Flutterby™! : Opportunity plops 2011-01-18 15:21:47.922109+00

Opportunity plops

2011-01-18 15:21:47.922109+00 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.

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.

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.

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.