OneBigWeb

Published on: October 29th, 2005  

The buzz surrounding the imminent release of Googlebase is truly extraordinary!

 

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

More details at Arstechnica . Screenshots here.

Structured content is the foundation upon which Web 2.0 is being built. Structure is what makes content “remixable”. The emergence of openly accessible, distributed content published with minimal structure in the form of Tags and RSS has made a significant difference to the efficiency with which information is navigated and consumed.

GoogleSearch played a pivotal role in effectively connecting up the first web, Web 1.0, consisting largely of unstructured information. GoogleBase is clearly well positioned to play a similar role connectng up the new web, Web 2.0, consisting a lot more structured information. What is particularly exciting is the fact that GoogleBase appears to be truly relational in nature, supporting extensible schema’s.

There has been some speculation that GoogleBase is likely to be a Walled Garden. This would indeed be very surprising. The initial configuration of GoogleBase could be a intermediate step. One would assume that in the long term, Google’s focus would be on applying its capability to build high performance, highly scalable systems to connect up all the world’s structured information rather than a subset of it.

It is clearly more logical for Google to join others like Technorati(blogs), SimplyHired(Jobs) and Oodle(Classifieds) in providing their services as gardeners to the emerging open web rather than go off to build its own Walled Garden.

Links
Microformats, Structured Blogging and Semantic Web are the key initiatives in the structured content publishing continuum, ranging from the pragmatic to the idealistic. All of them can obviously be transformed to schema’s defined in googlebase.
1. Stowe Boyd provides a comparison of microformats and structured blogging.
2. Bob Wyman. of PubSub, a active proponent of structured blogging, presents his thoughts on walled gardens.
3. Nova Spivac of RadarNetworks is skeptical about walled gardens. There is a description of his semantic web related project here.