Wolfram’s Debut: Does This Compute? I Think So. . .

Wolfram|Alpha opens to the public today at 3 p.m. I cringe to type the words “game-changer” but, well, there it is. At least I think.

[nb: The links in this entry may not work for the the public until 3 p.m. today, Monday, June 18, 2009. I think I have access as a Credentialed Member of the Bloggocracy, but I'm not sure.]

I’m a bit late to this Wolfram thing: Way-early adopters, artificial intelligence geeks, web semanticists and thousands of really really smart people worldwide have been onto this for a while.

But here’s the basic concept–conceit, one is tempted to say–as rendered by the company itself:

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic
knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. The
company aims to collect and curate all objective data; implement
every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to
compute whatever can be computed about anything.

I know, I know: This sounds grandiose beyond imagining, like a schizophrenic PhD candidate’s desperate plea to angel investors to help pay for his final semester of tuition. It makes Google’s goal of “organizing the world’s information” sound downright humble.

But check it out. The very early release shows impressive capacity to generate, organize and compute data in response to real-language queries. It can also do a whole range of specialized computations whose value and complexity are beyond my ability to assess.

It’s not a search engine: It’s a “computational knowledge engine.”

One canned example from the site, drawn from a situation close to human experience: Say someone in your family diagnosed with colon cancer? Process the emotions then take a look at the unforgiving pure data:

Another: Want to do scenarios about a stock market derivative type known by the delightful name “strangle option”? I thought so:

Significantly, Wolfram outputs don’t explain squat. They provide raw numbers and the ability to do calculations with them. Need real explanation? A link to the right conducts a Google search of the topic.

The tool’s data reach is pretty limited in this release,  so it’s pretty easy to baffle Wolfram into bashful retreat, viz.: “Wolfram isn’t sure what to do with your query.”

I’m not a mathematician, quant, engineer, botanist, derivative strangler or numerologist, for that matter. So I lack proper context to evaluate Wolfram fully. But I’ve never seen anything like this in a highly usable,  consumer-facing product with capabilities in so many content areas. It strikes me as a platform that has enormous potential to. . .well, it’s not clear.

And that’s part of the fun.

Here’s a video in which Stephan Wolfram himself does a walk-through of the Wolfram|Alpha application.

“Make Google Pay” and Other Hallucinations

The news industry has generated much sympathetic publicity lately about the woes of the news industry.

First, let’s say this: It’s easy to get positive coverage for an issue when you control so many ways to getting the message out. Pity the poor clowns who need to grovel to get major media attention for groundwater pesticide contamination.

Anyway, as the news industry continues to fight the inevitable, one phrase keeps coming up again and again:

Make Google Pay

The idea is that Google’s search results pages link to news content that costs a great deal of money to produce. Google makes money by placing ads around those search results. The content producers should get some of that money, the content producers argue.

I am bewildered–and a bit ashamed–that anyone who has achieved even middling professional status in a line of work that attracts a lot of really smart people can even say the words “Make Google Pay” and believe they have validity.

“Make Google Pay” is not a strategy, it’s a consensual hallucination of desperate minds. It is cognitive spatter that results from overwhelming stress. It is HAL’s final, dirge-like notes of “Daisy.”

I don’t want to get into a full-blown discussion about changing news ecology, user behavior, content abundance, link journalism, anti-trust law, etc.

I will make just three points. They seem so obvious to me that they don’t even need to be said. But as demonstrated at last week’s Congressional hearings about the future of journalism, people in the news industry, their lackeys and retainers appear not to have heard them. So:

1. Google is linking to content, not publishing it. I am amazed at how often Google is said to be “publishing” others’ news. Google points people to content that its algorithms determine to be high-value. Linking is not republishing. It is not a copyright violation. It is a way to direct people to high-value content that appears on the creators’ sites. The fact that Google is shrewd enough to extract value from its sift-and-direct service does not constitute unfair trade or thievery.

2. Publishers can block Google any time they want. If they think Google is extracting value from their content unfairly, they may choose to make their results invisible immediately. Any junior member of a news site’s web team can do this by 2 p.m. today.

3. Publishers instead are trying to make Google function as their utility. This is an astonishing act of delusional bravado. To wit: “Our content is so valuable that you must direct people to us and pay for the privilege.” Plus: “We need an anti-trust exemption to make this work, but our work is so important we deserve it.” This is not a business proposition, it is confiscatory collusion. I am stunned that various personages at the recent hearings entertained this proposal as if it were a serious idea worth consideration.

For god’s sake: “Make Google Pay” is a dead-end, an intellectually bankrupt proposition from a group of businesses that blew their big chance and continue to blow it every time they gather.

Trying to re-shape Google’s business to the demands of a failing method of distribution is a fool’s errand. If not precisely evil, it is at least destructively self-interested.

Every intercranial electrical firing, every synaptic twitch that news leaders devote to Make Google Pay represents a withdrawal from the central challenge they face: Creating bankable value that will fund the portion of  their journalistic work that truly matters to democracy.

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nb: Do a Google search using the words

Congressional hearings on future of newspapers

The pages that appear include no advertising. I mean, what are the chances?