Ruling the World as an Information Aggregator

aTypical Joe sent me a post heralding the hegemony of Google, or at least, of Google-like companies which aggregate our individual information.



I don't agree, and yet I am not certain that I am able to articulate clearly why (a good sign that I may not understand it well myself). Nonetheless, here goes:



Aggregation of information seems to be in itself, an democratizing tool. Unless there is only one aggregator (and there is not), the marketplace itself will correct abuses, for reasons comparable to why collusions do not work in the airline industry or the oil industry, among others. The time when if one provider ignored a story it would die are over.



Let us ask: Suppose Google were to blot out every mention of another aggregator: Yahoo! to pick the next biggest. As the public discovered the blockage (the lack of information) they re-route themselves to Yahoo!'s advantage and Google's disadvantage in order to get more information (value).



Suppose Google and Yahoo! agreed to carve the internet up between them. Then Ask Jeeves or MSN would be the winner, free to provide service on anything to anybody, and so on. There are a large number of well-known aggregators of information. I can name at least three more general search engines without breaking a sweat, not to mention Technorati, Ice Rocket, Blogrolling, etcetera, and new ones are coming on line almost daily.



Suppose they all get together? That just makes the rewards sweeter to the first one to break ranks.



Finally, the modern infosphere works to a large extent, off personal connections and site issues. I've only been here in the infosphere for about four months, but if I want to find out something I've already got a pretty good idea who makes a habit of covering what. If I want to get the information out, I don't go to an aggregator, I give it to somebody who makes a habit of reporting on it, be it me for Real Estate and Investing, Decision 08 for the 2008 presidential politics, SCOTUS Blog, Michelle Malkin, Captain's Quarters, Dean's World, or what have you, all the way up the line to Instapundit. Nobody is beyond fact-checking and eveybody can do fact checking, and if it's good, worthwhile information, somebody will pick it up, at which point we're all off to the races because once somebody has picked it up, anybody competing with them will pick it up (if only to debunk their competition), and then anybody who's mildly interested links and offers their take. You can no more intentionally contain it than you can hold water in a sieve. The question is not "Can it get out without the aggregators?" but only how many steps and how much work it needs to get it out. If it happens to Glen Reynolds, or any of the mass media types, it's out already. If it starts with any of the other A listers, it doesn't take much. The further down the information pyramid you start, the harder it gets, but you can get it out.



Paradoxically enough, the aggregators power depends upon them not using it for any purpose except what that which it was originally acquired for, i.e. the dissemination of said information. When they start imposing editorial slants of their own is when they start losing market share for being less than completely reliable. Which makes sense of a sort if you look at most of the legacy media, which is still living in a world that has since changed, when they had control over what the average citizen in their city heard about, a world that no longer applies. They're in the business of information dissemination to make money, not to rule the world, and although the two are not unrelated, their method of attracting money leaves them vulnerable to any attempt on their part to actually use their aggregating power for some Purpose other than making money. It was harder when you had a limited number of choices fifty years ago. Now, if disseminator A doesn't cover it, not only to you go to someone who will, but the aggregate of information seekers becomes less likely to seek A out, penalizing A for failing to get the story. These days, nobody is separated by more than the time it takes to click a bookmark or in extreme cases, run a search engine or six, which sure puts a crimp in the ability to restrict the free flow of information, as a Canadian judge found out when he put a gag order on the canadian press, only to have Captain's Quarters pick up on it in the US where canadians could look at it to their heart's content. Or What Armies of Liberation is doing to Yemen right now.



The thing which wields power today is something like credibility, which is a function of the audience you have, the audience you can get, and how credible you are to your core and extended audiences. It's great if Glen Reynolds reads your site everyday, but if he (or someone comparable) doesn't, odds are much better that someone they read does.



The reason that identified disseminators have an inherent advantage over anonymous ones in the minds of the audience as the one who stands out in plain sight and has to answer for errors, whether by embarrassment or something stronger, is instantly more credible than anybody anonymous who can theoretically vanish back into the woodpile with no-one the wiser. This is why, IMHO, of the top 100 members of the 'sphere, you have to go down to Jawa Report (#40 right now) to find one who is even semi-anonymous, and although I'm not familiar with all of them, I can't name one of the top 100 in the Ecosystem who is run by someone truly anonymous (Juan non-Volokh has fellow-bloggers standing out in their own names who know exactly who "Juan" is, and I believe the others would "out" Juan in an instant if he abused his anonymity).