Just writing

It's a crazy world out there!

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Some day, knowledge will be in my hands

You know I feel that it was not that world just now realised that "knowledge would determine success" in the future. I think there were some intelligent people who came much earlier than us and compiled the first dictionaries or the first encyclopedias. Either of these books houses so much of knowledge from all around the world. Take the dictionary, every thing that is spoken in English is compiled into a single bound volume. And then it has a technique to help us find the required knowledge quickly. So somewhere, people realised that the speed of change would get accelerated in the future and then there would be more knowledge available and ready to use. With some much knowledge floating around, we would need some tool to access them in a useful manner. Something which Google is upto.

Among Google's mission statements are things like: To organise knowledge of the world and make it available for the people to use it effectively. And boy, Google search is just part of their strategies to achieve this. Imagine, they have a Gmail which now scans thoughts of people as and when people think them (or rather jot them in a mail), even before they reach any accessible physical media (like a book, newspaper or a website). So now, they are trying to reach closer to the thought process of the man. (Well I am not sure how do they plan to use people's conversations. Actually there privacy policy says that no human at Google would read it and use it any motives) But somewhere sometime, even this knowledge may be put to use.

All of us have the tendency to get our questions answered at some point of time or the other. The kids look upto their parents to answer there silliest or rather most difficult of their questions. In a way I would say that kids are so efficient! With all their queries answered from their parents in a jiffy, they don't have to spend time searching for the information. That's another motive of Google; they want to reduce the time and money spent in finding information. They want people to spend time in using the knowledge rather than searching for it. To facilitate this, they have a feature called "Ask a question" where you can put up a question in their website and put a price to it, so that whoever answers that would get that amount.

I think all that I want to know and I don't know should surely exist in somebody's mind in some part of the world. Imagine that whenever I don't know something and I don't have the time to find it, I just shout in the air and all people awake in any corner of the world and ready to help me out, shout back with the answer. Or rather wouldn't this an ultimate form of global interation. Imagine a cellphone that help me do that on the move! Wouldn't that day be a day of "knowledge in my hands"?