On Inspiration Engines

Since the earliest days of the Web, content exploration has been based largely on the notion of search engine. Search engines have hugely contributed to shaping the web the way it is now.

Today, the queries you enter in Google or Bing are divided in 3 categories that are managed accordingly: commercial, navigational, and informational. In all three cases the user is supposed to be looking for information about something, what varies being the nature of what they’re inquiring about (products, particular entities, or more general topics). The Web has been built on the fundamental premise that all we could ever be looking for online would be information, of a nature that could be enclosed in a few keywords.

Information. Semantics. Words. Is this really all we can get from this network linking 5 billions of human brains in an incredibly rich way? 

Information. Semantics. Words. Is this really all we can get from this network linking 5 billions of human brains in an incredibly rich way?

I don’t think so. So many things out there are beyond keywords and explicit semantics. The most important things, I think, are not by nature information. To begin with, the human mind is not wired to process primarily keyword semantics –that is but a thin, superficial layer of its activity. I believe something more is to be extracted from Internet contents. Something that could have an incredible leverage for personal and collective development. Something that is not yet being mined by any search engine. Something that is today painstakingly hard to access, and can often only be reached by random chance.

Let’s call it inspiration.

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How the Cognitive Social Web can foster an Internet of better contents

Current web 3.0-oriented products tend to concentrate on how to better organize and develop the flow of information (how to share more content more easily, how to reach a larger crowd, how to get more of the content you already spend the most time on, etc), while mostly ignoring the psychological aspects of content sharing and content creation.

This results in awesome communication tools that are used mostly in dynamics of collective stupidity. Don’t see what I mean? Check out the current trending topics on Twitter –a fantastic product as far as sharing is concerned. That’s what the web of the future could be about: sharing more mediocrity, more easily. Incredible technology at the service of your mind farts. Is this what we really need?

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