The Information Bubble will Bust
(Why Web 2.0 will Eat Itself)
Everyone seems very excited by the idea of social networks right now, and with good reason -- people are able to categorise information in a more intuitive manner than a search algorithm.
However, I still see a problem with this. As these services move from the 'technorati' to the mainstream public, they will exceed a usefulness threshold and then the value of these services will rapidly decline.
Here's an analogy. Suppose a group of friends went into a massive library and decided to put post-it notes in books they've found interesting and useful. This might be a great system at first, but then suppose other people think it's a good idea. Soon the library would be flooded with post-it notes from people who have completely divergent interests, and the system would collapse.
However, far more worrying is the nature of the information that is being created today. New, insightful and useful information is diluted and expanded upon at an alarming rate.
Take for example, the false rumor that Google was developing an operating system called 'Goobuntu'. A Google search on 'Goobuntu' currently shows 426,000 links. If you estimate each link to contains on average 2 paragraphs of content, then you're talking about a 142,000 page document!!
This is an amazing amount of junk content resulting from the online community's penchant for commentary over solid research.
The problem stems from the fact that it is easier to publish new information than it is to amend or consolidate existing information. When you mix that the tendency to add one's own opinion to a piece of information that being communicated we're building an enormous information bubble -- and I predict that this will eventually computationally exceed any technology's ability to extract comprehensive, meaningful data from the internet as a whole.
So, rather than building smart searching, tagging or ranking tools -- what we need to start building are consolidation tools which can extract the increasingly rare gold dust of valuable, valid and unique content from the babbling stream of information.
3 Comments:
Yeah, but there are different colored post-it notes. And everyone's got they're own post-it note color. Though the library would become flooded with post-it notes, folks should still be able to quickly find the posters they trust and with whom they share related interest.
It's true, I greatly oversimplified things for my analogy, but even if you elaborate on the analogy I believe you'll find that there is a critical mass beyond which the system begins to break down.
For instance, the complexity of organising meta-information (such as keeping track of different colours, in your example)-- will begin to outweigh the simplicity that the system is meant to provide.
yes, there is a tipping point (see malcolm gladwell)
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