trendpreneur

Disclaimer: This post is personal opinion, the views expressed here are not those of Google, and not influenced by any relationships the poster may have with the Big G.

There have been arguments raging on and offline about paywalls, the commons, old media versus new media, and ‘information should be free’ for — well, it feels like forever now. One of the (many) components of new media under fire is the army of filthy idea-stealin’ bloggers, people who merrily subscribe to paid content and then go and paraphrase it on their free-to-view blogs (or in some cases, just copy it). Paul Carr makes an excellent point about the commoditisation of facts, the human need for information and thus the Internet hivemind’s tendency to trend towards free.

Information being free is good, for obvious reasons, unless you’re someone who wants to get paid to create it. There are plenty of arguments for well-crafted columns, investigative journalism, paid political pundits and so forth. But here’s a thought about the oft-maligned practice of reblogging, rephrasing, and retweeting.

Language is variable.

The more ways an idea or piece of information is expressed linguistically, the easier it is to find — it’ll match far more search queries, as a simple starting point. Although, in an echo of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, perhaps expressing an idea in multiple languages, or with different phrasings and words, could change the way people think about the idea. Even if this happens, the idea reaches far more people than it would have if it were confined to one site, in one language, by one author.

From Google’s point of view, if someone takes a New York Times article, paraphrases it, and links back to it, the data miners jump for joy. Beautiful, delicious data. We learn new things about the relationships between words and concepts — maybe one article said climate change but another global warming. The link-back gives us contextual data that can help too. (Linking to a climate change article with the text “This article on global warming”, for example).

Of course, paraphrasing and rewriting has been going on for years, a staple of the essay or lit review. But as with voice recognition, having the power to implement and use a feedback loop at world-scale is a mind-blowing thing. Google has the power to build an entire semantic web out of paraphrased blog posts, and that’s before we even look at contextual links in Wikipedia or Twitter link summaries. If that’s scary, just think of the magic that happens when you search for something and get a result that isn’t the exact terms you entered, but is the exact concept. With a bit of data, intelligence and an army of semantic web PhDs, it just could happen.