Open The Dialogue

Last night the tech world heralded the true launch of Google Base, the new service that looks to index anything and everything that the search tool hasn’t already found, and make it (somewhat) easy to filter through to find what you’re looking for. Job postings, classified ads, event listings, even news and stories on various topics will all make their way into Google Base, and users of the service will be able to sort through it all.

This is a huge story on Tech Memeorandum this morning, and with good reason. What I’m actually *happy* to see is that there are a lot of good critical voices out there. I can’t say that this won’t be a huge seller and be a very helpful tool for a lot of people, companies, and organizations. What I will say is that what Fred Wilson is thinking might be spot on. There are already services that handle certain things that Google Base is doing – from tagging to blogging to photo sharing to job postings – so will putting that all in one bucket with a pretty good search tool make it a worthwhile place for people to spend a good portion of their surftime? Will Google Base end up being open permanently on people’s desktops as a repository of all things content, whether that be what kind of toolshed you’re looking to have built in your backyard to a link to an editorial you got printed in your local paper? What levels of integration will it have with other Google products? Do sites that already own a lot of usership suffer in the long term, or do they gain traffic and success because of Base’s functionality? It already points to CareerBuilder’s job listings, which are now “searchable” without ever having to go to CareerBuilder’s own site until you want to look more closely. Additionally, what does this mean for people who are utilizing other Google services, like AdWords, that could potentially get overlapped by this? At TechCrunch, one commenter asks why he should be using AdWords for a keyword campaign for a job posting when he could just list the job through Base. Now obviously Base doesn’t have the usership that Google prime does, but that could change fairly quickly, especially for those “in the know.”

Dan Gillmor, I think, is asking a similar question – or really, making a rhetorical statement, if one can do so – when he says “There’s so much more here, potentially, than immediately meets the eye.” In my opinion, this is an easy way to get everyone to do for Google what it, and its search algorithms, haven’t been able to do alone – sort, filter, and deliver content, maybe even un-indexable content, in a way that makes the rest of the GoogleBot braintrust happy. You think you get a lot of search results now? I’d expect to see a big change there in the very near future, should this catch on.

Rashmi Sinha provides some thoughts as to what’s with the whole tagging epidemic – and I use ‘epidemic’ in the nicest possible way. She provides an excellent analysis of how we “tag” things in our everyday lives, and how that applies to using that skill on the Web. What’s great is that I found this entry while using del.icio.us, which is full of tagged links to everything and anything you might be interested in, and as I’m posting this I’ve put it in the newly formed “tagging” category here on my blog, but I’m not limited to doing just that. I could put it into “theory” or “Web 2.0″ or any number of categories on my site, or any other site like del.icio.us that I chose to post it on.

Categorizing content, news, information, whatever, through the form of links is so easy. It’s not like when you are recycling your cans and bottles at home, and you have one container that says “glass” and another that says “green glass” – leaving you to wonder what to do with the green bottle of beer in your hand – as you only have one choice. With tagging, the “error” is probably only limited to putting something in one bucket. You give people who might think differently than you do the same opportunity to find a link that you found interesting, even if they don’t think “tagging” is the tag to look under.

[via del.icio.us / axa1981]