Search and You May Not Find
A Thread on the Future of Search, Social Networks and Blogging
Arrington started this thread with his post on “junk content”. Now Fred Wilson, Om Malik and a few others have picked up on it. Here is the link to Fred’s post from A VC. What’s it all about? According to Arrington, Wilson et al, we are starting to see the limits of what search can offer. Why? Too many people are gaming the system with gimmicks to get search traffic. This gunks up the system.
So what’s next? Fred thinks web users will get savvy and rely more on digital social networks as sort of “trust clubs”. Fred would think that since he is investing in these tools like crazy. Om thinks networked content generation via blogging will evolve further. Interesting. But it seems the “what next” is still somewhat around the bend — most of us are not quite there yet. Indeed, some of us are still preoccupied with search.
My Take – As Om points out, blogging has been an incredibly democratizing force — and has led to an explosion of content. Me thinks that the explosion will continue to explode. Social networking is nice, but it is not flexible enough (yet) to give us the curation we need to manage the explosion(s). So I think that we need better business models for generating better and more flexible curation (paying people rather than platform generators). If we can make it pay, people will start doing it better. For example, Fred has a great curation model as a tech VC with an influential blog on tech trends, though sad to say most of us won’t be able to follow in his footsteps. But leveraging work output with content creation and curation will likely become more and more the norm. We just don’t do it very well yet. In the meantime, as Chris Dixon points out, we will still search when we want to buy something, or go to Amazon.
Bottom line - We are still in the early stages of getting everything we want, and what we need for the good life.
FOLLOW - From Howard Mann - “More megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue”