Sunday, November 23, 2008

Google Destroying Intellectual Value?

Today I had a discussion with a Professor of Economics and an Economic Researcher. Both had wonderful view about Google. They say, Google is destroying the Intellectual Value of the Information Creaters.

In their Own Words:
  • After Google has come, all the focus has gone from the Information Creation to the Information Integration and Publishing.
  • The Print Media is dying, and all the focus has gone to the on-line publishing where Intellectual Property is not protected.
  • The free information distribution mode including blogs are creating so much of buzz where they are hardly of any value. Most of the information present in these formats are junk.
  • People can copy and reformat, and republish same material creating so much of redundancy.
  • The concept of Knol where a portion of revenue is shared with the Writer is hardly of any value to them. It just pays off very little. And all the profit goes to the platform and not to the writers. Google just benefits from it.
  • Blogs and Knol provides platform to anyone to judge and reward. This creates a difficult situation for great researcher as the common man hardly understands it.
  • Information collectors, Interators and Good presenters are highly rewarded. This is making people to believe in searching and copying rather than in doing serious research.
I just have one thing to say to them. They don't understand business and are not able to cope up with the changed situation.

Professors and Researchers will have to understand business logic and need to create value readers. They cant just run away with saying people are stupid, who don't understand or value their findings or writings. This is just not done. They will have to find wrong inside themselves and have to respect the people's views. Need to digest the Information Area, and not blame Google.

Google's Knol is one of the best platform for any underdog to put his views. This has made World more flat and now the information world is not dominated by few Media agencies and so called intellectuals. But by the group of the entire mass who is interested in the information. Everyone in the world is in the same plane, and one needs to build his profile in the open market to be successful in the long term.

I however don't say, Professors are totally wrong. There are problems with the free information distribution. Most of these websites and blogs are filled with advertisements. It really pisses off sometimes, but readers have the right to punish them. They just need to do is to learn on how to punish them.
e.g. They can mark "Don't Like" in StumbleUpon.

The other weakness I see is that of the profile and linked profile. It is the disadvantage of extreme freedom and democracy in all areas, and it has entered Information Space too. A new guy who thinks to blog from company like Google can quickly have good traffic, if his friend bloggers link his website from theirs. But I doubt he can really sustain with just help, if he does not have quality.

I support Google's fight for right to information to all. They have done a remarkable job. But few points that Professors have put up are alarming. We need to make sure how good researchers and information creaters are rewarded. If they are not valued and left behind, it will hurt the World. World will just become a place of smart players trying to fool each other.

--
Wonderful follow up by Deep Sherchan. Thanks a lot Deep.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi
YOur bolg is very nice. I have really learnt a lot from this blog thanks

KVSSNrao said...

Google and other electronic platforms are not rewarding researchers adequately!

Which platform rewarded researchers adequately?

Newspapers and periodicals said unless you send an article against our request, we are not responsible for any thing. We will not even send you back the article. Forget sending remuneration, they do not even inform that your article was published.

Research journals want researchers to pay.

Textbook publishing gave some money to some people only. By and large most of the researchers have not received any money for their intellectual property. You cannot patent a research paper. You can patent inventions. Science is a free good. You cannot stop anyone from using it.

The emergence of electronic publishing made life of a reseacher easy. He can publish what he wants to convey to the world and the world is free to critically evaluate his argument and findings. No doubt, no body should use a single article for commercial exploitation. Any person who wants to use any idea for commercial exploitation needs to do his own analysis, needs to take opinion from number of experts and then conduct its technical feasibility studies.

According to me, electronic publishing is good for creative people of any discipline. It is bad for some editors who lost their power of censoring now.

Bhupendra said...

Prof. Narayana,
I have similar feeling as yours. There were only a few researchers (who were associated with Media houses or affiliates) benefiting earlier. But now the platform is open to all. People with quality can show his greatness in a better way, only thing that is changed is that everyone will have to pass the open world test.

I appreciate your effort to stop by my blog and comment. Thank you.

-- Bhupendra

VBPOutSourcing said...

I have actually read about blog insurance. This would help protect those who copy and paste, share protected material, and allow trackbacks to their own site and not the source. Infringement of copyrighted material can be up to 150 thousand dollars per infringement.

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