Has Google jumped the shark? Every good IT company sooner or later does a odd thing which may herald a downturn of its fortunes. Didn’t Xerox give away windows in the late 60’s because it would never work. Didn’t IMB give away the PC as, surely, no one could reverse engineer their stuff. Apple – well, Apple will overcome one day…
Google may have entered that lofty pantheon as it has started “Googlewashing” by which they are ridding searches of their bloggy results. Why they would care to is a bit understandable – it seems people want “real” answers not opinions on the topic they are looking for…so they go…to the internet. That hotbed of fact. Go figure. Beyond the problem of identification of the media it works within, how will Google know what to wash out of the search? What is a blog?
Some blogs are like the pre-webs topical ‘zines. After friends got married in 1995 or so, I realized I wanted a way to keep in touch collectively after everyone was married off. I started a photocopied ‘zine called “People Who Know Al” – one and a half issues made it to print before I took the on ramp to the information super highway and got email and a browser to call my own. Fellow travellers AOV and CEO Blues are pretty much interactive ‘zines on their relative topics of web related innovation and business theory. Others, like Ian William’s are pretty much a personal exploration through a diary. Still others, such as Tomalak’s Realm, continue the original links concept.
What I don’t get about Googlewashing is this – if I wanted to know what it was like to try and put a movie together, Ian William’s site would be a great resource. If I wanted to know what was new in web related things, AOV is a great resource. Apart from the hubris of believing that it should direct the web substantively based on its definition of what is a blog, what does Google think it is doing making it difficult to find one of the best things the internet does well – provide opinion.