Opportunity plops
2011-01-18 16:21:47.922109+01 by
Dan Lyke
3 comments
I was going to whine about Google's search results this morning. About how sites like eHow.com are making it difficult to find actual valuable instruction that's tempered with experience.
But then I remembered my observation that the brilliance of Zynga is that they saw gold farming as an opportunity where other game designers saw it as a flaw, and got to thinking "what's the opportunity in this, and how can we work towards that?"
Don't know yet, but just a little reminder to look at those steaming piles and see opportunity.
[ related topics:
Games Work, productivity and environment
]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2011-01-18 17:28:42.967646+01 by:
ebwolf
As I write about metadata in my dissertation, I can't help but feel the ire of
archivists who put great effort in creating good metatags. Unfortunately, Google
can't differentiate between well-meaning metatags and SEO-spam.
The irony is that Web 2.0 encouraged sharing non-authoritative information. We
found that sometimes Consumer Reports misses the mark. Reading through a half
dozen Amazon reviews can result in a better customer experience.
How do we balance favor between well-intended authoritative information and
valuable non-authoritative information while filtering out the noise?
I let Google track my web activities because it helps the filtering. I give up a
little privacy for sake of efficiency.
#Comment Re: made: 2011-01-19 02:20:17.314186+01 by:
brennen
Unfortunately, Google can't differentiate between well-meaning metatags and SEO-spam.
I think Google's success as a search engine has been founded, in part, on a recognition that between the perverse incentives and simple human laziness, there's just not much hope for taking a document's face-value description of itself as especially useful. This flies in the face of most formal* efforts to categorize and relate human-readable documents in a machine-readable fashion, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
- Well, more formal than a hyperlink, anyhow...
#Comment Re: made: 2011-01-19 15:07:30.122623+01 by:
ebwolf
brennan: Your point only makes writing my dissertation (on geospatial metdata)
that much harder. Even in areas where formal metadata is cherished the problems
of laziness persist.
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