On TWiT 135, in a pretty interesting, and somewhat troubling, discussion on the future of Wikipedia, Leo Laporte quoted Roger McNamee as saying that Google is dead and the web cannot be indexed. In his thinking, the future of the web lies in expert content, vertical wikis and the like. Jason Calacanis, who was on the call naturally agreed, since his project Mahalo, falls into the same category. While I admit that projects like Mahalo and the Wiki search paradigms that Jimmy Wales has been talking about have their place, I cannot agree with that worldview.
In my opinion, a web that cannot be indexed, and cannot provide the backend framework upon which information discovery is based, yes even the “expert” variety, is a web that is going backward. Whether the future lies with Google, or some giant global graph, or something that no one has thought about, to think that humans can scale like machines is absurd. We need that indexed web as the backbone on top of which we can provide specific services and build a circle of trust. Any attempts to derail that are shortsighted. I would go so far as to say that those who have this viewpoint don’t really understand the web and its potential.
The web is information - good, bad and ugly. A web composed solely of expert content is something quite different. All that matters is that we can extract what we need from everything else.
This is also my response to people who ask "what about peer review?" with respect to web content. Indeed, what about it? Traditional peer review by a small body of experts is just not appropriate. People are going to have to decide for themselves whether sources are reputable - and if that can be done in a community-based fashion, so much the better.
The web cannot be indexed?!!!
On TWiT 135, in a pretty interesting, and somewhat troubling, discussion on the future of Wikipedia, Leo Laporte quoted Roger McNamee as saying that Google is dead and the web cannot be indexed. In his thinking, the future of the web lies in expert content, vertical wikis and the like. Jason Calacanis, who was on the call naturally agreed, since his project Mahalo, falls into the same category. While I admit that projects like Mahalo and the Wiki search paradigms that Jimmy Wales has been talking about have their place, I cannot agree with that worldview.
In my opinion, a web that cannot be indexed, and cannot provide the backend framework upon which information discovery is based, yes even the “expert” variety, is a web that is going backward. Whether the future lies with Google, or some giant global graph, or something that no one has thought about, to think that humans can scale like machines is absurd. We need that indexed web as the backbone on top of which we can provide specific services and build a circle of trust. Any attempts to derail that are shortsighted. I would go so far as to say that those who have this viewpoint don’t really understand the web and its potential.
What do you think?
Further reading
ReadWriteWeb on Topicle, which is building on top of the indexed web
Technorati Tags: Search, Wikipedia, Mahalo, Google