump word of mouth, as demonstrated by Gawker Media. It can’t trump good writing, as demonstrated by the New York Times (which, granted, now hides its writers, but that’s another issue). And by sorting books through searches, Google Print helps a reader find what he already wanted to read — a specific item, the exact opposite of a commodity.

I really like the dogpile search engine now. Combining google, msn, yahoo, and ask Jeeves [I think those are all]. It has been the most comprehensive search tool lately…for me anyway.

Love your blog Jeff

C

As a librarian, I can attest to the usefulness of Google Print. Ever since discovering this resource over the summer I’ve made it my first stop in solving a research problem. Why? Commercial academic databases are great, but there’s often a time lag of as much as a year before the latest publications are indexed therein. Not only will Google Print turn up monographs published in 2004 and 2005, but those in turn will provide me with bibliographic references to get back at recent references to scholarly journals and periodicals as well. Even in the humanities these days a year old is a year and a half too late! And Google gets that.

The other thing that Google Print is excellent at is offering an alternative way of searching a library’s online catalog. Typically in order to find a book via subject search you’d have to navigate the annoyingly arbitrary Library of Congress Subject Headings and pretty much assume that you weren’t going to find everything in the nested hierarchy. Nowadays however you can start with Google Print and use those titles to reverse-engineer and refine your search in the card catalog. Google Print also adds a level of granularity when searching by subject by revealing chapters in larger tomes that deal with the topic you’re interested in, whereas most library catalogs only concerned themselves with the subject classfication of the overall book.

For example, I had a patron who came to the desk one day asking about the “theater of the oppressed” in Ireland. After spending about five or ten minutes in vain looking for something close in the LCSH subject index, I went to Google Print and did a keyword search for the above terms and got 23 pages of potential hits — several of which appeared to be exactly the sort of thing the patron was looking for.

Mind you, Google Print has merely facilitated the process here, not pre-empted it entirely. We still needed to own the books in question, or else the patron would have to buy them or get them through interlibrary loan. Copyrighted works are protected so that you can only read about three pages forward or backward from the matching page — enough to figure out if the book merits a closer look, that’s all.

But what a powerful tool that is! Ever since the dawn of the electronic age scholars have had mixed feelings about the new technology, lauding its ability to take the drudgery out of basic research tasks but lamenting the loss of that serendipitous feeling of browsing the stacks and stumbling into something you didn’t even realize you were looking for that ends up changing your research entirely for the better.

Google Print brings a lot to the table, but I think the most wonderful thing about it is that it brings back the ability to browse the pages of actual books that very well may have been on the shelf next to the book that you thought you needed but didn’t. Authors should be overjoyed by the development, and not instinctively attempting to shut it down.

At least some of them get it.

Great post as usual.

I agree with the gist of your article and would expand by saying that technology commoditizes everything. Google leveraged IT extremely well.

Starting with the commoditization of information, Google’s stated mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Perhaps next we will see the commoditization of the world’s knowledge, followed by our collective intelligence.

I don’t know if Google will be the entity to do that, but the trajectory seems clear to me.