Jonothan Stribling

When I first discovered Google, it was a revelation. I was using a combination of Alta Vista, Yahoo, Dog Pile and luck to find what I wanted and Google returned the right results super fast.

Fast forward to now and Google know more about me than my mother. I use Google Apps for jonstribling.info mail, Google AdWords, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Trends, Google Books and more.

That is a lotta Google!

A few years back, I started to get upset about the lack of choice in search engines. It’s not that Google do a bad job, they do an amazing job. It is just that as a consumer choice makes me feel better, it makes me feel in control, rather than as a passive victim.

Google are so good that it can seem that there is no viable choice in search. This is not good for consumers.

But hang on, I hear you say, what’s the problem? Google are cool.

Well they sure are. They even have a corporate motto, “Don’t be evil”. They couldn’t possibly be bad with that kind of positive “let’s do some good” attitude?

Wrong.

How can a corporation that is obliged to provide a return to shareholders and demonstrate continual (and impressive) growth effectively guarantee that they’re not being evil?

It sounds like a load of BS to me.

More importantly though, it also raises the hoary question: What is evil?

• Is censoring information about Tibet and Tianamin Square in China evil?
• Is the unauthorised scanning of books evil?
• Is the collection and analysis of users searching and browsing evil?
• Is having a monopoly evil?

So what is evil anyway?

Evil is a limit defined by culture. Evil is beyond that which we can comprehend and justify as part of a complex set of cultural practices and beliefs. Evil is not, in my view, an absolute measure. It is defined and understood through culture.

What is understood as evil in Afghanistan is quite different to how evil is understood in Australia or the US.

Some ethicists contend that this kind of relativist approach to ethics is plain wrong, that an absolute limit is required to be able to judge right from wrong and truly recognise evil. But this removes any cultural specificity from the equation.

How else can you explain suicide bombers?

The bomber thinks that killing themselves and hundreds or thousands of strangers is a sure fire way to enter heaven. Which brings us to the real reason that some folks believe in an absolute ethics and that is, god; sorry God. The god botherers are so desperate to believe in an absolute all-knowing, all-powerful entity that they reckon good and evil are absolute concepts.

If you don’t believe in god then you have to accept that each ethical limit is defined by a complex set of factors including culture.

So back to Google.

Is Google evil?

No, not when you stack it up against Nuclear and non-nuclear weapons manufacturers. Diamond miners exploiting poor Africans. The Indonesian government’s actions in West Paupa. Blackwater, the US contractor making bucketloads of cash from the war against terror. Dick Cheney and Hannah Montana.

Google are simply very successful at indexing, storing and analysing data. They do it better than most and have built one of the go-to sites on the Internet. By being successful Google have put themselves under the cultural microscope, so that every action, every success and every misstep is analysed and studied and criticised.

As a multi-national corporation, Google might do stupid, even evil things sometimes, like almost every multi-national corporation, including Greenpeace. This does not mean that Google, or Greenpeace, are being evil.

Selling my personal information to the CIA is evil.
And I don’t think they have done that.

Censoring information for a totalitarian regime is evil. And yes they have done that.

How I stopped worrying?

The great thing about the Internet and capitalism is that there is something great around the corner that will make Google look a little old fashioned.

In 2010 Google have been playing catch up to Bing, Wolfram Alpha, Twitter and Facebook.

Networked lifestreams are a huge threat to traditional search and the ad supported model and it is not obvious that Google know what to do.

Perhaps the threat is Bing, Wolfram Alpha, Twitter. But it’s more likely something we don’t know about yet. Something that is being built by a couple of super smart hard working PHD’s in their garage right now.

The point is that history tells is that nothing lasts forever.

And hopefully that includes my Google search history.

Since Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle introduced the term Web 2.0 five years ago, there has been an explosion of web tools and Internet-connected gadgets that foster conversations, interactions and discoveries.

In the past five years startups have built massive brands by harnessing communities and conversations. Brands like Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon, Ebay, Amazon and many others grew massive audiences by offering means for related and unrelated people to connect using Internet technologies. By crowdsourcing these brands provided platforms for collective interactions that create useful and cool tools like book reviews, movie databases, online encycopedias, map annotations, link resources .

There has also been a lot of chatter about what’s next. The teleological nature of the term, Web 2.0, lead some to focus on what web 3.0 might look like. Is it the mobile Internet? Is it the fast(er) Internet?

O’Reilly and Battelle see Web 2.0 simply as “harnessing collective intelligence.”

I always found the term a really useful rallying cry but overall a spurious oversimplification for what the web was always meant to be. Web 2.0 for me is a great epochal term expressing the evolution of how we use and interact with technology rather than a concrete real-world thing. And the danger with epochal terms is that we focus too much on the term, defining and justifying it, rather than the really interesting stuff that helps us understand the intersections between culture and technology.

In a new paper “Web Squared“, O’Reilly and Battelle write about how the web is on a “collision course with the physical world” through a proliferation of Internet-enabled devices, smartphones and real-time
microblogging platforms like Twitter.

For the authors Web Squared is “Web meets World” and they mount a compelling case for web technologies being applied to solve the problems of the world using the principles of “openness, collective intelligence, and transparency”.

I found the article to be both insightful and inspiring. The idea that the web is an entity comprised of devices and the collective intelligence of millions of users, which could be applied to the real problems of the world really speaks to my aspirations and vanity.

I can’t help think that O’Reilly and Batelle are speaking from a very privileged position as elites in the most webified economy in the world and that the global problems including hunger and poverty, drought, global warming, war, slavery, health, corruption and despotism are a long way from being solved by a bunch of well intentioned web developers, designers, strategics, venture capitalists and well-intentioned twitterers.

Not straight away anyway.

There is a direct line between the invention of the printing press and the breakdown of the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. The opportunities offered by being able to easily and quickly distribute information meant that the monopoly the elite (the Church) had on knowledge was no longer tenable. The consequences of this “revolution”  took hundreds of years to emerge.

My point is that we’re too close, too involved, too emotionally engaged to really see whaat the epochal implications of the Internet revolution are. It is entirely possible that the Internet having been responsible for the breakdown of Western media empires dominance of the distribution of knowledge and information will be the catalyst for the breakdown of the Western economic hegemony. If 80% of the populations of China and India get access to the Internet and relative economic security the world and the web will look completely different. It will be dominated not by the privileged citizens of the West but by the “Other”.

The rise of the Arabic TV network, Al Jazeera and their release of broadcast quality footage from Gaza on a Creative Commons license puts this evolution in real context. I can’t see CNN, the BBC or even the Australian ABC putting their syndication deals at risk.

In fact it could be the case that the real revolution could be the emergence of a new global heterogeneity in the distributiom and consumption of knowledge, rather than the homogenous US dominated Internet. This has less to do with Web 2.0 than multi-lingual domain names and the rise of affordable Internet enabled mobile devices.

When we talk about conversations and interactions, most of us still have what Edward Said would have called an Orientalist point of view: “There are a lot of them and their economy is going well, but we invented Google and the iPhone”.

If we are to have a rallying cry to use the web to solve the worlds problems then it needs to be grounded in those radical ideas that provide the economic tools, including the Internet, to the world’s poorest peoples.

When I was at Uni there was always “that class”. It was the class with the interesting name like “Sex and Politics” but was really about obscure French theory and the heterogenity of Southern Pacific political parties in the pre-war period.

That’s right, boring!!

I had the same experience the other day when I downloaded an eBook.

It made my blood boil that I had provided my contact information on the promise of receiving something really interesting and useful.

Sadly, it was neither.

Having been disappointed how likely am I to buying the service?

I subscribe to a lot of Internet marketing type, SEO, ecommerce and related services and cannot open my email without being assaulted by emails promising 3 Quick Tips, The 7 Rules Of Engagement and Make Her Big Happy.

The last email I expect. It is clearly spam and I know to ignore it (for now).

What frustrates me is the profusion of guides and white-papers that are really spam masquerading as something useful; kinda like how KFC masquerades as corn fed organic free-range chicken.

I have decided to call it Spamducation.

The problem is that the core goal for many white-papers and guides is not informing and engaging buyers, it is generating leads. This leads to compelling headlines and disappointing content written by amateurs or second-rate copywriters.

What would be great is actionable or useful information that cannot be easily found in a Google search. Without that the eBook business is really just a cynical lead generation exercise.

So before you write a guide or white paper to generate leads consider the following:

Are you qualified?

Do you know enough about what you are writing about? If not then find someone who does. Your brand will be damaged by inaccurate information and your customers will lose trust.

Is the topic right for your buyers?

Knowing what you know about your customers, is the topic relevant?

How does it relate to their tasks and objectives in relation to your products and services?

If it is relevant then write your guide or white-paper. If not, you need to start again.

Is it really valuable for your buyers?

Are you presenting old information in a new way, new information in a new way, or old information in an old way?

What problem are you solving? If what you’re doing is the same old stuff then stop and start again.

Is it annoying?

Your education should have actionable information so your customer can say:

“Wow! I have that exact problem and now I have a clear pathway to solving it.”

Is it lazy?

Finding information using search engines like Google is easy. So much so, that I can do a little research and trot out a plagiarised eBook, learning guide or quick tips document.

This is just lazy and purposeful plagiarism is plain wrong. If your document is inspired by someone then at least credit them. They may have worked hard and deserve some recognition.

Your education should also be unique to your customers and their place in your behavioural model. There is little point offering information about building a space ship if your customers are yet to master basic thermal dynamics.

Do you really need that email address?

This might make some marketing folks turn pale, but do you really need to collect contact information before offering the eBook download?

If the information is engaging and exciting then you will have built credibility and trust with your buyer and they will be more likely to call or email you when they’re ready to purchase.

Education tools like eBooks are a great way to build credibility with your audience, so don’t burn that trust with spamducation.

It’s corny, but I gotta do it:

“educate don’t spamducate”.