I’m puzzling over the New York Times article on google and Jim Moore’s Second Superpower paper in this morning’s Week in Review. Jim’s very short paper, with no footnotes and little more than an intriguing idea in its first-cut articulation, clearly grabbed the attention of the online world for a time. And google rewarded it with a high page-rank. Why is that so strange?
Lessig commented: “It is wrong wrong wrong to bias the rules against the free.”
Doc Searls and Dave Winer, also implicated in the story, each wrote a tour de force on the topic as well.
Lots of fodder for the journalism panel of our planned BloggerCon this Fall, no? Think the NYT will show up?
Also: how do you think reporter Geoffrey Nunberg feels about the fact that the link above to his article has to go away in a few days? Does that really make sense?
A quote from the NYT article in case it goes away at some point:
And a high Google ranking can also have a lot of clout in the marketplace of ideas. It seems to confer ”ownership” on a particular word or phrase — deciding, in effect, who gets to define it. It’s easy to read these results as reflecting the consensus of an extended Internet community, with the power to shape opinion and events. As James F. Moore, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, wrote in an article on his blog posted March 31, the Internet has become a ”shared collective mind” that is coming to figure as a ”second superpower.”
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