Public Radio and TV has so much wonderful inventory - if I cannot find it, has it any value? I have been at the Fast 2008 conference in Orlando with 1,300 other people who have had a profound lesson in the relevance and the power of search on the web 2.0 world. I have come to the conclusion that higher levels of search - enabling me to have IT MY Way and to reflect back in real time my preferences to the producers is going to be the key to any system that Public Media rolls out.
Here are some neat video interviews with people such as Dan Tapscott and David Weinberger. MY favorite is Clare Hart of Dow Jones who showed us what "evolved search" looks like in practice today - where your world is presented to you.
I will leave Fast 08 knowing one thing. That Search will be one of the key ingredients in the new business model.
Imagine if I sent you a container full of DVDs. Packed to the top with DVD's. Many of them great films and shows but many of them not. Imagine there are 50 million of them in the container. Would this be helpful for you? In your busy day, how much time would you invest in trying to find the gems? With so many unknown to you, would you bother to have a look to see if you would like them?
My bet is that you would give up after a while. And so all that content would in effect have little value - even though it may have cost a lot to make.
Imagine the web in say 3 years time. Now for every conventional film, there are a million made by us the public - some of which are very good. There are more films in 2010 than have ever been made before. Now every film made will be there. (If film bores you, think books, or music, or shirts, or shoes) Think of a store the size of America - with no order to the layout or shelving) Will you have time to sort through all of this? I doubt it.
So of course when and should you find something that you like it will have value. In this new world of personal film, there will be thousands of films that you have never heard of that you might like. But the barriers to finding it are very high.
So I am now convinced that in a world of infinite information, finding what I like and what I would like will become one of the most valuable processes. Search becomes not a nice tool but essential. I even use it myself now to find my own stuff. I can't possibly keep up even with my own output let alone yours!
True search will not look like Google search box. I will want to know stuff that is important for me as a matter of course. I want events and stuff that will affect me to arrive before my eyes. I will want to be able to find stuff I don't even know I need.
My bet is that my friends will play a role in this. Even today, I would rather, in my time starved life, accept the recommendation of a friend than a stranger. He knows me and is filtering better.
For time and attention are scarce for all of us.
So as I struggle to understand all I have heard today - I know this. That the web has made the world infinitely more complex. There are too many choices out there for me to comprehend.
Evolved search will give me a perspective that will enable me to make meaning of it. Evolved Search will be like my own nervous system on the web. It will be an extension of me. It will filter as much as find.
Our nervous system deliberately limits noise. The world and life offer us too much data. So our eyesight is confined to a narrow bandwidth. Our hearing can be selective - enabling most of us to hear what others say in a crowd. We have evolved to select out the important from the noise. So it will be with Search - it too will have to constrain but also allow - allow what is most meaningful for each of us.
