Charbax.com

The way Google works is quite simple:

1. The know what people click on, they know people clicking are real people and not machines, they know how long time people spend on each site. Basically Google monitors how interesting everything is on the Internet, it’s not like some Google robot is magically doing all the work.

2. Links only matter partially to determine the importance and relevancy of a page. What matters more is if people clicking on those links think they are getting relevant information when they get to the page.

The way Google monitors that is quite simple:

- Google Toolbar.

- Users are logged into their Google Account all the time so when interacting with Google services, they know. When clicking on search results, they know. If you then click on other search results or go back to Google services, they know you are probably not browsing that page anymore.

- Google cookies. 

- Google Chrome statistics.

Do I think it’s bad Google knows all these things about everyone on the Internet? I think it’s awesome, this is absolutely fantastic and I think it is great.

Why? I think someone has to do it. And if Governments around the world such as Obama or the EU are too lazy to do this work, then I trust Google is the best company to take care of this very important responsabillity. I trust Google isn’t going to do evil things with this, but mostly use it to bring more and more relevant search results.

Do I think Google Search is the end of innovation on the Internet? Nope. I think something like Google Searchwiki will take over: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-searchwiki.html

You see, I don’t care about HTML JPG designs, AJAX gimmicks, CSS styles, even worse Flash interfaces! I want my whole web in a totally standard interface that just consist of one typeface, one interface for the whole thing. I am getting sick and tired of all the design on the Internet, let’s make things simple. When I search Dvorak, I want his content, I don’t want to look at his stupid blog templates.

Yup, it’s kind of like the next level of RSS, but a new standard. And centralized. And no, it’s not going to be Wikipedia.

Although the number of registered users of http://barackobama.com is impressive, their multi-user blogging portal at http://my.barackobama.com is cool. I wonder how many of those hundreds of thousands of blog posts that were actually read or how much those user-generated blog posts actually mattered.

As far as I understand it, the way Barack Obama’s campaign had the worlds best usage so far of the Internet in a campaign (second best could be Ségolène Royal’s lost french presidential campaign), has been especially to collect money in the form of millions of small donations. And to do the online organizing of getting out the vote efforts in the form of getting millions of supporters to personally call voters (which is better then robocalls), knock on their doors, do meet-ups, know about local events and stuff like that. Also the usual most effective way to communicate with supporters has been newsletters.

Putting some wiki, chat or user-generated blogging type blog comments on http://change.gov I think may be more of a gimmick then really useful and powerful. Live webcasts from the White House would probably be an awesome highlight and a worlds first. Already right there, they could provide hundreds of interesting hours from those meetings, those deliberations, commities, speeches, diplomatic meetings and all that.

I think they need to create an online congress where every citizen is a representative, can vote on all ideas, can suggest ideas, can amend ideas, express themselves in meaningful ways. Then all this needs to be done using clever algorithms to promote the good ideas automatically using clever new wisdom of the crowds algorithms. On the Internet, one vote shouldn’t count as one vote, votes should count proportionally with the influence and activity each verified user has on the rest of the community. This way, an algorithm can automatically filter out the experts and the representatives.