When I was in graduate school, the web was a different place than it is today. Some new technologies and concepts were cloud computing, RSS, and social networking. Wikis had been around for years, but wikipedia had only just become popular. It was a time of shifting paradigms and new toys. Facebook had just gone public, previously only available to college students. Much of the details were still a mystery to me, but I caught on quickly and wanted to learn more. It seemed to me that all the new media sharing could only serve to make life easier and more fun; it was certainly helping me, anyway.
Another subject that really interested me was cataloging and indexing. As an emerging information professional, I felt it my duty to understand how knowledge and information has been organized up to this point. Librarians had been responsible for organizing and disseminating information for the general public, and they had done a great job. Using data schemes, like the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress system, they had organized everything so it could be easily found. It was a monumental task, but they had achieved the goals of keeping things available where they made sense.
Then, the internet came along.
The internet has been likened to the contents of filing cabinets being dumped on the floor. Where is the Dewey Decimal System? Where is the librarian to help you find what you need? THERE ISN'T ONE!!! From an information professional perspective, it is indeed total chaos. Proposals have been made to completely start over and try to impose some kind of schema to organize and classify the stuff on the web, but there's just too much stuff. So, attempts to organize it in the old ways just don't work.
Google works by indexing information that's already on the web. We all know anybody can put stuff on the Web, and most of the time it's done anonymously. Organizing and indexing the Internet is a giant giant job, and they have tons and tons of employees and servers. It's a ubiquitous, household name used for searching the web. "Google it," somebody says, and what they mean is use a search engine on the Internet to look at web pages about the item in question; much like the word "Xerox" is used for a copy machine, or "Band-Aid" for plastic first aid strips. They sell your searching patterns and search terms to advertising companies, who help pay for their indexing endeavors. There are other Web organizers, digital libraries, archives, dictionaries, and so on.
Something that's really captivated me is reading about Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, and his philosophy toward information. In some ways, social networking is the opposite of Google. Social networking connects people to other people and their created information. It is more than a third place, like coffee shop or chat room- it's real people sharing real photos and real news about themselves to others. It isn't necessarily scholarly, peer reviewed, accurate or organized (although it depends on who your Facebook friends are, it CAN be!) To users of Facebook, what their friends are doing this morning is more important than what's going on in Mali right now. That is a generalization, but if you look at data (number of web visits, number of clicks, etc.) to get your conclusions, it's true.
Zuckerberg has only given interviews to one author writing about Facebook, and that's David Kirkpatrick for his book, The Facebook Effect. It's thoroughly detailed, but he leaves no stone unturned. He really wanted to get into the heart of Facebook and its' founder. His reporting has helped me understand in ways I didn't before reading this book about the passion and purpose Zuckerberg has for free, open information on the web. Here's a quote from the book:
"Given that the world is moving towards more sharing of information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people inputting the information themselves and having control over how their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system. I think that's critical for the world." -M. Zuckerberg, p 324
You can see that his approach is user-centered, as opposed to data centered, or schema centered. User behavior on Facebook certainly reflects the creator's philosophy and intent. One of Zuckerberg's advisers and board members, Peter Thiel, agrees that Facebook's model is profoundly different from Google's.
"One of the things that is critical about good globalization in my mind is that in some sense humans maintain mastery over technology, rather than the other way around. The value of the company economically, politically, culturally-whatever-stems from the idea that people are the most important thing. Helping the world's people self-organize is the most important thing." P. Thiel, p 325
So it's not like they're competing really, because their goals are very different. Zuckerberg sees people and people's interests as the most important kind of data, because he sees people as more important than computers. I think that's a wonderful perspective for any information professional to have. Without people, our need for organizing information goes away. Without users, all our tools for blog feeds, collaborative entries, instant messaging and lightning fast communication is for naught. What is a smoke signal without a recipient, or a sender, for that matter? The lesson I take away from this is that we should be mindful of people when we make policy decisions. We should remember what the ultimate purpose is when using or developing a new tool - people.
Another subject that really interested me was cataloging and indexing. As an emerging information professional, I felt it my duty to understand how knowledge and information has been organized up to this point. Librarians had been responsible for organizing and disseminating information for the general public, and they had done a great job. Using data schemes, like the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress system, they had organized everything so it could be easily found. It was a monumental task, but they had achieved the goals of keeping things available where they made sense.
Then, the internet came along.
The internet has been likened to the contents of filing cabinets being dumped on the floor. Where is the Dewey Decimal System? Where is the librarian to help you find what you need? THERE ISN'T ONE!!! From an information professional perspective, it is indeed total chaos. Proposals have been made to completely start over and try to impose some kind of schema to organize and classify the stuff on the web, but there's just too much stuff. So, attempts to organize it in the old ways just don't work.
Google works by indexing information that's already on the web. We all know anybody can put stuff on the Web, and most of the time it's done anonymously. Organizing and indexing the Internet is a giant giant job, and they have tons and tons of employees and servers. It's a ubiquitous, household name used for searching the web. "Google it," somebody says, and what they mean is use a search engine on the Internet to look at web pages about the item in question; much like the word "Xerox" is used for a copy machine, or "Band-Aid" for plastic first aid strips. They sell your searching patterns and search terms to advertising companies, who help pay for their indexing endeavors. There are other Web organizers, digital libraries, archives, dictionaries, and so on.
Something that's really captivated me is reading about Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, and his philosophy toward information. In some ways, social networking is the opposite of Google. Social networking connects people to other people and their created information. It is more than a third place, like coffee shop or chat room- it's real people sharing real photos and real news about themselves to others. It isn't necessarily scholarly, peer reviewed, accurate or organized (although it depends on who your Facebook friends are, it CAN be!) To users of Facebook, what their friends are doing this morning is more important than what's going on in Mali right now. That is a generalization, but if you look at data (number of web visits, number of clicks, etc.) to get your conclusions, it's true.
Zuckerberg has only given interviews to one author writing about Facebook, and that's David Kirkpatrick for his book, The Facebook Effect. It's thoroughly detailed, but he leaves no stone unturned. He really wanted to get into the heart of Facebook and its' founder. His reporting has helped me understand in ways I didn't before reading this book about the passion and purpose Zuckerberg has for free, open information on the web. Here's a quote from the book:
"Given that the world is moving towards more sharing of information, making sure that it happens in a bottom-up way, with people inputting the information themselves and having control over how their information interacts with the system, as opposed to a centralized way, through it being tracked in some surveillance system. I think that's critical for the world." -M. Zuckerberg, p 324
You can see that his approach is user-centered, as opposed to data centered, or schema centered. User behavior on Facebook certainly reflects the creator's philosophy and intent. One of Zuckerberg's advisers and board members, Peter Thiel, agrees that Facebook's model is profoundly different from Google's.
"One of the things that is critical about good globalization in my mind is that in some sense humans maintain mastery over technology, rather than the other way around. The value of the company economically, politically, culturally-whatever-stems from the idea that people are the most important thing. Helping the world's people self-organize is the most important thing." P. Thiel, p 325
So it's not like they're competing really, because their goals are very different. Zuckerberg sees people and people's interests as the most important kind of data, because he sees people as more important than computers. I think that's a wonderful perspective for any information professional to have. Without people, our need for organizing information goes away. Without users, all our tools for blog feeds, collaborative entries, instant messaging and lightning fast communication is for naught. What is a smoke signal without a recipient, or a sender, for that matter? The lesson I take away from this is that we should be mindful of people when we make policy decisions. We should remember what the ultimate purpose is when using or developing a new tool - people.
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