The Information Age

Information is in ever greater abundance and ever more valuable; and yet at a time when this is the case the general quality of information has never been in greater doubt, witness the rise and rise of so-called "experts". There has been an explosion in the availability of opinions - often with virtually non-existant regulation - via the weblog [the lightbulb a case in point]. Concordantly witness the rise and rise of wikipedia, frequentally called into question, granted, but largely respected.

It is the opinion of lightbulb that Wikipedia, and to the same extent, Facebook, cater and have fulfilled the modern requirement for endless information in a predetermined - or to reflect previous posts - discrete formats. Information is arranged into a single page per "word" entry (or person(s) in the case of facebook) from which we are able to track down the data : rather than through the previous arrangement of the websearch.

This system avoids that classic modern condition of "I searched on google and got so many thousand entries, but did not find a single answer".

No, it is true to say that - as with so many things in life - the internet has massively increased the quantity of information available whilst massively reducing the general standard of quality. A quick search for any popular internet topic generally turns up (these days) not the information as a first hit, but rather a directory, which if one is lucky points directly to the source...

Given the choice the average punter would like to view the source, but in the way are an ever increasing number of levels of - for want of a better word - crap. It's rather like turning up at a party with a view to speaking to an old friend, but on your way to finding them meeting several different people all promising to introduce you but repeatedly passing you amongst themselves without ever getting around to it.

The solution is not immediately obvious, Wikipedia etc propose a Wiki based set of presorted search results to answer standard questions... Lightbulb remains skeptical that any system could either be possible [in light of the staggering quantity of information available] nor able to cope with ever changing and widely varying syntax in use by the general public.

More likely, in the view of Lightbulb, is that we might have found one of the primary new uses of the Artificial intelligence - a digital librarian if you will.