I have read “Googled: the end of the world as we know it.”
I can sum up what it says about Google in three statements:
- Engineering can fix anything
- Information is neutral and measurable
- Advertising is information
I’ve often wondered how your motto can be “Don’t be evil” when you are in the advertising business. It obviously works if you consider information to only have meaning based on numerical measures, and that advertising is just another kind of information. This engineer-based mentality as the guiding principle of the largest, richest advertising company in the world falls somewhere between Ayn Rand’s objectivism and Bernie Maddoff’s ponzi scheme. About 50% of Google’s employees are engineers, and engineers, on average, earn twice what non-engineers earn.
Eric Hellman said…
As an engineer, I find your placement of the mentality of engineers in a pantheon where the only other gods are Bernie Madoff and Ayn Rand to be profoundly offensive. It’s like saying the librarian mentality is somewhere between that of Mao Zedung and Charles Manson.
Ok, that’s off my chest, no need to take that any further. The real question is: are there any better ways to run a business?
Eric, it’s not my placement, it’s how it’s described in the book — and I should have made that more clear.
Better ways to run a business? If your goal is more $$, regardless of the social impact, no. If your goal is something like: make some money so you can invest in new, exciting authors, as used to be the case in the book business, then, yes. I prefer the idea that companies take responsibility for their actions. My fear is that the business environment of today doesn’t allow you to do that and survive as a business.
Googled
by Karen Coyle
Coyle’s InFormation
Comments on the digital age, which, as we all know, is 42.
http://kcoyle.blogspot.jp/2009/11/googled.html
Googled
Waiting for the next round of Google/AAP/AG settlement prose (which was due today, November 9, but has been moved back to Friday, November 13, when the parties will presumably present it to the judge), I have read Ken Auletta’s book “Googled: the end of the world as we know it.” It’s mainly a business book, and primarily about media and advertising. I can sum up what it says about Google in three statements:
1. Engineering can fix anything
2. Information is neutral and measurable
3. Advertising is information
OK, maybe that’s a bit overly concise, but that is what it boils down to. I’ve often wondered how your motto can be “Don’t be evil” when you are in the advertising business. It obviously works if you consider information to only have meaning based on numerical measures, and that advertising is just another kind of information. This engineer-based mentality as the guiding principle of the largest, richest advertising company in the world falls somewhere between Ayn Rand’s objectivism and Bernie Maddoff’s ponzi scheme. About 50% of Google’s employees are engineers, and engineers, on average, earn twice what non-engineers earn.
Google has ramped up the advertising game by orders of magnitude, destabilizing huge, long-lived media companies, and it’s all based on… winners win. Google sees its role as matching up users with things they are seeking, whether it’s web sites, books, or a place to buy sneakers. It doesn’t matter to Google what the information is.
There is something creepy about the way that Auletta refers to SergeyandLarry as “the founders.” It sounds almost… cult-like. The fact that the book treats the founders and CEO Eric Schmidt as a three-some is just way too trinitarian for my taste.
Eric Hellman said…
As an engineer, I find your placement of the mentality of engineers in a pantheon where the only other gods are Bernie Madoff and Ayn Rand to be profoundly offensive. It’s like saying the librarian mentality is somewhere between that of Mao Zedung and Charles Manson.
Ok, that’s off my chest, no need to take that any further. The real question is: are there any better ways to run a business?
Karen Coyle said…
Eric, it’s not my placement, it’s how it’s described in the book — and I should have made that more clear. Auletta emphasizes the non-human aspect of the Google culture, and the “founders” call it “engineering.” Their definition of that (acc. to Auletta, who spent much time at Google) is that everything is decided with numbers, and numbers never lie. There is no concept that there might be anything beyond numbers that could lead to any decisions. And by their definition, if the numbers are “right” then it isn’t evil. So the fact that Google Books might destroy libraries isn’t an issue, because Google will show with its numbers that people are flocking to books online even if they have to pay for them. What it won’t show, of course, is how many people have no access because they have no money. Yes, there will be more use, but “socially equitable” isn’t a factor in their formula. It’s a bleak view of the world, and basically offensive to all of us.
Better ways to run a business? If your goal is more $$, regardless of the social impact, no. If your goal is something like: make some money so you can invest in new, exciting authors, as used to be the case in the book business, then, yes. I prefer the idea that companies take responsibility for their actions. My fear is that the business environment of today doesn’t allow you to do that and survive as a business.
Karen Coyle’s Home Page
http://www.kcoyle.net/
Google and the FTC | Peer to Peer Review
by Karen Coyle
http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/01/opinion/peer-to-peer-review/google-and-the-ftc-peer-to-peer-review/
Think “Different”
by Karen Coyle
Keynote, Dublin Core, 2012 and Emtacl12
http://www.kcoyle.net/presentations/thinkDiff.pdf
Thinking “Different” About Libraries
The classical library is a thing of great beauty. The wooden shelves, leather-bound books and the cathedral-like atmosphere of contemplation, the distant ceiling that gives one a sense of reaching upward, transcending – who of us who love books and learning wouldn’t want to study here?
This model is still at the heart of most modern libraries. It may be the case that the library as conceived even many thousands of years ago is so right that it is still relevant. However, the technological changes over the last century, and in particular those that have led to a vastly larger variety of information media, must certainly mean that the “books on a shelf” model is no longer the most relevant one.
Today’s media have an emphasis on interactivity that was inconceivable in the past. Books have been called a “slow conversation” between authors and readers, and some readers go on to extend that conversation in their own publications. In the traditional book world it is not easy to see how the books interact. There are some overt connections, such as footnotes, but that is only part of the story. Technology today can help us see other connections, such as when documents share readers.
We can also learn about interaction between documents through their proximity in bibliographies, syllabi, and perhaps even the shelves they share. An aspect of the conversation is knowing what books an author or reader had available in her time, which gives us a context for that person’s part of the conversation. And we know that books are active when they are read, and that the reader is as important as the book itself.
But libraries insist on treating books as objects; objects to be organized, not as knowledge.
In fact, libraries are very “thing” oriented, and the library view of its collection is that of things that are owned and must be managed and controlled. Library cataloging is all about the physical format, and placing those things in a linear order. Retrieval is primarily language-based, requiring that the user be able to name what she is looking for.
This concept of a controlled information world is out of date, as is the concept that information comes in a tangible form, pre-packaged. While print dominated for a significant amount of time (from about 1450 to the late 1800’s), our information has been in less tangible formats since the invention of the telegraph in 1844. Telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet have taken over the book’s previous monopoly on information. In fact, something that we couldn’t even imagine just a few years ago is how the telephone has combined with the Internet to become a multi-media information and conversation machine.
Yet in libraries we are still putting considerable effort into the linear arrangement of books on a shelf. It is a myth that the library’s shelves are meaningful to the user. We tell users that when they go to the shelf looking for one book they will find others on the same topic. That may happen sometimes, but the limitation of having only one shelf location means that some books are also kept far from each other. And what is the user to make of those numbers on the spines of the books? At no point does the library show users what those numbers mean. And they are meaningful – in fact they have a whole knowledge structure in them, which is seen by the one librarian who assigns the number, and no one else. It’s a secret code. How can that help people find things?
We have to move libraries from organizing things to knowledge discovery. This means that the library can be only one part of the information picture since a great deal of information is outside of the library. It means emphasizing the relationships between things, not their place in a linear order. It also means allowing interoperability and that means treating library users as contributors to the knowledge universe, not just as consumers. It means, yes, giving up control, and that is going to be the hardest thing for librarians to do.
Libraries have been slow to augment their catalogs with more information beyond the bare catalog record. WorldCat is now providing more links to resources outside the catalog itself. Amazon still provides much more information, and more interaction, than the library catalog which still mostly does not let the user contribute at all.
However, the length of the page is not a good measure of how useful the catalog is. One problem that I see is that all of these still focus on a single item; they are still very “thing” based. For Amazon that is a function of its purpose, which is to sell things. The library could take a different view. Some library catalogs are adding topic maps and various facets, but the focus is still on the individual things, not relationships between them. And in fact it is easier to organize things than it is to manage a complex of relationships, but that’s not our mission. In fact, I have a new mission statement for libraries:
The mission of the library is not to gather physical things into an inventory, but to organize human knowledge that has been very inconveniently packaged.
To do this, we must un-package our data so that any information can combine with any other information, and let the user of the data determine what is the focus, and what relationships are meaningful.
It should be possible to ask a question of the library catalog, and to get an answer, not just a list of items.
“What were the most popular book subjects from 1830-1840?”
(WorldCat answer, using kw:history because a search on date alone isn’t allowed: 141,076)
Presenting results as a list of items no longer works because library holdings have gone beyond human scale. A search on the term “history” and limited to books published from 1830-1840 retrieves over 140,000 records. Even with a few hundred it would be hard for a human to look at these records and determine what the most popular subjects were in that time period. We need to apply computation to perform tasks that humans cannot do on their own. That’s what computers are good at.
New Dimensions
We need to add some new dimensions to the library. The library today is 2-D, relying heavily on linear order — linear order of shelves, linear order of headings in the catalog, and linear order of catalog records that are retrieved with searches.
The first dimension that we need to add is linking; linking between items in the library based on any aspect of the concepts they contain; linking from the library to information outside of the library; and linking from the main information resource in the users’ environment, the Web, to the library. With links, the library can become 3-D.
The fourth dimension is time. It needs to be possible to follow thoughts and ideas in the library as the develop over time. This includes knowing what works influenced an author or inventor and what new discoveries that person may have contributed to. Readers should be able to reconstruct the context of information that they encounter, so that they can better understand the world that knowledge addressed.
The fifth dimension is people. What is in the library was created by people, and people will use the services and materials of the library in unpredictable ways. People will understand and create new knowledge using the library. That knowledge may be totally new to the world or just new for that user. It will combine thoughts from the person’s life and information previously encountered.