A very interesting and important conversation is taking place on the web just now, but mostly because of business models, only one side of the conversation is even aware of the conversation itself.
Currently there’s a backlash among some professionals against weblogs and other personal-voiced micro publications. A dividing line, real or perceived, appears to separate the professionals—those who do what they do for money—and the amateurs—those who do what they do for the sheer joy of the thing.
The latest point of contention seems to focus on Google, everybody’s favorite search engine. Page ranking within Google’s search results are based on a number of criteria including the number of times the phrase appears in the document and the number of inbound links to the document. This much of Google’s page ranking algorithm is transparent. It’s proven to be so useful that most other search engines are adopting a similar methodology.
Information authority, in the realm of Google—and because Google is by far the most popular search engine, that’s a rather large realm indeed—is based on a bottom-up distributed sandbox in which anyone who publishes to the web may play.
That’s apparently a hard bit to swallow for some professionals. These professionals firmly believe that information authority must come from the top, preferably from an anointed professional priesthood which includes, of course, them and theirs.
Here’s what Jay Dougherty had to say about the matter in a BlueEar.com message dated 15 May 2003:
“It seems to me that the major issue for librarians and the Internet is establishing information authority. What I mean is filtering the good information from the crap on the Internet. This is especially important for academic librarians, as one of the major undergraduate research tools is google. One of my professors commented in class that the papers of her undergraduates on certain topics were all starting to sound the same because they utilized google as their main research tool. Obviously, the ‘hegemony of google’ is something that has to be alleviated. Librarians, at least in an academic setting, are trying to alleviate it through ‘information literacy’ classes in which students learn about on-line journal databases and how to establish ‘authority’ within websites (ex. ‘.gov’ usually offers better information than ‘.com’ websites).”
Consider that Jay Dougherty is a graduate candidate at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Library and Information Studies and I have to assume you find his statement as offensive as I do. There are, generally speaking, two kinds of librarians: those who insist upon being information gatekeepers and desire to have all information flow from authoritative sources to and through them and those who wish to teach the rest of us how to use the tools with which to access information for ourselves. Dougherty claims to be the latter kind of librarian, but I’m not so sure with comments like this. We’re quite capable of granting our own information authority, thank you very much.
One of Dougherty’s teachers is Siva Vaidhyanathan, NYU assistant professor of Culture and Communication and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity and the forthcoming The Anarchist in the Library. Vaidhyanathan weighs in along the same lines as his student:
“It [Google] generates the seductive and calming illusion of precision, authority, and convenience. Yet by emerging in a matter of four years from a cult search engine to the most dominant and important source of information filtering, we have allowed it more cultural and political authority than Microsoft has.”
All of this is a result of The Register‘s Andrew Orlowski writing about the vaguely Orwellian concept of “Googlewashing” the net. According to Orlowski, a googlewashing occurs when the supposed information authority of a word or phrase is surreptitiously—and intentionally—usurped by a sort of anarchistic super-conspiracy (I know, I know) of unwashed weblog masses. Exhibit One of Orlowski’s perceived conspiratorial googlewash is Patrick Tyler’s definition of “second superpower” in a 17 February 2003 New York Times article:
“...the huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”
The second superpower meme spread quickly throughout the culture, from progressive organizations to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
A month-and-a-half later, Berkman Center for Internet & Society fellow James Moore published “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head” on his website, extending the meme to cyberspace. The blogosphere became saturated with discussion of the “second superpower.” As a result, Moore’s essay rose to the top of the google search results for “second superpower.” This, Orlowski maintains, was a deliberate attempt on the part of the weblogging community to confer information authority on the undeserving—a googlewash.
“Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a ?Second Superpower’,” writes Orlowski, “it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank? to flood Google with Moore’s alternative, neutered definition.”
On its face, Orlowski’s contention is absurd. Google, for the most part—censorship claims not withstanding—indexes the publicly accessible web. (That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems with Google; there are. But that’s fodder for another article.) As former software developer and current Berkman fellow Dave Winer pointed out, “If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the web.” Tyler’s “second superpower” definition was supplanted by Moore’s not by some nefarious conspiracy of amateurs, but rather because the New York Times, from the perspective of Google, doesn’t exist on the web. The New York Times, like many publications, locks its web content behind a paid-content business model. Content behind paywalls like the one found at the New York Times is impervious to non-paying users and search engines alike. And with 200 million daily Google searches, that’s not insignificant lost information authority.
The entire concept of information authority is undergoing tremendous changes in the culture. Used to be that there were only a handful of information authorities—all in the mainstream, and almost always a triad: New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times in newspapers; ABC, CBS, and NBC in television; Time, Newsweek, and US News in newsweeklies; and so on. This nicely packaged turf carving was cracked, initially by cable television and has been forever shattered by the net, brining a plurality of voices and authorities. The old media are no longer considered authoritative information sources. In fact, they’re mostly seen as the figments of past imagination they always were. There’s no going back, the FCC consolidation decision next month notwithstanding. The damage done by Jayson Blair, clues for which the New York Times continues to search, could never happen on the web because “we fact check your ass” around here.
I believe the core question that any independent media organization has to answer with regard to the web is the value of being an information authority versus the value of revenue from a paid-content model. Is there a point—and if so what and where is that point—at which the value of being an information authority is greater than the revenue derived from the paid-content model?
For publications with content locked behind a paywall, including my employer, an alternative model may be to create an equivalent to Google’s AdWords program with contextual text ads alongside individual articles. Before you snicker at this, consider that sources indicate that AdWords are responsible for some 75% of Google’s revenues. Doc Searls suggests that publishers should take this a step further and investigate partnering with Google in shared revenue deals.
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