Gatekeepers’ Last Gasp: Journalists Know Information
April 17, 2009
The Guardian (a UK dead tree publication) ran Seth Finkelstein’s “Shutdown of Wikia Search Proves Empty Rhetoric of Collaboration” here. I enjoyed the idea, the argument, and the writing. On the surface, the failure of the collaborative, people-fueled search system Wikia is a news story. In fact, in appropriate journalistic garb, the guts of the argument could be used in a first year writing class:
This strategy of mining user-generated discontent foundered in trying to monetise those sentiments. As anyone in politics can attest, it’s easy to have a crowd rant about dangers and to generate press coverage, but harder to turn those feelings into something vaguely useful. And, contrary to many pundits who have sought to find some way that Wikia Search could be said to have affected Google, there is no evidence it had any effect whatsoever. While Google’s “SearchWiki” interface has an obviously similar name, beyond that possible bit of marketing the underlying system is much more about personalisation than presenting results to others.
How delicious! “Vaguely useful.”
When I think about this article in the context of the fire fight now raging about online information and the traditional media (aka “dead tree outfits”), I chuckled. The article does a very good job of making clear that a gatekeeper has to step forward and impose order on the unruly crowd. Indeed. As civil disorder peppers cities from Athens to Zagreb, order is useful.
On one hand, Google seems to be the outfit best suited to manage the search side of the world. Whom do you suppose should handle the information side? Mr. Finkelstein’s approach left this addled goose with the idea that newspapers and publishers are the ideal candidates to tidy up the messy information businesses.
I have no idea who will craft “a representative trajectory of Web evangelism”. I do have a hunch that the dead tree crowd will have some ideas and expect to be paid to perform this valuable service.
Stephen Arnold, April 17, 2009
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