Month: January 2009

Nicholas Carr (of “Does IT Matter?” fame) wrote a post a couple of days ago entitled “All hail the information triumvirate!”

Here is his argument in a nutshell:

what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia – and I admit there’s much to adore – you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

Carr discloses that he is on the Encyclopedia Britannica’s board of editorial advisors, but I don’t think he’s writing this as a hit piece against Wikipedia. Nor does he recycle the usual pablum about Wikipedia’s inaccuracies; he has surely read the research that Wikipedia is just as accurate as Britannica. [Note: he has read it and criticized the study.]

I agree with Carr that our current use of Google and Wikipedia impoverishes our experience of the information that the web has to offer. In fact, that was a major subtext of my recent presentation on reconsidering relevance. I’m not sure that the dominance of the web is itself a problem, but that’s because I assume that the web is relentlessly assimilating all of the world’s information.

But Carr’s advice isn’t constructive, nor are most of the comments in response to it. Indeed, people wrongly focus their ire on Wikipedia rather than Google. It’s Google that promotes a winner-take-all information economy through its relevance-centric paradigm; if anything, Wikipedia mediates this effect because its results are collaboratively edited.

I think that, if we constrain ourselves to a relevance-centric information seeking system, our current Google + Wikipedia model is close to optimal. To do better, we need web-scale tools that support exploratory search. Long live the HCIR revolution!

Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg cultivated the motto, “Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube” (What others achieve by war, let you, happy Austria, achieve by marriage). This morning’s announcement that Autonomy (AUTNF) is acquiring Interwoven (IWOV) for $775M would have made Maximilian proud. Indeed, while some (including Alan Pelz-Sharpe at CMS Watch) have gone as far as to call Autonomy a holding company, I think of Autonomy more as a Habsburgian dynasty.

Autonomy’s acquisitions over the past decade include:

• Softsound (speech recognition)
• Virage (multimedia search)
• etalk (call center software)
• Verity (enterprise search)
• Blinkx (multimedia search, since divested)
• Zantaz (email archiving and litigation support)

And now Autonomy acquires Interwoven, a player in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space. It’s not quite an AOL-acquires-Time Warner moment, but it is dramatic to see an enterprise search player acquire a content management player. Indeed, most of the speculation last year was that Autonomy would be acquired, not vice versa.

What does this mean for the rest of us? Given that Autonomy and Interwoven have both been focusing on the compliance and e-discovery space, it is reasonable to expect that the acquisition will deepen this focus. The more interesting question, at least to me, is what this means for the rest of the enterprise search space. Autonomy was recently crowing that it “has won the enterprise search wars“. That’s news to me, but I won’t claim to be objective. In any case, with Autonomy focusing its investment in the compliance / e-discovery space and Microsoft acquiring FAST in order to fold its technology into SharePoint, I do wonder what will happen to the competitive landscape of enterprise search. Will it be Endeca vs. Google?

Today is a monumental day in the history of the United States, and I suspect many readers will be too caught up in the inaugural festivities to be checking their RSS readers. But everyone has a job to do, and part of mine is to speak truth to power through blogging.

A few months ago, when Obama’s victory was hardly certain, I was fortunate to attend a meeting of New York technology executives where Jed Katz, a managing director at DFJ Gotham Ventures and a technology advisor to the Obama campaign, responded to questions about Obama’s technology strategy. What he made clear was that he, and by extension the Obama campaign and administration-to-be, was there as much to listen and learn as to respond.

I followed up with Jed by sending my ideas about how the federal government can better make public domain information available to the public. Today, much of that data is locked up in the hands of vendors who then dole it out in drabs. While these arrangements may have been necessary at the time to fund the distribution of that information, they are out of step with today’s technology. What we need is for anyone to be able to obtain that information in raw form and then add value to it by creating better ways to access and analyze it. In fact, private sector companies, universities, and NGOs could compete in their offerings.

I’m hardly the first person to suggest this. Vivek Kundra, the CTO of the District of Columbia and a short-listed candidate for CTO of the United States, organized Apps for Democracy, a contest much along the lines of what I’m describing.

I work in the private sector, and I’m not swayed by the naive conception that  all information needs to be free. Some of us would like to earn a living! But public domain information produced by government needs to be freely available to an informed and active citizenry. Moreover, information freely contributed by that citizenry should to be available to decision makers, as well as to the at large.

Today is a milestone many of us never expected we’d live to see, a president who “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” Let’s raise the stakes and aim for a government that doesn’t look like the information-hiding governments of our past. That is change I can believe in.