Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

I had a great meeting with Google Chief of Search Strategy Peter Norvig last week.

We brainstormed the notion of creating a separate “Better World” section to Google News at the same level as science, technology, sports, etc. I think that this has tremendous potential – and it opens up the very important question, how do we find the news which can help make the world a better place?

This technique, creating an empty slot which then draws people’s attention to filling it, is a powerful design technique. Mendeleyev did this in desiging the periodic chart of the elements. He discerned a pattern of the repeating characteristics of the elements, drew his chart, and then created named voids for the holes in the chart. This is an example of creating missing nothings.

The analogy here is that adding “Better World” to Google News would create a missing nothing for folks to fill up. Creating a better world would be a topic, and folks who figured out how to make the world a better place would have a way to thrive by showing, rather than telling. Rather than fundraising, they could thrive by trustraising.

The impact of this on the Google user experience would be enormous. Not only would Google give users what they want (and get out of the way); they would give them a way to make the world a better place. Some cynics might say that this is pollyannish…OK, go ahead and search for beheadings and looking at the world as an infinite regress of reciprocal attrocities. You’ll find that and much more, today and throughout history.

On the other hand, we could flip to positive discourse:

Interesting Site for serious uses of games… Serious Games

“The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy.”

What’s interesting about this approach is that gaming allows us to appreciate the coevolutionary and generative consequences of our interaction. We are really good at “Monday morning quarterbacking” of what should have been done in the past, which in turn triggers regulations and controls for future activities. Thus, the pathological extreme becomes the dominant controlling consideration in our “normal” interaction. It really may be the best policy for all concerned to “take two aspirin and see if it goes away by morning” for a headache, but the fear of a one-in-a-million brain tumor drives our attention to doing a CT scan as a defensive measure against future malpractice. Serious gaming and modeling of future scenarios could introduce postive discourse to the situation, and more realistically portray what is likely to happen.

This approach has a lot of potential.

I just stumbled upon an interesting idea from England… a group collects poetry and distributes them around in Doctor’s offices. Michael Lee is the editor pitwr@blueyonder.co.uk He’s done a lot of thinking about the type of poetry and the dynamics of poetry and the health care process (or, at least, the waiting room).

He’d be very interested in spreading this idea in the States or elsewhere, if anyone is interested…

Peter Kaminski just pointed out to me an interesting description of a mathematical reconstruction of the hole in Escher’s Prentententoonstelling print.

This is all very interesting, but all they did, really, is make the hole smaller.
It’s still there, as a hole in the fabric of our reality.

Google has announced in their SEC Registration that they want to make the world a better place. I think this is great.

The New York Times op-ed piece Googling Google editorial seemed to me to be a little cynical about this:

“their one-of-a-kind company with the “Don’t Be Evil” motto will remain committed to making the world a better place. Such idealistic talk out of Silicon Valley, so seemingly empowering back in 1999, seems embarrassingly na?ve now that the party’s ended, at least for the rest of us.”

Maybe the party has ended for the New York Times, and this op-ed is just a symptom of a hungry dinosaur, dimly aware of its impending extinction. As former editor Howell Raines said in the May 2004 Atlantic Monthly:

“a harsh reality of our era is that if the [New York] Times ever ceased to exist, it would not be reinvented by any media company now in operation, in this country or in the world. A harsher reality is that its ability to prosper in the modern media marketplace is not at all assured.”

I can understand that Madison Avenue might be a little upset at Google for creating their global brand without their “assistance.” Google simply provided a great service which got better, the more people used it. They did not go to Madison avenue to force peoples’ “lizard brains” to want to buy their product. David Weinberger gave an impassioned rant on this subject on C-Span recently.

The general Lizard-brain approach is: See the beautiful babe. Drink our beer. Get the babe.

Charities have sometimes adopted this approach, too: See the sad-eyed child. Give us Money. Help the sad-eyed child.

(A former vice president of one of the largest charities running these ads told me that of the $28 per month they collected from these ads, maybe $4 made it to the kid.) Save the Children once even dipped to the level of “poverty porn” which included a vulture lurking over the kid. And then there is the question of whether giving to one kid in a village is the best way to uplift the village… but the process appeals to our lizard-brain.

Google is on a roll; their search technololgy is just a starter kit for their enterprise. They have an incredibly scalable architecture (Google responds instantly; eBay takes forever in comparison) They’ve built a top global brand (no thanks to Madison Ave), and now they are going directly to the web with their IPO.

The common theme to all this is that they are associating, integrating whatever they come in contact with. Google News associates news articles by topic from around the world, whereas New York Times integrates it. Gone are many of the hierarchies and control structures; arriving is a new sense of direct connectedness.

I think that Google already has made the world a better place; and I applaud them for making this their continuing goal. And I hope that they maintain their “naivete.”

I am also intrigued with their notion of a Google Foundation; humanitarian uplift could use a shot of the Google Magic to help create a cascade of uplift. Anyone wanting to talk about network effects and humanitarian uplift should check out GivingSpace.

Rather than throwing rocks at Google, perhaps we need a few more Google-like competitors, all trying to make the world a better place, inventing systems which improve themselves by improving others.

I prefer to think of Google as just the beginning of an associative avalanche of ways of connecting people and things to make the world a better place.

I hope that they set a mighty precedent… a successful company makes the world, not Madison Avenue and Wall Street, a better place.