The search engine wars continue as both Google and Bing develop more exotic ways of arriving at the wrong answer. Both commit the same error as all declining industries in social media space; assuming that they can predict what people want without engaging them in a conversation.
The first development is the predictive search notably pioneered by Amazon.com for predicting future purchases based on past purchases. While predictive search is an improvement, the next step is the “vicarious” search, that is, when the search engine sees the world through your eyes – or someone Else’s – for your benefit.
The Web is Flat
The Ingenesist Project specifies a standard knowledge inventory that may be represented as a packet of code. If someone wanted to see the web through the eyes of another person, they could buy a packet of their knowledge inventory. Likewise, a web article would be tagged with the representative knowledge inventory code of the author. Each comment or re post to a blog article would contain the knowledge inventory of its aggregated vetters.
The search can be done in reverse as well. If I find an idea on the web and want to know who can execute it locally, I can simulate the knowledge inventory in one or more local people. This is not trivial. It literally allows an entrepreneur to manage knowledge assets that they did not know exists and predict content that does not yet exist.
Been there, done that?
Obviously there are privacy, security, and ethics issues related to others seeing the world through your eyes. But what if every American was told 20 years ago that their identifier number for an insolvent social security program would be attached to their personal, medical, financial, and civil records then spun through Wall Street algorithms, sold worldwide to advertisers, politicians, banks, insurance companies, demographers, and ultimately hacked? The cities would have burned.
So why can’t social mediators monetize?
The difference today is that if packaged correctly, we can own and control our knowledge inventory. We can allow or decline access and we can revoke access – it happens all day long on Face Book, Linkedin, Twitter, and My Space. On-line communities represent collections of knowledge assets. The 400 Billion dollar per year advertising budget is on the table – up for grabs. The 100 Billion dollar “head hunting” budget is up for grabs. The multi-billion dollar election budgets are all up for grabs. What are we thinking?
The likelihood of Innovation
The innovation economy will depend on business intelligence related to society’s knowledge inventory to match most worthy knowledge surplus to the most worthy knowledge deficit. Entrepreneurs must know supply and demand for knowledge assets as well as where to find them at what cost. Entrepreneurs need to predict competition, disruption, risks, and volatility in knowledge assets. They need to conduct scenario tests before expending money. They need to predict the likelihood of innovation and all of the options that they have in the future related to those innovations.
The Securitization of Knowledge Assets
Entrepreneurs need to securitize knowledge assets in order to finance innovation on the scale that will be required to offset our massive debt. This is how the innovation economy must play out. We cannot depend on corporations or governments to do this for us. People must control, regulate, anonymize, and manage their own knowledge inventory. If only they could see their world through the entrepreneur’s eyes – perhaps they need a vicarious search engine more than anyone.
