Online shared intelligence

All fantasies of ethical behavior die a slow death in these hyper-commercialized days. The process is familiar, you like a hungry startup because you are hungry for empathy, the hungry startup likes you because… it’s hungry for your attention. You love each other, admire each other, and everything works until the hungry startup makes it. Then, class conflict replaces romance.

Google’s “do no evil” was just a stretcher, a smart tactic to make us think the other way while the company helped the Chinese government censor its people (and probably helping ours censor us as well). But let’s admit it, the romance is gone; Google crossed “to the other side” long ago.

Lately, however, something is starting to happen more and more frequently, which would suggest that the corruption of principle is getting deeper and deeper into the architecture of this money-making machine: search SPAM. Check the search below: can anybody suggest that the Google engine does NOT know the difference between this SPAM result (offering cheap cash) and the technical results I was expecting from an OBVIOUSLY technical search? How many people would you expect to Google for specifications on a software integration and come out saying “Hey, that was cool, getting cheap cash was exactly was I needed for my integration needs!”?

Do you know of any innovative search provider that is still hungry enough to love me? If so, let me know… And if you see Google around, please ask them to come pick up their things or I’ll throw them out of the window  :)

Most users of enterprise social networking / collaboration complain about the chasm between common desktop documents and on-line content; let’s face it, most Rich Text Editors (RTE’s) used by Enterprise Collaboration products are anything but “Rich”, and people who learned everything they know about computers through Office don’t get along with Textile either. As a result, RTE’s and/or Textile irritate the heck out of most users.

From what I hear, most collaboration vendors are trying to tackle this problem, some by making the desktop edition even more proprietary (guess who), others by trying to improve RTE’s. Well, there is another vendor, one that doesn’t have a collaboration platform of its own, whose product (Evernote) is quite relevant to this issue…