Semantic Void

With all the speculation about Google hosting Wikipedia pages and Google Reference, the question everyone seems to be asking is ‘’Why Does Google Love Wikipedia?“. The Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is maintained by the people, it is for the people to use and is of the people i.e. has no central authority governing it. Its an collaborative effort where everyone contributes.

Currently Google bots crawl the abyss of the internet, parsing and indexing information from pages. All of these pages might not be useful or its content accurate or reliable from the user perspective. On the other hand the Wikipedia is moderated and maintained by the people themselves ensuring accuracy. Although the facts on Wikipedia cannot be guaranteed to be accurate but public moderation ensures that false data will be removed eventually.

Hence Google’s interest in Wikipedia is evident from the fact that the people would themselves act as data sources. It is like every individual is a Google bot, feeding data right into the Google Indexer. Google would also gain from the fact that this data would be accurate which is not the case for the web crawler.

This is how I perceive Googles interest in Wikipedia. What are your views?

What does the term ‘Web 2.0′ denote?

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.
[via]

The Web 2.0 promotes an ‘architecture of participation’ by utilizing data from multiple sources and providing its own data in a form that can be utilized by others. This is evident from the numerous API’s that are available on the web. Anyone with a unique idea can develop a mashup using one or more of such API’s.

I have always been skeptical about the sustainability of mashups. Although the API’s the mashups use confer with the idea of Web 2.0 and promote openess and free flow of data, they are restricted in a way. For example, the search API released by Google restricts searches to thousand queries per day. Alexa for instance charges for its API usage. The question this raises is that ‘Is the Web 2.0 as open as we thought?’, as free as in beer.

In the mashup ecosystem the mashups can be thought of as resellers. The data providers are in control cause if they intend to discontinue sharing data or for some reason change their API, the dependant mashup will be in a fix. They can even block service to mashups they think are inappropriate.

This leads us to rethink: Is the Web 2.0 just another walled garden?