Googlization of Everything Else

This is a reblog from Chris Kelty's posting on Savage Minds on Wikipedia's recent announcement of its own version of Wikipedia.

knolcats: i?m in ur pedia, innovatin ur ass

Posted by ckelty under Bibliomania , Technology
[5] Comments

It its never-ending bid to own every inch of your brain, Google has just announcedthe beginning of its competitor project to Wikipedia. You knew this wascoming. You did really, because every time you search for something,you get a Wikipedia page, right? You thought Google wouldn?t notice?There have been some short posts by Esther and Henry at Crooked Timber, and all of us want to hear what Siva will say, since he?s made it his new project to worry about precisely this.

Formy part, I find it to be an interesting confirmation that something haschanged with respect to innovation on the internet. While it iscomforting to suggest that innovation takes place democratically on theInternet because any little guy with an innovation can suddenly becomehuge and all of a sudden capture billions of eyeballs, or whatever, itspretty clear that Google is turning out to be to the Internet what IBMwas to mainframes and Microsoft was to PCs. Which is to say, amonopolist. Only it?s in a totally unregulated environment, where thede facto ideology is that we live in a world of unconstrained freecompetition; we fool ourselves that this isn?t a monopoly because theirtag line is ?don?t be evil.?

But in reality, Google didn?tinnovate here. There are a bunch of projects that have done what googleis proposing to do with ?knols? but they don?t have the massiveresources and direct access to the most valuable data available thatGoogle has (for instance, my own Rice Universities Connexionsproject has addressed exactly the issues Google claims that no one elsehas addressed). But for most net observers, anyone who says ?we didthat before google did? is just sour grapes? and in an era and anenvironment in which the intellectual property system is so drasticallyand so completely broken, it?s impossible to use IP rights toadjudicate who might actually deserve recognition for an idea. The bestyou can do is assume that if they are 1) bought by Google or 2) boughtby Microsoft, they must have had a good idea, and some good lawyers. SoI?m not sure how I feel about the new frontier; on the one hand, I, forone, welcome our new knowledge-ecology overlords, on the other hand, itfeels to me like we?re on a primrose path towards the Wal-Martizationof the Internet, with candy rainbow-colored everything. Or maybe Ishould just take the blue pill, and stay here, forever.