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Dvorak on Google and Wikipedia
cryptoluddite writes "PC Magazine has an article by John C. Dvorak expanding on the community discussion of Google's offer for free web hosting of Wikipedia. Those against the deal point out that Google may be planning to co-opt the encyclopedia as Googlepedia (by restricting access to the complete database). In a revealing speech given by the Google founders, Larry Page says he would 'like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month.' Should public domain information be free?" It's a pretty scary scenario painted, but one can hardly take a speech from 2001 as serious evidence these days. Update: 02/16 20:16 GMT by T : This story links inadvertently to the second page of the column; here's a link to the first page.
And this is another thing they can leverage in their war against MS... Next up, a total web-based OS (Firefox/Linux backend?)... Would be interesting to see where this is going; someone needs to stand up to the behemoth that is Microsoft, for the sake of all mankind!
if someone ruins it, sure it is a shame, but something else will pop up to replace it. The internet is just a big game of whack-a-mole, no matter if you are the RIAA, the Feds, a kiddie porn fiend, or a information seeker.
It's kind of the whole point...
i saw the baby, and the baby looked at me
IF (and it IS an if), google do start restricting and charging - it would be a pity.
This information was collected for free, and would be disseminated at a cost. While this has been done before (volunteer organisations are not new) - it would probably lead people away from making the effort in the next thing that comes along and is "by the people for the people"
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
Is IMDB the model for Wikipedia going forward?
Free not-necessarily-accurate data for everyone, fact-checked and extended commercial data for some?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
What exactly are you throwing a hissy fit about? By sold-out, do you refer to google becoming publically as opposed to privately traded?
In 2001, that was still a cutting edge idea. People knew there was a way to make everything accessable, but weren't entirely sure what revenue model could support that.
$20 a month was (and is) a small price to pay for everything, if "everything" is correct and up to date.
I'd certianly pay a subscription for Google now, because their service is of value to me.
Never confuse volume with power.
Still IS on the front page of google...well 1 click away. And the search is still perfectly usable...what IS Dvorak on about?
While I will agree with him that DejaNews should NEVER have ended up in the hands of a corporate entity when the oportunity came for it to enter public hands; google havnt done a bad job of maintaining it. Its just a pitty no-one has come up with a service to compete with Google on that level since it COULD be a lot better.
I own a business, and maximizing profits is no where on my list. I make enough money to pay my employees and myself. We all get a reasonable job so we don't have to go through life miserable, and we get to eat and have places to live. I could make more profit, but that would have an adverse effect on my employees lives, so I don't. If I were the CEO of a public company, I would not have that option, shareholders demand that nothing matters but short term profits.
Storing customer's e-mails even after they've deleted them is just as "evil," because they could easily become the subject of a subpeano or discovery in a lawsuit.
Google does a lot of evil things. Just because they slap on a motto claiming otherwise doesn't make it so.
This is just like what happened to the CDDB (Compact Disc DataBase). It was open source, public server, free client. Millions of us entered our CD data, in exchange for access to everyone else's data, for free. Then the founders sold the operation to GraceNote corporation, which took it proprietary, and slapped licensing restrictions on access, protected by secure login - locking out all the "owners" of the shared data we'd entered.
Some other people cloned the DB server into FreeDB, and jumpstarted it by datamining the CDDB server while it was still publicly accessible. We'll probably need to do that with Wikipedia. How big is it? Since "Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License", we should take a page from the FreeDB folks who saved our data from privateering clutches. How big is Wikipedia, in GB? Sounds like a job for BitTorrent, or perhaps Archive.org, or maybe a more passive archive, which would redistribute it only if access is restricted. Just distributing copies of the valuable data we've all produced would probably preempt Google, or any other "benefactor" from taking Wikipedia private. Let's not repeat the history that stole from us.
--
make install -not war
I wouldn't be too worried.
Capitalism has checks and balances.
As serious evidence? No. But thanks for the commentary.
No, what it is telling of though, is the mindset at Google at the time of writing. This little insight is important now because it's quite possible that their end goal is to monopolize information in such a way as to extract their income from it.
As they've recently made copious amounts of money and gained incredible power, it's quite possible its gone to their heads. Let's not paint them as a humanitarian group just because we like them: they are a company, after all, and have the same potential for evil that Microsoft (or any large company or government) has and does demonstrate.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That the same guy in PC magazine? I used to read that eons ago... I found myself in the grocery store and read his latest column (in PC Mag). It was kinda interesting, he was mentioning the Cell processor.
But he incorrectly stated, not once -- but three times, that the Cell was going to be a 250 "Teraflop" processor.
Dunno about him, but everywhere I've seen info on this chip, it was a gigaflop processor, not teraflop. Don't believe me? Go pick up the most recent PC Magazine, see for yourself.
FLR
It might be a viable model to sell the content to people, but it certainly won't encourage anyone to contribute. I, unlike many people, don't believe in the Magic Server Fairy, who provides everyone with free bandwith, with the logical result anyone trying to earn money from their site is evilly distorting the whole point of the Internet, which is entertaining people for free.
The problem is that once money gets involved, people's motivation will drop away. It will still be free-as-in-freedom, the GFDL means they cannot take that away. But once it has the feel of working for free-as-in-no-pay for Google to make a profit on it, you can see why people simply won't bother.
Of course, this is all speculation, let's not get too stressed yet.
In /. case, no, it's definitely not worth any money to me. I use /. to kill time while my project is building at work. Occasionally, there are articles that interest me. My contribution is not putting /. in adblock.
Google is entirely different. It provides access to information in a format that is much more agreeable to me than other searches I've used. Unlike what others have claim, I regularly click on the ad links because they are often relevant to the information I'm looking for. I personally feel Google maps kicks the crap out of other tools. If they found a way to make their service significantly more usable, it would certainly be worth it to me.
Hints (2 Things that'd move me closer to being willing to pay):
Integrate Google maps with movie showtimes, as in IMDB's theater database. If possible, read my local paper and correlate showtimes from there, since not all my local theaters keep their times up to date online.
Correlate restaraunt searches in google maps with reviews. I'd like a review aggregate for a total star rating of nearby messages when I get directions via SMS. I'd like to be able to filter places that google believes suck, based on their their review data.
Never confuse volume with power.
In particular, ladies and gentlemen, consider MSN Search's fantastic Encarta Integration feature; you ask, for instance, "Who killed Abraham Lincoln? (to take MSN's own sample search string), and it gives you the answer. As much as I hate MSN, I think this makes it MSN 1 - Google 0; nope, Google's answer.com integration just doesn't match.
I'd consider Google's offer of hosting Wikipedia sites in the light of this feature offering by Microsoft.
More than mere navel gazing.
I agree. Just think - Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Pericles' funeral oration to fallen Greek warriors in the Peloponnesian War, and JFK's "We Choose To Go To The Moon" speech - all consigned to the dustbin of history by one arbitrary pronouncement on the part of one self-important pundit. Way to go, dude.
Does that sentence mean that we should disregard all speeches spoken before, say, June 14 2004? What is PC Magazine's cutoff date here?
Don't be ridiculous. He's talking about a speech given by a head honcho at a tech company several years ago. The tech industry, as we all know, changes very rapidly. Saying that such a speech might not be relevent any longer has absolutely nothing to do with whether actual important historical speeches are still relevant (which they may or may not be).
And besides, it was CowboyNeal who said that, not Dvorak (your "self-important pundit").
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
Just offering a free service, in exchange perhaps to displaying some text ads or offering more relevant results to their searches. If someone is not satisfied, he can always host a copy himself.
As for subscription or pay-per-view information services, I am all for it, even for $100 per month, if the knowledge/art I get is not further restricted - I can burn a CD and give it to someone who can not afford access.
I fear that authors/editors would withdraw from Wikipedia if it were under the arm (or in the iron-fist) of a for-profit company. If these people felt like Google was profiting on the backs of their freely-contributed content, these content creators would leave and the Wiki would whither for lack of fresh/updated content. Donating time so that other may profit does not seem likely.
What is interesting is that Amazon makes this work. The company is clearly a for-profit entity. Yet its crown jewels are the volunteer-created book reviews. I'm not sure what makes this work. It might be that friends-of-authors are motivated to post glowing reviews, it might be that people who disliked the book are motivated to post scathing reviews, it might be that some reviewers simply like to publish, or all of the above. Perhaps Wiki/Google-pedia could borrow this model to mix free-labor with for-profit.
Looking further into the future on an alternate path, I wonder if Googlepedia could become a fully for-profit (or at least self-sufficient) professionally run and staffed encyclopedia. With micro-royalties to authors/editors (and moderation-based revocation of payments for "bad" content), the organization would attract content creators on a for-pay basis. This aligns the motivational underpinnings of the organization with those of the content creators. The current Wikipedia is for-free people creating for-free content. A future Googlepedia could by for-pay people creating for-pay content.
One overriding lesson from Wikipedia (and Slashdot for that matter) is the ultimate necessity of sources of hard currency for online sites. As long as something is small (and below a certain scale of popularity) it can survive on donated hardware, bandwidth, or the benevolence of a monied patron (someone who pays the hosting bills out-of-pocket). But once it reaches a certain scale, the cost of serious server power, bandwidth, and professional administrators pushes the budget far beyond the hobby scale. Although pleas for donations can help, I suspect large-scale sites must, ultimately, turn to ads, tie-in product sales, and subscriptions.
What is fascinating, in a long-term trend sense, is that the cost of scale are steadily declining. Cheaper hardware, declining bandwidth costs, and improvements in systems management tools mean that sites can reach ever-larger scales before generating prohibitive burn rates on costs. The number of visitors that a hobbyist/free-site can support continues to rise. Perhaps Wike need only wait for the singularity point when the cost to reach (and serve packets to) the entire world is within the reach of a home-grown, volunteer-run organization.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I suggested Google to support Wikipedia long time ago
Information can be free, sure. The process of obtaining that free information is not necessarily free. The free information is hosted on a server that must be bought, and transmitted over a connection that must be bought. If it's a large-scale hosting project, support staff must be present to keep it working, and these staff must be paid. The person accessing the information is paying their ISP for their own connection, and had to buy their own computer. How much would you pay for a wikipedia that responded to requests as fast as Google does to searches?
The speech certainly is revealing - it reveals cryptoluddite's agenda, which is anti-google.
If you look at the quote in context, I think it's pretty clear that google is not talking about doing the selling, unless they are the gateway to ALL the content. They will never be that gateway. I do think that there is a market for commercial versions of some of this media, but I think the future is that you will pay only for directed media, and for convenient access to media. For instance a newspaper will have several classes of information, based on what they think they can sell to who; There will be information that is free on the web and also in print, information that is included in the cost of the paper but for which you must pay extra on the web, and so on.
In the meantime sites like E2 and Wikipedia will probably be freely available for the forseeable future, but I would like to see them have commercial or "pro" versions of the site. For example, the pay site would have full-text searching, and the free side might not (and in both cases, currently does not.) You would also be able to enter RFBs for research papers, and you could accept them based on price and posting history. This model would work better for E2 than for Wikipedia due to Wikipedia's collaborative nature, but it is not inapplicable to Wikipedia.
Anyway, any comissioned research would become a part of the database at an appropriate time (possibly part of the license agreement) and thus everyone would benefit. At the minimum, the site would make a commission, which would definitely benefit all of the service's users.
This is precisely the way software is going, and I don't see any reason that all kinds of media won't see the same development. In fact, I see no way that any kind of media can survive without making this transition.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Would be more like 20 bucks for access to ALL the world's content. Lexis-Nexis, academic journals, and other subscription only services. Access to all of 'em.
Would be nice. I'd pay for it in a heartbeat.
"They cannot restrict copying of the content, but they can limit access to it via Google's servers." - Wrong. The GFDL requires them to provide a transparent copy on a nondiscriminatory basis. Wikipedia does this via download.wikipedia.org, and google would be obligated, at the very least, to provide something similiar.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Yes, the that's right. We have lots of wikipedia stories and more and more coming with this googlepedia story. It's time to create a Wikipedia category so we can use their logo in the stories!
Lest we forget, Google is not in this game as a benevelent dispenser of information...in whatever form. They are a publicly-traded, profit-driven corporation who is on-track to becoming the next 800 lbs. gorilla that everyone regrets dancing with.
In the end, Google, like Microsoft, will only get in the way of progress and innovation.