Are people inherently stupid?
Sometimes I think so, especially when I hear someone ask “how do I turn the Internet on†when what they mean is “how do I open IE?â€. But after that knee-jerk reaction, I realize it’s my technological arrogance speaking. They’re not being stupid, in fact, they’re acting smart.
I spent hours a day in front of the computer, so I know how to “turn the Internet onâ€, and I know better than to use IE for that. But that’s my chosen profession, it’s the thing I love to do.
People who use computers occasionally are smart with their time if they ask the question instead of trying to figure it out. It takes a few seconds to answer, a few minutes to teach, and hours to discover on your own. They know not to waste their time.
They’re not stupid. They’re intelligently lazy.
Users aren’t stupid, they’re efficient. They’re spending the least amount of effort (i.e. intelligence) as they possible can on each step of the goal they’re trying to achieve. If you make them spend more, they’ll go somewhere else — it’s like intellectual bargain shopping. — Jeffery Veen
The Web was built out of intelligently lazy. I don’t think anything of such massive proportion can happen any other way.
As a medium, the Web consists of millions of dumb nodes that do only the minimum amount of work. And a few smart hubs that compensate for that. And get well compensated for their smarts. And the result is the largest collection of knowledge, a new economy, a wisdom of crowds.
What do I mean?
Dumb nodes are the million of MySpace profiles that take a few minutes to set up, and the minimum of technical expertise to customize. Yours or your friends’. For that matter Geocity pages, blogs, YouTube uploads or anything else that’s low hanging fruit.
Smart hubs are the few points that connect these nodes and make sense of it all. The search engines, the algorithm, the brainy stuff. Put the two together and you get what the Internet is all about.
On a small scale, look at del.icio.us, Digg and Flickr. They all do dumb nodes: your bookmarks, diggs, photos. They all have smart hubs: popular, recent, interesting. They’re the Web on a smaller, more specific scale. Take each of these services, add many more features, break up into domains, and you’re back to the Web.
Dumb nodes, smart hubs, wisdom of crowds.
So it’s quite ironic that I had several conversations recently with technologists who are intelligently lazy, but forget so it everyone else.
They all have great ideas for fixing the Web, or adding value to it. It’s all stuff I’d like to see happen, I’m even willing to pay to use it.
All these ideas rely on some form of search or indexing or meta-data, so I’ll put it in the broad category we call search. And we all know how expensive it is to solve the search problem.
That’s why we pay Google so well for doing the best at solving search. Far from perfect, but better than anyone else.
What all these ideas have in common is that they aspire for a better Web. They want to keep the search algorithm simple, easy to build, cheaper than the Google cafeteria budget. And it will work because people would make more effort to build better content. They’ll make it rich, semantic, conform to specs.
Right.
If your idea has huge immediate benefit that I can see right now, and requires minimum amount of work, they you can get people to intelligently lazily do it. Like blogging that only takes a few minutes to setup. Like YouTube widgets on MySpace profiles that anyone can do (or ask a friend), even if they don’t know meta from embed.
If your idea is a great concept that will materialize once the world paves a well-formed road to your search engine … you might want to keep your day job.
In the early days of the Web we all learned how to use keywords to search engine optimize, but we never quite learned how to balance our tags. Why? Because good search engines can deal with HTML crap, and bad search engines don’t matter.
If your search engine needs correct HTML – or semantic or anything else – then you can’t build enough momentum to get people to notice you to get people to change the way they build sites. Hubs that are intelligently lazy never get to benefit from smart nodes.
This post is not about anyone in particular, it just a collection of ideas out of many different conversations I had. But nothing exemplifies it better than the story of the Semantic Web experiment.
Photo by LabGP.
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