Punk’s Posterous

A funny thing happened yesterday, I found myself in an old book store in Russian Hill while waiting for my friend to arrive.  Since purchasing the Kindle I haven't physically bought a book in months and actually having moved from suburbia only recently to the city, I haven't been to a non-corporate bookstore since my days in East Village, Manhattan.  They are few and far between in suburbia.  The great thing about spending any amount of time in a bookstore like this is, I always end up looking at books that I'd never normally think would be interesting.  There is definitely thought put into the organization of the material, but it is clearly not commercially driven.  The Dan Brown books with movie posters aren't glaring at every corner.  There is no special shelf specifically for Oprah's book club selections.  The layout has not been analyzed to maximize revenue.  Its just a hodge podge of books, mostly used and read.

I find the lack of organizational analysis for maximum monetization allows me to visually peruse hundreds of titles in various subjects indulging my subconscious.   I go down thought trains that otherwise would never be explored.  This is how I used to broaden my horizons.

Today broadening my horizon means googling a keyword and subsequently jumping links.  Yes, I do subscribe to a number of news aggregation sites, and was sort of intrigued by stumbleupon for a while, but for the most part Google is it.  The issue with this is Google has become a revenue driven corporation.  It had no choice, even with the best intentions and the brightest minds, once you have shareholders your vision and strategy are to increase marketshare to make more money.  There is nothing wrong with that, its the natural evolution of every successful company.

But just as a Barnes & Noble or Borders feels too commercialized, Google searches have long lost that raw edge where your discovery feels original (even if its not).  The search results are dominated by results that corporations have paid money for.  Much like a book publisher cutting a deal with Borders to have every corner of the store to remind you about the upcoming Harry Potter book.  

Then along came Twitter.  I have absolutely no qualms about Twitter becoming a revenue driven corporation like every other company before it.  Like I said its the natural evolution, but until then we have a way to find information by the people (not corporations) for the people (anyone who knows how to search) to the people (with no ads or tricks).  I read an analogy that Twitter is much like a stadium full of people all shouting.  Well, I wager that there are far more interesting things being said (by sheer magnitude) then what all the major companies say in hopes of driving revenue. 
 
I did a google search for Grandma's apple pie recipe and all the search results were professional pages (food network, allrecipes, americanapplepie.com).  I did a twitter search for grandma's apple pie recipe and came up with nothing.  So I tried apple pie recipe and got 30 links out of some 45 tweets.  All of the links went to personal looking blog pages that had some variation of an apple pie recipe.  All of the tweets had some form of praise for how it turned out.  None of the tweets matched google's top links.  Among the tweets were ways of making the apple pie vegan, or doubling down with cranberries, a recipe from a Godfather off a car racing site, an apple chocolate chip pie, etc.  Wow, when was the last time you did a search and said, who would've thunk?
  
Excellent.