Participation Literacy

I remember Yahoo as one of the early players on the Internet. Yahoo was known as the directory service as opposed to the search engines Altavista and Lycos. Yahoo is an offspring of the hierarchical Gopher protocol in the days before World Wide Web. Yahoo’s directory and other hierarchical taxonomies will probably always have an important role to play in the information and knowledge society, but other ways to view information and knowledge lie in front of us. When Google emerged, it was as a new fresh search engine with a clean interface without blinking banners. But it was the PageRank technology that made it the worlds largest search engine. Search engines before Google ranked their hit list on parameters such as where in a document a search string appeared, and how often. It became a sport to fool the search engines by, for example, writing search words hundreds of times at the end of the document in white text, preventing it for being displayed on the page, or writing the search words over and over again in the meta tags. Google had a sensational solution to this, they would count how many pages linked to a certain page in the hit list, and the Web site with the most pages linking to it, would end up on the top. This is one of the most profound Web 2.0 phenomena, representing the real start on the phenomena called collective intelligence (in this context). Every movement on the WWW leaves traces, and those traces are not too hard to follow. Web 2.0 thinking strives to harness those traces.

Google About text:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Yahoo About text:

Our mission is to be the most essential global Internet service for consumers and businesses. How we pursue that mission is influenced by a set of core values - the standards that guide interactions with fellow Yahoos, the principles that direct how we service our customers, the ideals that drive what we do and how we do it. Many of our values were put into practice by two guys in a trailer some time ago; others reflect ambitions as our company grows. All of them are what we strive to achieve every day. [Excellence, Innovation, Customer Fixation, Teamwork, Community Fun].

Reading the Google and Yahoo about texts, gives an insight into their mission. Yahoo are perhaps more laidback. Even though the say their goal is to be the most essential global Internet service, they are not doing it aggressively. Google’s mission is short and concise. They want to gain control over all information in the world and they want to give it back to the people in a more usable package. They are not saying the package is going to be intertwined with commercials, but that is self-evident.

A few years back, Google was only an Internet search engine, but the company has grown both vertically and horizontally. Google’s role as the number one search engine with the revolutionizing PageRank and AdSense technologies has deepened. PageRank means Google is ranking the hit list according to the following rule: pages with more pages linking to them earn their place higher up in the hit list than pages with fewer pages linking to them. AdSense means text ads in the search engine and other pages, and the ads are always contextual to what you search on or what page you are visiting. Searching on the word “cell phone” for example, renders ads from companies related to the cell phone industry.

In 2004 and 2005 there was a massive expansion on the horizontal level. Google launched their mail service Gmail, which is one of the best examples for Web 2.0 ajaxian user interfaces as yet. They also launched Google Maps; often named as a blueprint for Web 2.0 services. Later they launched a service called Google Earth, which actually is a desktop application. With Google Scholar they tried to reach academic information, bounded in academic commercial databases such as Science Direct. Another goal with Scholar was to filter the academic information from irrelevant Web pages (what ever that means).

Yahoo has had a horizontal expansion strategy for several years, with yahoo mail, calendar, notebook, briefcase and other tools, but perhaps not as forceful as in the recent year. Yahoo has a base of Web 1.0 services mentioned above. Recently they have moved towards the Web 2.0 mindset, partly by creating new services such as the new bookmark service conveniently called myWeb 2.0. It has not gained a widespread attention though – it is currently on place 16 on the list of social bookmark managers at Listble. Yahoo’s main move into the Web 2.0 mindset has up till now been through the purchase of both Flickr and Delicious – the two most popular and most talked about Web 2.0 services in all categories.

Google’s horizontal expansion has lead to speculations about a war against Microsoft. If it happens, or if it is already a reality, it will be a war between business models: the service company Google against the software company Microsoft. It is not too farfetched to see it as a war between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0, although Microsoft has another view (Batelle, 2006). In recent years Google has actually become a software company with Google Earth and the purchase of the image organizer application Picasa, but they have also purchased the world leading blogging service Blogger. Other services they have launched recently are Google Reader (RSS reader) and the Google Talk (Instant Messaging (IM)) client. If a war between Google and Microsoft is emerging, we might see Yahoo as one of the combatants. In the beginning of 2006 there are a lot of texts in the blogosphere, mentioning Yahoo and Ajax - and also Microsoft and Ajax. Even though the Ajax programming environment does not say directly that it is about Web 2.0 services, it does indirectly. According to my experience many programmers use the word “ Ajax” almost in the same way I use “Web 2.0”

A comment at the frozen moment, when this thesis is written, is that there have been a lot of rumours about an upcoming Google browser and its possible impact on Microsoft. It is hard to predict what will happen. Microsoft has the advantage of being the leading provider of Operating Systems, i.e. MS Windows, but I guess Google has the advantage of being some sort of mycelia reaching every square inch on the Internet. They can have a fresh view of how to build the proper application (that is the Web browser) for lodging the next generation of Internet services. The team behind the Flock browser has already showed the possible to view the Web browser in different terms than Microsoft and Mozilla do. The Flock browser relies heavily on third part folksonomy applications, see more below.

Google also functions as a symbol for some negative aspects of Web 2.0. Google is one of the actors in the computer industry who accept censorship in Kina. This act reminds us about the commercial drive in Web 2.0. It is easy to forget the commercial underpinning in the computer industry when talking about Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 discourse has generally an air of openness, but this urge to be open and communicative should be positioned against the instincts for money and power.

Since Web 2.0 builds on openness and participation there will be integrity and security problems. Google’s marketing strategies with text ads forming after your navigational context can be viewed as devious compared to flashing commercials directed to everyone. It can be argued that Google Desktop 3 increases the integrity problems. Google Desktop is software for searching your computer in the same fashion you search on the Internet. Version 3 includes the possibility to store the search index on Google’s servers. Having the index on Google’s servers means you can search your own computer from anywhere in the world. This also means that Google knows a lot about you. If someone hacks Google they might get information about you. The government or even rivals could subpoena the search engine for the information stored on the Google servers and automatically get information about you and your actions on the Web.

My intention was to introduce the concept Participation Literacy in the last section as a beginning for my post-Lic research. But maybe the context calls for a quick introduction. Participation Literacy means learning to share and participate in a Native Web world where participation and sharing is going to be an important feature in our lives. It has always been important, but the native Web environment calls for participation and sharing as one of its basic features. To be participation literate you have to be equally skilled at sharing your knowledge and letting others share their knowledge with you, but it also includes knowledge of when it is safe to share and when it is not. It is not wise to share your bank account in insecure settings, but it is usually no danger in letting other people know your shoe size. Everything between those polarities calls for a certain amount of knowledge about how to share and participate in Web environments. This knowledge together with firewalls, spyware detectors and antivirus software will be required ingredients in our life from now on.

Tags: bookmarks, google, pagerank, participation, participation literacy, web 2.0, yahoo