Learning from Google's Two-way Web

In the current climate of IT slowdown, Google continues to hoover up online advertising revenue while growing the number of its regular users.

There are lessons to be learned all-around, by looking at Google's strategic initiatives. Many of them lead down the path of the two-way Web.

Ireland knows Google as a headline about jobs. But Google really is the world's first successful online implementation of knowledge management (KM). Most of the Irish Examiner's regular readers don't know what KM is, just as they don't know what the knowledge economy is.

Those using Google don't have to know that knowledge can be broken down into tacit and explicit. They just want information in an easy-to-digest form. In the time taken to read this far, at least 1100 people used Google to locate information they needed. That kind of metric is what KM architects try to build.

So when the standard setters of search acquire a new piece of software, KM analysts try to get their heads around what it means. Two months ago, Google acquired Pyra Labs. Sergey Brin, one of Google's founders, fingered Pyra Labs as the leader in blogging.

"It was a relatively routine decision," Eric Schmidt told the Always-On Network. "It was very consistent with how the world and Google all benefit with more information on the Web more broadly accessible, and this is a way to advance that."

Unlike the first generation of the Web, with its gaggle of Front Page editors and Dreamweaver hobbyists, blogging is more about interconnected publishing. It begins with fresh content, sustained by a powerful set of editing tools. Behind all the leading blogging software sits an exceptionally powerful digital authoring environment. To the user, it's much like using Microsoft Word to write a letter.

Google has placed blogging onto the next big wave of human communication.

"The last big wave was Web activity," said Schmidt. "Before that, it was e-mail. Instant messaging was an extension of e-mail, real-time e-mail."

The second wave of the Web is washing over websites now, and Google wants to better understand self-publishers connected by online communities. A better understanding leads to better indexing of information, a pre-requisite to better search results.

Ten years ago, when the Worldwide Web got its first Internet browser, most of the screenshots of content were in the English language. The Internet was a monocultural experience. Its American influence reflected the preponderance of browsers clustered within five time zones of each other.

Gary Noone, the creative mind behind Electric Search in Dublin, remembers "you didn't read many different views online than what you heard in meetings or read in the trade press. The early Web publishers put things online after they presented them in person. You were often reading background information dusted off from archives."

When Europe, then Asia, copped onto the Internet, people discovered the world was very different than the way it had been presented in the national press. Today, Americans are astounded to read that millions of other citizens think the Rumsfeld Persian Gulf strategy is counter-productive and immoral.

"In the early days, futurists thought the Internet was going to harmonise opinions," Noone said. "It would bring everybody together."

Today, we know the Internet is really highly specialised information, requiring tightly targeted searching. Events like the war on Iraq quickly dispatched the idea of a single news source. Sky News viewers can press their red buttons and follow a niche story as it breaks. Both thebroadcast and print industries have evolved more targeted outputs, oftendistributed across the Web to thousands of people scattered among a larger audience.

Google has anticipated all this. Google thinks there will be dynamic clusters of weblog communities, representing very distinct viewpoints of self-published thought. This cacophony will not espouse one Political agenda, one religion, or one culture. And Google will sift through thousands of these communities to create a "more like this" answer to aquery.

"We're watching people use Electric Search as they react to this explosion of new information," Noone said. "The communities of self-publishers have created many more viewpoints than you would normally see, even when using the reach of Google."