See One, Do One, Teach One

I attended the talk of Craig Silverstein presented by the Health Sciences Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill regarding Google’s vision for Organization of the World’s Information.  I’ll post a link to the video when it is available.  I’ll highlight what I found interesting.

Craig Silverstein was the first employee hired by Google’s founders.  He was vital in creating google’s foundation.  He is obviously a geek but a funny, engaging speaker as well.  Other than an over-lengthy introduction, UNC did a good job with the presentation.

Google wants to organize all the worlds information to make it universally accessible and useful.

Google book search is a good example of this.  It takes google 45 minutes to scan a book.  Based on that, google estimates it will take 6 years to scan all books in existence.  20 percent of books are in public domain.  5 percent are pulled in by direct partnerships with publishers.  The other 75% are protected by copyright but difficult to tackle.  Frequently these books are not for sale, the rights have reverted back to the author, and/or are out of print.  Google dodges copyrightrs by allowing full search of these books but by only showing snippets instead of access to the whole document.

In his talk and from questions from the panel, Craig addressed Google’s role in privacy.  In the past, much of a person’s “private” information was actually public; however, it was just locked away in some file cabinet in a courthouse somewhere.  Now, accessing this not-so-private information is easy.  Craig says that this type of semi-private information is no longer really private thanks to google and online databases.  He says in the future a person will only have true private information and true public information; the gray middle ground is now gone. 

He also said that google does not collect pure private information for commercial reasons.  If I could have asked a question, I would have asked him why google ties cell phone accounts to gmail accounts then.

Many of google’s tools have become more useful and valuable to the company because of the community that has developed around them.  Google Earth / Google Maps are examples where users (via mashups) are making the products worth much more than google ever imagined.

The rest of Craig’s talk was mainly reviewing the history of the company and discussing the role of fresh products that they are rolling out.  The end of the session was Craig answering some interesting questions.  I’ll examine more of his points in subsequent blog posts.