Why Kids Can’t Search

The November issue of Wired has an interesting article on a new form of (media) illiteracy: the generation of so-called digital natives seems to lack the means to determine the credibility of the information they find online.

A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google’s results list.

But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.

This reminds me of my parents generation who - if another blatant generalization is allowed - might think everything that has been seen fit to print in a newspaper must be true. Thank goodness for the X-Files teaching me not to trust anything.

Volunia

In this short video, Massimo Marchiori introduces tha last fruit of its work, available by the end of the year: Volunia, a new service that seems a search engine (like Google) but promises to be totally different.

In this article (unfortunately in italian, sorry), it is presented as one of the results that will lead to the new frontier of the Web, the Semantic Web.

Facebook, the FRA Law and Google

The legal issues surrounding the upcoming Facebook data center in Northern Sweden are starting to come up. Here's a snippet from The Register a week ago:

A controversial Swedish internet surveillance law passed in 2008 allows the government there to intercept any internet traffic that passes Sweden's borders with no need for a court warrant. It's called the FRA law and the Swedes don't like it, and Google called it "unfit for a Western democracy". And the rest of Europe could start to get annoyed by it too when that internet traffic includes their Facebook data.

What I find the most interesting in this is what Google has said and done around the issue. As you probably know they opted to build a data center in Finland. I don't know if they ever even considered Sweden but if you consider the fact that the net traffic from Finland towards Europe and onwards still goes via Sweden, it doesn't really make a difference which they choose as far as the FRA law is concerned.

I'm guessing the proximity to Russia is the real reason for choosing Hamina. The rest feels like a clever Machiavellian way to play the "Don't be evil" card to me.

Beyond Web 2.0

There have been debates regarding the evolution of the web. The way the web evolved from Web 1.0, where the web used to be mere static pages to Web 1.5, many had considered the evolution was breathtaking which was the era when the web had assumed more dynamic fashion. However, it was only to be overshadowed by the emergence of Web 2.0, or in simple language, SOCIAL MEDIA. Social media has been at the forefront since a number of years now. The aftereffects it has reproduced are breathtaking. Analysts who examine social media and its evolution believe that the web is moving towards what we would call Web 3.0. Essentially, Web 3.0 would be offering more personalization to media consumers which will provide them more liberty to choose the content types they like. It goes beyond the "conventional" (although I don't agree with this terminology!) type of User-Generated Content media consumers are accustomed to. When will Web 3.0 form part of the mainstream?

Since media is becoming more and more fragmented and volatile, competition amongst content providers is becoming fiercer. some plays want to remain ahead of others in the race to achieve superiority. One example I was going to outline here was the emergence of "Gmail Motion" (a prank joke by Google on April 01, 2011), something which I believe could be a major step towards Web 3.0. Google advocated that "Gmail Motion uses your computer's built-in webcam and Google's patented spatial tracking technology to detect your movements and translate them into meaningful characters and commands". It is indeed an eyeopener and I think the race towards Web 3.0 will be on fire now.

A demo of what Google tried to show can be seen right here. ENJOY!