Perhaps the most pernicious proposition of the “everything must be open” crusade is the notion that curation is bad and anti-freedom. Soldiers of this crusade confuse freedom with competition. Our museums are not football-field sized warehouses where art objects are indiscriminately dumped and our magazines and blogs are not amorphous containers of randomly selected articles. Our classrooms, restaurants, hospitals and indeed all our civilized institutions are firmly reliant on curation of one kind or another. The goal should be for curators to compete, not for curation to be declared illegal and unholy by the “open” zealots.
Curated hypocrisy: How Google camouflages its attacks on Apple. A must read.
By the way, Tim, what is it when Google, at will and without any explanation, removes the ranking of a web site and, effectively, removes it from search results, if not curation of the web? Google is itself the biggest curating goggles through which a truly huge amount of people see the web.
The problem isn't with Google curating the web (and a big chunk of the online advertisement business). Actually the point is, precisely, that the relevance in search results is a direct product of curation. And to paraphrase Steve Jobs, if Google enjoys up to 90% market dominance in certain countries, it must be doing something right. Right?
The hypocrisy lies in refuting Apple the right to curate its own ecosystem, which by the way isn't anything as public as the web is.
Rather weak strawmanship here...
No (sane) person ever contested that Google could exert a possibly nefarious control over the gate to information, but this is still a fully theoretical control (and one they pledge never to use, if only for the sake of their reputation and business model), whereas in Apple's case, it is their stated intent.
To the best of my knowledge, Google has never yet tried to free me from porn.
I was still editing this note while you commented. Not only I never denied Google the right to curate the web, but I'm actually using it because it does not present me with random results. Yay for curation! As for porn, actually the default settings of Google will remove them from results in images for example, you will have to change that parental setting manually (and register with Google if you want to make it permanent).
And to be clear about porn, I find Steve Jobs' position on that totally hypocritical. (But so do I find the attitude about sex vs. violence of most North Americans, there's a cultural issue here.)
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