Increasingly people are having less of a problem finding the information, and are now having more of a problem managing that information. Often times I find myself frustrated at people who cant find what they want via a search engine, and then a matter of seconds later (with the same search engine) I’ve pulled up a list of highly relevant information for them. The problem isnt that they dont know how to search… the problem is that they dont know how to apply relevance.

As an example… A dog lover who hits the internet for the first time might pop over to google and search for “training bitches” You can imagine what they might find. Any tech savvy person would have searched for “Dog training bitches” It’s amazing what a little bit of relevance will do when used properly! The problem is that most people arent tech savvy, and most people dont think in terms of relevance!

As an engineer, and as an ops guy I’m constantly aware of the relevance of what I’m doing as well as how it affects the neural network of aparati around whatever mode or framework that I am operating inside (be it reality, an application, or google.) My grandmother is not.

Of course when people think search and relevance they think spyware, and understandably so. But would it really be so difficult to build an application which was really able to exploit relevance in such a way as to be easy to even the worst novice? I could imagine several ways, all of which would get me booed off my soap box… and the ones that wouldnt wouldnt please the techophiles…

Maybe thats the problem. The divide between the eleetist users and the novice users is shrinking, causing the real eleetist folk to dig in their heels and resist anything which would help close that divide even faster (especially when privacy is mentioned). But until grandma can use the web just as well as I can… the job isnt done…

Web 2.0? hardly. Think 0.75