Architecture + People = Creativity
While it isn’t exactly news, lately I have been thinking about the phenomenon of the google bomb. For those not familiar with the concept, it is a verb and a noun that describe:
… A certain attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.
Google search works by ranking the number of links to a page to key phrases it associates to that page, mostly through anchor text. So, imagine that thousands of people link to your site with the text “talentless hack”. When someone searches Google looking for a “talentless hack” then your page will pop up first. This has been used for some interesting political ends There is a very detailed page on Wikipedia, if you are interested in more detail I would highly recommend it.
My interest in this subject is not about technology, instead I am fascinated by how people are using the Google architecture. You can argue that form follows function and that people are just using the tools as they were designed, but I think it is more than that. The google bomb shows us that an open-ended, flexibile information architecture can spawn a creative explosion in its users. While the explosion can generate anything from the forgettable to the dissapointing to the sublime, you can rest assured that it will be unpredictable.
One of the real shortcomings of current information architecture (specifically ETL, Data Modeling and Storage, and Information Quality) is that it is too structured, too difficult to build an environment where solutions can emerge organically. I think that this is an area where we will see some really revolutionary changes in the industry in the relatively near future.
technorati tags:information quality, data quality, ETL, informaition architecture,
