Internet trends, 2.0

Ah," you`ll say now. "He didn`t have a big idea for this week, so he`s doing another one of those trends columns..." I admit it. I didn`t have a big idea for this week. Personally, I feel that`s okay once in a while. We can`t always have big ideas, every day. Big ideas every day must surely burn one out after a while. So - if you want to look at it that way - I`m saving myself :-)

Business, entertainment and lifestyle information has never looked this good or been this useful.

One of the really cool, quiet revolutions in Web content that I`ve come across lately has been The Mining Company (http://home.miningco.com), an American-based content provider. Their secret? Employ content-finders, so-called guides; people who know a particular area of knowledge very well and can thus sift through the endless garbage that`s on the Web to isolate the few things that are worthwhile. Amazingly simple, really. Why didn`t anyone think about this before?

The Miningco guides are like a human Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com), a real life intelligence system (as opposed to the `artificial intelligence` of a search engine). Business, entertainment and lifestyle information has never looked this good or been this useful. Finally, you don`t have to wade through hundreds of meaningless search engine hits anymore - just go to the Mining Company and look for the area your bit of research would fall under. Chances are there`s a guide who`s already done the spadework.

What`s interesting about this is what it says about building large-scale systems, especially those containing relatively advanced code, such as search engines. In a nutshell, it means they don`t really work. The old systems programming principle (garbage in - garbage out) applies more to search engines than any other type of program. The moral of the story: humans are better at establishing relations between documents and making value judgments.

You knew that already? One wouldn`t have thought so from the amount of money that`s still being dumped into search engines everywhere in the world.

"Oh no, not another diatribe about content," I hear you say. No, I`m not going to rant and rave, just observe. Like in an article from Douglas Rushkoff recently reprinted in Intelligence magazine, I also have some doubts about the carry-over-ability of so-called `content` into the Web environment. There are a lot of content hub sites, both locally and internationally, who do just that - take content from a newswire, for instance, and `dump` it, verbatim, into a Web site. There`s no value added and no editorial function (or as little as possible). I find this quite worrying.

Not only because of what it says about the carelessness of those Web publishers, but also about what it says about the people who make up the Netizenry. Why do we accept it? I`m not going to name any names, but it`s sometimes hard to notice that a lot of news sites are really showing you the same content everyone else has - often, using the exact same words. Sometimes those words are the exact same words received on the press release where the story originated.

Content (in this case, text) is assumed to be something that comes `live` out of a wire and finds its way into a template Web site. Unchecked, unread, undigested.

But there are some companies that are doing something about it. For instance, I talked with one smaller player the other day who will start offering custom Web content. This is much like the custom media industry in print: an enormous growth area. Helping corporate customers maintain their Web site could be a very lucrative enterprise - especially if the content provided is good quality and suits the business the client is in. A good idea, and I take my hat off. These guys will go far - because Internet-specific writing isn`t about `generating text`, it`s about creating something valuable. This, of course, is like any other writing. As in the search engine bit above, you already knew that.

I wonder if the Sabinet-organised "SA Online Info", to be held next week in Kyalami (4-6 August 1998) is going to deliver what it promises on its Web site (http://www.infoexpo.co.za). In my own small way, I somewhat wonder whether such an expo is necessary - this is a small community, and those who work in it already know each other. Our customers are often the general consumer, or the business reader, or some other niche animal.

It`s hard to say where the benefit lies in bringing together, non-digitally, a group of people whose primary business is the publishing of digital information. I`m still thinking that it would have made more sense to have a big ICP conference (Internet Content Provider) and form some sort of association that looks after the real issues, which aren`t how to sell more Web page accesses or Webvertising (is that really going to be achieved by putting people in a room together?) but censorship, regulation, etc.

At least the ISPA has fixed the plumbing problem previously bottlenecking Internet connections through its JINX peering point - a new, high-speed data switch has now gone online and the problems are resolved. Amazing how fast SA Internet access can be.