Googlebase and User-initiated innovation

User-initiated innovation was what made Microsoft what it is today. When the PC came along, users suddenly found that they were no longer at the mercy of the IT department. This was extremely liberating. Users found they could do things by themselves. No need for the high priests of mainframe to chant incantations for these lot of people. Spreadsheet macros, QBASIC and batch files were cobbled together like Frankenstein’s creation. They were ugly, but you know what? They were good enough.

However, these innovation were islands. Before the internet era, the main focus has been on storing and then protecting private data. Public stores of knowledge were in books, magazines and media.

Then the internet came, and suddenly we all become aware that making data publicly available is not altruism, it was advantageous. It is easier to post a tidbit of knowledge on the internet and let the search engines crawl them for posterity than recording it on bits of paper. We also learned the value in connecting people and enabling people to find other people: Ebay, Paypal, Craigslist. We also learnt that people can become media. In the past, to run online media, you have to a have a BBS with 120 phone lines running into your house. Now, weblogs and e-mail newsletters make it so easy that anyone who is passionate about their pet-topic can publish.

Googlebase is the next step. To give these mass of unstructured data some structure, so that it is easier to extract meaning from web pages. Google does not have to figure out what sort of mash-ups is going to be the next killer app. By liberating the kernels that are locked up in the unstructured data, Google is letting putting the user in the driver seat again, and challenging them to unlock new ways of finding people and doing business with this data.

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