Category: Information

Wikipedia and Science Fiction Reference Books

I’ve been discussing with Bob Sabella, author of Who Shaped Science Fiction?, about writing a science fiction reference book together.  We wondered if would be fun to write the book I imagine in Science Fiction: 1951.  Then I got to thinking, when is it better to write a stand-alone book compared to when it’s better to add content to Wikipedia?  Many books about science fiction are really just reference books, and Wikipedia already has a great deal of content about the history of science fiction.  Why not make Wikipedia better rather than competing?

Obviously, if I wanted to write a book like The World Beyond The Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence by Alexei Panshin or Heinlein’s Children by Joseph T. Major, the book format is the best way to go.  But books like The Science of Science Fiction edited by Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, and The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by James Gunn have the kind of content that would be perfect for Wikipedia, and Wikipedia already has similar content.   I own the latest DVD edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, but I much prefer using Wikipedia because it’s far more extensive and has abundant hyperlinks.

For the past couple years when I search for answers on the Internet, I don’t go to Google, but Wikipedia.  Google returns so much crap now that Wikipedia is a better source of knowledge. When would an author contemplating writing a reference book or article be better off adding their research to Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has expanded beyond the traditional encyclopedia of a limited collection of short essays to one of unlimited size.  Plus its extensive use of hyperlinks makes it possible to add content in layers across many dimensions of facts.

Let’s use science fiction for example and say we want to write a book about science fiction as a general introduction to the genre.  Just by using these main Wikipedia pages as our general table of contents we can easily see the breath of research that already exists in this online encyclopedia:

These pages have hundreds of links to further articles, some of which are quit extensive, like the article on Robert A. Heinlein, which has hundreds of more branches.  How can a writer wanting to write an introductory book on any subject compete with Wikipedia?

The book I dreamed about writing in my last post would have organized events in science fiction by years and crossed referenced that listing with the evolution of themes, sort of like a pivot table.  Wikipedia already does some themes like I want:  Alternate History.  This is done quite well.  But other theme articles, like Generation Ships, still need work.  I’d love to see its list of fictional works dealing with generation ships organized by decade and year in same way alternative history stories are treated.

Wikipedia also has articles on specific years, for example, 1983, and then sub-topics for that year, like literature.  I’d like to see a sub-topic called “science fiction” where it lists the magazines and stories published that year, showing their covers, a list of major book publication, fandom events and awards, new films and television shows, plus comments about significant science fictional ideas presented that year for various themes.

Everything I want to see in my dream reference book on science fiction could be part of Wikipedia.  I don’t know if they’d like a bunch of cover art images added to the articles, but Wikipedia could expand in that direction if they wanted.  And that Table of Contents I listed above could also have section called Year.  I’d be very happy.  As long as Wikipedia doesn’t go out of print, it’s constantly being updated and refined.  The encyclopedias of science fiction in book form I mention above are several years old and very outdated.  I don’t know, but I imagine some of their editors and authors might already be working on Wikipedia entries.

At one time I wondered why fans didn’t create a separate wiki for science fiction, but what’s the point?  Why compete with Wikipedia?  If every topic had it’s own wiki there would be thousands of them to keep up with when you wanted to search on a topic.  It’s much better to have just one front end.

One you start thinking about Wikipedia this way many questions about the future of knowledge pop into mind.

JWH – 2/17/9

Ad Pollution

In these bad economic times, it might be heresy to attack marketing, but advertising is starting to crush my innate cheery disposition.  The web is being choked with ads, reducing the signal-to-noise ratio so low that many sites and searches are worthless.  Google, the darling of weberati, whose motto is “don’t be evil,” has become corrupted by advertising revenue.  Slashdot.org should stop making Borg allusions about Microsoft, and start making them about Google.  Too often a search on Google leads to page after page of links to sites wanting to sell me something directly, or links that take me to honey-pot pages, with tiny bits of info nestled in large screen acreage of ads.  For the most part, I’ve replaced the World Wide Web with Wikipedia when I’m searching for knowledge.

I stopped listening to the radio decades ago because of advertising and annoying disc jockeys.  I can only watch TV because of PBS, HBO and DVRs.  I know people who have stopped watching television altogether because of the advertisements.  I’m quickly approaching the decision to stop going to movies because of advertisements.  The only place I don’t mind advertising is the Sunday newspaper, but I feel guilty about all that wasted paper.  Shouldn’t there be a better way?

There are sites on the web that will reward or pay you for looking at ads.  What we need are systems to bring ads to us when we need and want them.  There are times when I’m shopping that I would be open to sales pitches, and I wouldn’t even mind an AI shopping companion.  Marketing really should be on the basis of don’t call me, I’ll call you.

Are ads really effective?  Sure, sometimes.  Those “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” TV mini-dramas from Apple are effective at making me hate them for selling misinformation and promoting style. I’ve never bought a Mac.  Microsoft is miserable at creating ads, and I always buy their products?  Neither decision has anything to do with advertising.  When I want to buy something, I research it, and then look for the most convenient place to shop with the lowest prices.  And how often do you see ads on TV selling on the basis of price?  I suppose if Apple ran ads that said, “Buy the latest Mac Book with the hi-tech aluminum cases for $899,” I might rush out and buy one.  Instead they sell comedy on TV, without mentioning the details of their products, or the price of the one I want.  Me to Apple, if you want “me” to be a Mac, then sell that $1299 Mac Book for $899, and I’ll come visit your store.

My point is I’ll buy something I’ve studied if the price is right.  The rest of the time I’m just avoiding ads like I avoid mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, germs and viruses.  Of course, the real test of reality is whether or not the various forms of mass communication could exist without advertising.

If there were no advertising, how many television channels would we have?  How many TV shows would exist?  How many college sports programs would exist?  How many professional sports teams would exist?  Can you imagine racing cars without their advertising paint jobs?  HBO and PBS exist without advertising and have outstanding programs.

I’m not alone in my aversion to advertising.  It’s obvious some big economic bubbles have burst this year, and I’m wondering if the advertising bubble will not burst soon too?  As we move into a world-wide recession we’re going to see a lot of companies cut their advertising budgets.  Unless there is real proof that ads bring in dollars, companies will start seeing how naked their marketing programs really are, and close them down.  Recession has a way of cutting out the fat, and mean vicious recessions, like I’m guessing we’re moving into, trims away every gram of grease.

I would like to see more marketing along the HBO model.  I’d rather pay $5 or $10 a month per channel for a handful of quality channels, and abandon all the rest.  I’d rather pay a subscription fee to an online digital magazine if they could provide me the content without the advertising.  Theater owners and movie distributors need to cut the ads before people give up on going to the movies.  And that’s for three reasons.  One I hate seeing the ads.  Two I hate people trying to find seats at the last moment trying to avoid the ads.  And three, I hate that they waste my Saturday afternoon time.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  There are occasions when I want ads.  I’ve been meaning to buy some new shirts, and have wished I could get some stylish ones that fit better.  My wife complains about the constant boring shirts I wear now.  I wouldn’t mind going to a web site and telling it I’m in the mood to buy shirts and then see some healthy competition to market me new styles, especially if I had more choice in sizing and material.

I don’t know what to do about the web.  I can’t believe that all those web pages with Google ads really make enough money to pay their bills.  I was just researching on optical astronomical interferometers and I couldn’t believe the “Ads by Google” signs I was seeing on pages with links to scientific papers.  The reality is we have too many web sites trying to direct us to too few places with real content by paying for their useless help with web ads.  Go away.  Please, turn of your servers, and go away.  If you try to make money on the web by solely linking to other sites, you are worthless.  Google and other top level search engines can do all that work.

Comment to Microsoft, if you want to beat Google, offer a search engine that is based on subscription income and only provides links to 100% content.  I can’t guarantee it will work, but if you offered such a service for $19.95 a year, and you filtered out all commercial web pages, you might have an alternative to Google.  If I’m sick enough of Google’s commercial results and willing to pay, there might be others like me.

This recession is going to shake up how we earn money and how we spend money.  Inflationary bubbles will be bursting everywhere.  I think the advertising world will be one big bubble that’s going to pop big time.  In all the various mass market venues, we’re going to see disappearing players, fewer networks on TV, fewer magazines and newspapers, and fewer web sites.  I’m an ordinary guy, so if I’m reaching the tipping point of running away from advertising, I imagine there are lots of other ordinary folk feeling the same way.

JWH – 10-25-08

Science As Fantastic As Science Fiction

Science fiction magazine editors often complain they don’t get enough science fiction stories submitted to them.  What they need to do is convince the popular science writers showcased in the latest edition of Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 to also write fictionalized versions of their latest essays.  Or maybe, all those would-be science fiction writers stuffing their slush piles should study this volume, integrate the ideas into their work, and then they’d impress those editors.  I kid you not, there are some far-out, fantastic, sense-of-wonder concepts in these essays.  Just do a bit of sampling here, and you’ll see what I mean.

Start with the Freeman Dyson prediction about green technology.  He’s not talking about windmill generators, but plants with silicon leaves, engineering biology and taking over the role of evolution to remake the Earth.  If you want to know about alien minds, trying reading the essays by Colapinto and Cook.  They don’t look to the stars and little green men who think different, but to South America.  Then Jon Mooallem looks at the history of people seeking anti-gravity and gravity radio.  Each essay, no matter how down to earth, could be used to inspire SF stories.

Here’s the table of contents with links to the articles on the web:

Just the fact that I can link to full-text versions of all but three of these articles on the web is science fictional.  It represents a major paradigm shift in copyright, economics and the dissemination of knowledge.  And I’m not linking to these articles to give you free reads, you should buy the volume and study it.  I’m linking to web pages as a way to review this book, because just sampling these links will give you a taste of what I’m talking about far better than I could with descriptive words.  Most people do not like to read off computer screens, but having these essays online is an excellent way to recommend them to your friends.

This collection is a snapshot of our times but far different from what you see on the news at night.  These articles are overwhelmingly about the future, either predicting fantastic new developments, or warning us of dire happenings if things continue as they are now.  All the concepts that science fiction writers use to write visionary science fiction.  I’ve been getting this volume each year for awhile now, but I’ve yet to meet anyone else that recommends it.  That’s a real shame.  Science was never so accessible, so why isn’t it more popular?

Could this be why the SF mag editors aren’t seeing that many science fiction stories cross their desks?  Because we now live in a world that seems science fictional compared to what we grew up in just a few decades ago.  I was watching a new cop show called Life on Mars, about a detective thrown into the distant past of 1973, and I was struck by the scene where he’s wishing for a cell phone.  Or another time when he mutters about wanting a computer.  I’d love to time travel back to see The Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, or the Beatles in Germany, but I don’t know if I could live without my sixth sense, the Internet.

The world and election I remember seeing through a 19″ black and white TV in 1960 is so very different from how I see reality in 2008 while watching a 52″ high definition set.  I think we take science for granted now, and back then science was that gee-whiz Mr. Science stuff that nobody paid any attention to other than the proto-geeks.  Many of the science stories in this year’s collection come from The New Yorker, The Atlantic and other mundane periodicals.  Today I can switch on my TV and see an hour documentary on the history of the black hole, and the controversy over the information paradox that Stephen Hawking had proposed that angered scientists for years.  When I was growing up, my choices were Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie.

In the early days of three channel television, there wasn’t room for physics and astronomy shows.  Today I can find several science documentaries on every night, and not boring ones like we used to see on 16mm film in science class, but fantastic shows with killer computer graphic clips beautifully illustrating cutting edge science, like string theory and the effects of dark matter of galaxy formation.

Sheila Williams, the editor at Asimov’s SF Magazine, complains she receives too many stories beginning with exploding space ships.  That was a popular way to begin a story back in the 1930s.  Explosions are dramatic and quickly lead to action, but what people want today are new far-out ideas to create sense-of-wonder SF, and evidently too many potential science fiction writers are living on ancient clichés.  They need to be reading the science essays and watching the science documentaries on TV, because the mundane world has passed old science fiction by, leaving it quaint and suitable for nostalgia retrospectives.

The Donlan and Dyson articles inspired me to envision fantastic changes in our everyday landscapes.  Donlan writes about scientists wanting to repopulate the American plains with substitute “megafauna” like that found 13,000 years ago during the Pleistocene overkill, which would make traveling out west like a safari crossing a well populated African wildlife preserve.  Imagine tooling west on Interstate 70 and seeing elephants, tigers, lions, camels dwelling in the high grass beyond the highway fences?  If you add in Dyson’s biological experiments, and think about T. Boone Pickens’ giant windmill farms, our country is going to look very different.  When I was growing up, the future was exciting because of rocket travel.  Traveling to Mars may end up boring compared to just staying home.

I think about the recent hurricanes, Katrina and Ike, and wonder what our coastlines would be like if we could build houses that were indifferent to big waves and wind.  In my neighborhood I’m seeing hawks, raccoons and red foxes set up habitats.  I know there’s a chance that possums, coyotes and armadillos exist unseen.  It wouldn’t take much to let our lawns become urban prairies and adapt our lifestyle to allow for more wildlife, renewable energy, shifting ecologies so where we live would no longer be manicured sameness.

If we listen to Freeman Dyson, we could have all kinds of scientifically created plants and animals joining us, like shrubs that produce electricity.  How do you make such a neighborhood biosphere into a science fiction story?

On the TV at night, the news is all bad, dwelling on lost jobs, crashing stock markets, terrorism, melting glaciers, oil panics that make me worry that the future will be dim and full of drudgery.  Reading The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008, makes me think the future will be more like living in Oz.  I wonder what the mood of the country would be like if ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news programs shifted their focus from Wall Street to science laboratories around the world, would we all feel better about the future?

The public fear you see in the news is all about economics, and that’s because economists are uncertain about the future.  Reporters should spend more time interviewing scientists, who are more confident about what’s ahead.  Reading Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman made me feel a whole lot better about the next forty years because he interviewed hundreds of people with solutions, not problems.  The articles in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 aren’t gosh-wow futurism like the 1939 World’s Fair, but working class science, as real and ordinary as cloning and gene splicing.

JWH 10-11-8

Inventions Wanted 006 – The Data Bank

I’ve worked with computers for decades and backing up has always been a hassle – both at work and at home.  I used to have a tape system for home but it became impractical years ago when hard drive space far outpaced the expense of tape drive technology.  In recent times I’ve been using external USB drives, but they’re not backup paradise either.

Unless your backups are frequently taken off site there is always the problem of your house burning down, blown away by tornados, submerged in a flood, or invaded by thieves.  In the early days of personal computers valuable home data was limited to word processing files, spreadsheets and financial records.  Most of that stuff could be saved to floppies.  Now I need 63 gigabytes of space to preserve my digital valuables.

Since our parents died, my wife and I have became the librarians of family photos.  We have boxes and boxes of photos that we’re scanning to digital files.  I’ve also converted dozens of old cassette and CD audio books to MP3 files.  And I converted LPs and CDs to MP3s.  Now I have an every growing expanse of valuable binary data.

The weight of all these digital files is becoming a burden.  Last year I bought Second Copy and two USB 250gb drives.  I made a copy of my files to one drive and took it to work.  I then connected the other drive and let Second Copy replicate my hard drive activity to it in real time.  My plan was to switch drives every week so I’d always have a fresh backup off site.  I never developed the discipline to follow this plan more than a few switch outs.

So this week I subscribed to Mozy.com, an online backup service for $55 a year.  My plan was to create a Mozy backup and then restore it to a drive at work to test it out.  When I purchased Mozy I knew it was going to be slow but I had no idea how slow.  The first backup I set up with 63gb of data was predicted to take 5 weeks.  I have the third fastest DSL from AT&T.  High speed internet access is built around downloading speeds not uploading speeds which are a fraction of downloading speeds.

I called AT&T and asked about getting their fastest DSL service but they told me it wasn’t available in my neighborhood.  I even considered switching to Comcast high speed cable internet but I’m living with slow uploads for the time being.

The next thing I did was stop the current backup and cut it down to 7 gigabytes of essentials.  I was able to upload this data set in a couple of days.  At work today I ran the restore to test things out.  Mozy.com offers different ways to restore your data.  The fast way for large backups is to have them burn DVDs and express mail them to you, but this costs extra.  I used the free web restore method.  You log into Mozy, request a restore and wait for them to email you when the files are ready for downloading.  It took about an hour to be notified.

Mozy makes one or more compressed .exe files for you to download.  I assume they divide your backup into the same DVD size chunks as they do for when they actually burn DVDs.  I got two 3gb files that I downloaded in less than an hour.  Download speeds were 1.1 – 2.2 megabits per second at work. 

I discovered that my backup had no .mp3 files in it.  I then read Mozy’s manual and discovered you can configure your backups with all kinds of filters.  The basic data set of My Documents files were set up to filter out .mp3 files because I had unchecked the Music backup set.  But I was expecting to get my audio books, which are also in .mp3 format.

In other words you will have to play around with the settings to get exactly what you want.  If you don’t have much to backup I’d just backup everything at once.  Mozy is light on documentation so I’m guessing at some of their methods.  I emailed Mozy several times and got answers, but for other things I just speculated about how to do things.  It’s easy to use, but you have to second guess them at times.

One problem with online backups is how and when to copy files.  My Second Copy program patiently waits and every ten minutes copies any newly created files to the USB drive.  That’s great as long as I don’t mind an ever growing backup because it never deletes files on the backup drive.  That’s great if you want to fetch a file you’ve accidentally deleted last week, but bad because your backup contains all those files you thought were deleted.   

Mozy works by creating backup sets.  Each set is a snapshot of the moment.  If you make a backup with Mozy one week, clean up your hard drive and reorganize your files and make another backup the next week and that backup will reflect your new system.  That doesn’t work with my USB system.  Working with the Second Copy method I’d have to wipe the folder on my USB drive and start Second Copy running fresh.

What I would like is an online backup that copies files as I make them but waits one week after I’ve deleted a file on my hard drive and then delete it off the online backup.  In other words I want backing up to be totally automatic and without backup sets.  Mozy doesn’t work that way, but the way it works is best for the technology we now have.

All this begs me to put on my wishing cap and imagine a perfect service.  What I would like is a Data Bank that protects my digital wealth the same way a normal Bank protects my money.  I want to feel totally confident that my data is always protected, maybe even with government regulations.  I’ve read horror stories about online backup companies going out of business.  Online backups is a fantastic concept.  It would be nice to know that Mozy or companies like it replicate their stores to multiple cities and I’m 99.999999999 percent sure I’ll be able to restore my files in case of a catastrophe. 

I’d also like my Data Bank to work with a standardize filing structure so I can easily find my files.  Mozy copies Windows My Documents’ structure and appears to use Vista’s new structure with my Vista machine.  Mozy is starting to support Macs and I hope they follow on with Linux.  It’s a shame that all the OSes don’t use a similar filing structure so people could learn data organizing principles.  I think it’s great that Microsoft started segregating music and photo files.  I wish the OS could tell the difference between music and audio books.

Because we can’t trust online backup companies yet, its important that you restore you files to a computer not in your house.  I did mine at work, but if that’s not possible you might want to find some backup buddies to trust.  It would be wonderful, that in the future, Data Banks do become a reality and they are guaranteed 100% trustworthy.

What I also want from the dream invention is perfect access from any computer I’m working on.  Just as I can log into my money bank from my work machine I want to be able to log into my Data Bank and have easy access to my home files.  For instance, as I rip my CD collection I’d like to copy it to my work computer to play songs there.  Or if I start a project at home on the weekend I’d like to get it out of the Data Bank on Monday.  Mozy isn’t set up like that.

I’d love to log into my Data Bank and see two folders at the root level:

/data

/library

Data would be where I go for any files I created and Library would be media files like music, photos, audio books, video, ebooks, Acrobat files, etc.  It would be very cool if the Data Bank worked like a network drive and I could just play my media files from that location.  However, I don’t know if that’s practical.  If a Data Bank had six hundred thousand customers could they handle such a load?  Maybe in the far future where everyone has fiber optics and gigabit bandwidth.  But for the near future I think causal access for backing up and retrieving should be practical now. 

Even that is beyond Mozy at the moment.  Mozy is designed to backup your files and then in an emergency restore them.  I think I’m pushing their system when I plan to backup my home system and then restore it on my work computer a couple times a year.  Since Mozy could go out of business I don’t trust them yet to hold my files without having them on a second computer.  I’m mainly using Mozy to eliminate messing with the USB drives.  That’s another source of saving electricity for those wanting greener computing, but I’m also getting tired of hearing my USB drive grind away.  Mozy should make my life simpler, and that’s good.  It will take a year or so of living with Mozy to really decide how they do.

Jim

Has Google Become King of the Spammers?

Every time I use Google, especially when I’m trying to find a product review, I’m overwhelmed with sites that are trying to sell me something.  Any word in my search term can set off a signal to bombard me with results from vendors.  I don’t mind the Adsense listings in the right column, but the paid rankings is getting out of hand.

Google seems to be invading my life even more with sales pitches when I visit blogs and web sites.  Everyone is seeing a gold rush with Adsense.  But I’ve got to wonder just how many bloggers make money using it?  It makes their pages look ugly and uninviting.  It’s one thing if you’re making a living off your site, but it’s another thing just to junk up your layout because you have get rich quick fantasies.

Spam is the word for unwanted email, but I’m now wanting to broaden its definition to include all ads.  Some web sites are looking like the hoods of race cars.  Magazines are so filled with ads that publishers practically give subscriptions away as sales catalogs.  I go to the movies and have to sit through an ever growing review of ads before the previews as well as having to overlook numerous ad placements being forced into the show.  Trucks and buses are becoming roving billboards.  I quit listening to radio years ago because of the obnoxious ads.  If I didn’t have a DVR I wouldn’t be able to watch many of my favorite shows.  Computers now come with crapware which is only a new form of advertising. 

Spam is overwhelming our lives.

Microsoft seems to be going nuts trying to find a way to compete with Google.  When is the ad boom going bust?  What we need is the HBO of search engines – but would people pay for better search results?  I’d pay $19.95 a year for a great search engine that found me what I wanted to know instead of sales pitches.

The trouble is a great non-ad search engine will be defeated if it only takes me to web pages full of ads.  How often do you end up at web pages or blogs that are honey pots that tricked you into seeing a page full of ads?

If the free Internet is going to be ad-powered I’m not sure we don’t need a new Internet.  I find most of my answers now at Wikipedia, which still uses the PBS model of financing.  Strangely enough I’ve paid for the online Encyclopedia Britannica which uses the HBO model but I prefer the results from Wikipedia.  Open source enterprises combined with subscriptions and donations could the way to go.

What I want when I go to the search engine is usually something specific.  Not only is the information I want specific, but I also have a exact idea in mind for how I want my answer formatted.  I want to buy a new HVAC, so I turned to the Internet for help.  I want How-Tos, Tutorials, Product Reviews, Consumer Reports type articles, etc.  What I would like in my dream search engine is a box for my query and a checkbox list of formats for how I want to receive the information.  For example:

  • Bibliography
  • Essay
  • Blog
  • Newspaper story
  • Encyclopedia entry
  • Definition
  • Photograph
  • Video
  • Audio
  • Travelogue
  • Lesson
  • Tutorial
  • Book
  • Journal
  • Magazine article
  • Peer-reviewed academic journal
  • Product Review
  • Comparison shopping grid
  • Sale offers

And so on.  Sure, sometimes I do want to find a place to shop.  Most of the time I don’t.  Using Google now is like visiting a poor country and stepping off the plane to be mobbed by hundreds of hucksters and beggars.  And as long as Google is free this is how it’s going to be.  They have to make money to pay their overhead.  Can’t blame them on that.  But, I’m sick of ad-generated enterprises.

I’m not expecting a free lunch, but that’s what people have come to expect from the Internet.  I think the businesses and advertising firms of the world need to think of ways to market their wares other than buckshot spamming.  I know the current system is working for them and I tend to think most people accept things the way they are, so change is unlikely.  I believe we have a whole generation of people used to being walking billboards with their clothing, and they have lived and breathed advertising their whole life and can’t think of anything different.

I’m not against shopping.  I’m not against technology helping me find things to buy.  I am tired of spamming, and I believe the world of advertising has become spammers.  Google has succeeded magnificently in this method, so everyone is following them.

Recently I started researching social networking and found tons of sites about how to increase ranking or visitors.  Everyone wants to manipulate Digg.com to increase their traffic and thus their ad revenues.  In fact, some of the sites with the largest traffic are those that teach people how to generate large traffic – in other words, the Internet is becoming a giant pyramid scheme.  Hordes flock to the Internet to make their fortunes only to learn that to make money requires getting other people to flock to their sites.

Google has unwittingly become the tool of this madness.  Digg.com offers one method to overcome Google’s Achilles heel but only if you’re looking for what’s popular on the net at the moment.  Ad driven sites are now trying to find ways to manipulate Digg.com.

During the early years of the World Wide Web it was promoted as a super Library.  Mixed in with all those billions of current pages are ones that offer genuine information, the kind of data you go to a library to find.  Wikipedia has become the shining light that draws people seeking knowledge.  What we need is other information enterprises that are like Wikipedia and Digg.com that circumvent the ad generated gold rush.

One idea would be to create a Digg.com for long term ratings of web pages.  Google does that by measuring how many links point to particular pages, but I assume this feature is overridden by paid rankings.  Google could offer a non-ad version for a fee if they wanted and even combine Digg.com voting.  The early form of Yahoo was based around a subject tree index of human reviewed web sites.  That worked when the Internet was smaller.  It might work again to make the Internet seem smaller and manageable by filtering out the noise.

I tend to think all gold rushes, like this ad generated one, eventually go bust.  Pages will start disappearing when ad revenues don’t grow.  Super sites will consolidate services.  I think blogs will evolve and like personal web pages before the blogging era, will lose their appeal to most people.  Blogging will succeed as a form of personal communication but I don’t think many people will ever make money at it. 

Jim