Shooting Wide Open

Click through these two presentations and you get a pretty good sense of the web today. First, the first five slides of this article on the weak spots of tech giants pretty much sum up the tech world today in a few sentences. As for the first assertion that Google doesn’t get social networking, I’d add that the reason Google doesn’t get social is that Google doesn’t get user interface. Changing settings in Gmail or Docs or any of the apps is painfully Web 1.0. C’mon Google, what’s with the ugly unintuitive interfaces?

Then there’s that Netflix internal presentation about the future of the company, its competitors, and different content delivery systems – streaming vs ad-based free (ie Hulu), etc. Most presentations are boring, but this one is a page turner.

Content distro

A couple of interesting little details are buried in there – apparently they are in favor of a 3-strikes type law against piracy, but at the same time, want to push for net neutrality to ensure the best broadband speeds for every potential customer. Ah, complicated corporate motivations. But more importantly, now that they’ve gotten big into the back catalog streaming business and have their eyes set on mobile users, they consider all sorts of content providers to be competitors. Interesting how Google, Hulu, Apple, Amazon and Netflix all seem to have similar designs on dominating the selling of content, but the social apps are relatively unchallenged still. It’s been Twitter and Facebook for a while now, with no hint of anything changing.

The difference seems to be that the content these companies are wrangling for is for the most part top-down type content. Produced, polished, and with some significant financial backing, while the content on social networks is user-generated and personal. Hence Zuckerberg’s big privacy fiasco.

User-generated

So where does user-generated public content stand? There are venues to host this type of content aside from Youtube or Vimeo, Flickr or blogs and the like? Netflix certainly doesn’t think that content separate from these large hub-like stores has a chance, even with big budget movies like Avatar. Is the divide really that entrenched? You’ve made something that’s not meant to be purely personal, yet you’re either drowning in a mass of bad Youtube videos or you plug into a Big Player to distribute. At the moment, viral videos aside, there’s no getting around the fact that as always, we want some sort of filter for quality control, not to mention there’s a social benefit to watching popular content – you can talk about it with other people. If everyone climbed into their own little niche, the only place we’d find a community of likeminded people who’ve seen what we’ve seen would be the net.

More uniform web standards (a la Apple’s attempt with HTML5) is one step toward standardizing pooled content for all platforms, but that seems to only help with the problem of making content look palatable, not with finding viewers once it is. Or is it? Perhaps I’m just a bit too short-sighted to see where this can go. Tantalizing as they are, mobile content-consumption devices like the iPad don’t necessarily change where we we get our content from. I want a way to browse a collection like Youtube and filter for subject as well as aesthetic taste or quality standards without resorting to deference to the Big Players. For example, with graduation on the horizon for some of my peers, how might I be able to find short films made by MFA documentary film students all over the country without having to know of and search for each director individually?

Where’s the Hub?

This goes back to some of the ideas and questions raised in our collaborative blogging endeavor about the future of photobooks – how will distro work and how will artists monetize in the land of self-publishing? It’s that same debate about the indies vs the gatekeepers. I’m afraid that at least in the near future, the only way to make a living as a content-producer is still to distribute via a Big Player, at least until you are fairly (very) well-established. I’ve mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, putting your content in other people’s hands is risky (albeit, let’s face it, relatively low risk for most), but on the other hand, I know people who keep their “serious” stuff off Flickr and I’m not sure what to think since for us, it is more likely to be seen on Flickr than when it’s sequestered in the “safe” cave of the website of a relative unknown, where you no longer have the Flickr community to tap into. Seems like a shame.

Furthermore, how do we prevent Big Players from trawling little pools of creativity and siphoning off the cream to use for their own profit? There seems to be no defense for someone more high profile reworking an idea put forth initially by an unestablished individual. But I suppose that has always been the case, and it’s why people tend not to think out ideas or works in progress publicly. It’s less of an issue when you debut a completed work, more of an issue when you are working through ideas. It’s too bad, but on that point I am willing to cede defeat. Human nature, you win.

Semantic isn’t enough

The more general question is about the processes we employ to find “good” content. Where are the filtering and sorting tools that allow me to connect with individuals whose existence I’m completely ignorant of? When, essentially, do we get a real live working semantic web in which I can search for pure content and not just keywords or abstractions?

But we also need more than just the semantic web. For the most part we seem pretty unable to get away from a linear greatest hits/top ten/best of mentality, and the more I think about it, the more it seems influenced by the structure and weighting of search results. Does it matter that there are 423,985,239 results if nobody goes past the 3rd or 4th page? Google’s algorithm may have been groundbreaking years ago, but now that the semantic web is starting to circle for landing, it’s looking a bit old. I’m not sure that we can utilize a super content-aware web optimally without new ways of displaying organizing and thinking about search results. Why don’t we have more cloud-like results where spacing and size matter, and transparency, layering or toggling screens a la Spaces plays a role? There’s a lot of room for design at this table – visual literacy applied to information and data? This does seem like a problem that devices like the iPad can help solve.

(Thanks to Todd Walker for the links to many of these things.)

Early in the wee hours this morning, a factual data oriented search engine cum calculator called Wolfram Alpha launched. (You can read an initial review on TechCrunch.) Instead of pointing you to webpages with information as Google does, it collates selected facts in its database and presents it to you in a page of charts and numbers. It’s mostly geared toward mathy or sciency topics. For example, you can search for a string of DNA by entering a sequence of basepairs and you can quickly see a payment plan for a mortgage with specified interest rates, but you can’t get any band fan sites or things of that ilk.

I do wonder if this will throw an inadvertant monkey wrench into math and science education. I can imagine science teachers throwing up their hands as their students use Wolfram Alpha to solve problems they would normally have to think out or solve by hand. But maybe this is what people said about the calculator. Maybe this will enable the teaching of a higher level of problem solving.

The question that comes to my mind is what you’re supposed to do with this data. Can we extract those graphs and charts easily? Google has been working on a similar app called Google Squared which returns your results in a spreadsheet. This is less visually impressive, but seems to be a more powerful if you actually want to use or manipulate the data for your own purposes.

Google is no doubt working on semantic web apps already, and I suspect they’ll swallow up the good bits of Wolfram Alpha (or any new web and info related thing that isn’t utterly groundbreaking) and implement it themselves very quickly. I can easily see a new Google tab containing exactly what WA offers. Competing with all the info on the web with curated data stored in your own databases seems to be a losing proposition. So far WA looks like an encyclopedia and calculator rolled up into one and made interactive, which is very impressive, but surely there are more interesting things to be done with the idea of the semantic web.