At The Commercials: Google just crushes it

Since I seem to be on a kick with somewhat-mushy posts, given my focus in the past couple days on romantic comedies and personal drama, it only makes sense to focus on a commercial that does emotion effectively.

Google is well-known for essentially being the crack of Internet search engines, with examples ranging from Carly Googles to how no one I know uses Bing to the fact that the site's name essentially serves as a verb now. Well, the commercial world should also watch out, as their Super Bowl spot (featured above) was so diabolically simple and effective.

I caught it a day after the fact on The TV Ad Guru, a neat site that I follow. I agree completely with him - The ad is devastatingly effective because of how simple it is. While I can question the need for the commercial, given Google's seemingly unassailable market position as the top dog search engine, a quality effort like this certainly doesn't hurt matters at all.

What Steve Reads: Brick Sexplode and Carly Googles

If any of you have ever spotted my blog roll, and I'm guessing you have because it is conveniently displayed on my profile and the right-hand side of the blog, you might have noticed that I follow a lot of them. As of this writing, this number has swollen to 85, with varying degrees of publishing frequency between them.

The purpose of this series of entries - What Steve Reads - is to shine the spotlight on the various crap I read. Obviously. I'll do two per segment, once a week or two weeks, depending on lots of different factors, such as the airspeed velocity of unladen swallows. Typically, the blogs will have something in common, such as the one I'm doing tonight. On to the actual blogs I read...

- Brick Sexplode. Well, actually, the name of the blog is Bricks Explode, but whenever I glance at the name, I think it is Brick Sexplode or Brick Sex Plode, so I am calling it that instead. Sorry.

The author of the blog is Josh, and I quite enjoy his writing, such as a list of things nobody in your office will ever want to hear about. I also have no idea what he looks like, so I hope he's cool with my using a picture of the fetching and vexing Katie White from The Ting Tings instead. (Sorry again Josh.)

However, to get sentimental for a second, when I was first starting this blog, Josh's was one that I randomly read a lot of the back entries for. To get very specific, I absolutely adored his listing the Mighty Ducks from The Mighty Ducks 2 as one of The Top Ten Selfish Sports Teams Since 1980. One, because they totally are, and two, because it was the sort of plucky pop culture analysis that I was hoping to do myself.

- Carly Googles. So, one of Josh's latest entries noted that Carly Googles had used him as a source for an entry. Intrigued, I checked out her blog, and immediately started following it. I mean, how else am I going to find out what the origin of the word seersucker is, how big the moon is, how close the characters in Archer and Frisky Dingo sync up, and other wonderful random information?

I suppose some of you are saying, "Well, you could just look up the information on Google yourself." To which I say... no. You go look it up. And Carly does in fact look it up for me! Listen, sometimes I don't know that I need to know what a cashew tree looks like. Carly does, and she shares it with me.

The Katie White photo is from here. Carly's photo is from her blog. And the picture at the top is from here, and solely used because I thought it was silly.

The Wikipedia groupthink

[Left] The first result on Google Images for "wikipedia monster." Thanks to this site for providing it.

Over the years, Wikipedia has morphed from a quirky, somewhat-encyclopedic place that I could find out everything I ever wanted to know about Top Chef, Top Cat and Topps baseball cards to some weird organization paralyzed by a collective mind. Just in case you can't tell from the wording I've used, and the title of this entry, I'm somewhat against this shift.

Slate reporter Chris Wilson has done a couple good articles, here and here, which show that a small percentage of Wikipedia users are responsible for the vast majority of the edits to the site. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing – The accuracy of Wikipedia has improved as a result, and silly (but funny) things like Stephen Colbert getting everyone to change the elephant page are edited out pretty quickly.

The downside has been an adherence to some destructive policies, namely, the elimination of trivia and fancruft from articles. Maybe it is just because I have a journalism degree, but I think this is the new weak spot of Wiki's collective editing mind. While trivia sections, by their definition, are not important information, they are interesting. I like reading quirky little facts in articles about obscure subjects; they help flesh out characters, whether you're reading a novel or an encyclopedia entry. I understand that the editors are shooting for a collection of objective fact, but why not shoot a little higher and go for a collection of interesting, objective fact? It seemed to work out quite well for Hemingway, when he was a journalist, and George Plimpton.

Because the groupthink has been given the edict to cut down on the trivia, Wikipedia is now a less interesting place for me to visit. Oh, sure – When I want to read up on a certain subject, it and Google are still the two sites I consult first. But it has traded the sheer, utter depth it used to possess for a sort of quasi-professionalism. There didn't seem to be much thought given to the idea of integrating tidbits, regardless of how small they were, instead of making “yes no” value judgments.

And getting personal for a second, looking at some of the edit histories for Wiki's most active editors can be downright scary, in terms of the time devoted. While there should be some praise given for what is an altruistic deed – contributing to a common encyclopedia for all of the Internet to use – I feel that the personality type of such an editor is showing through in the writing. If you have the time, and more importantly the drive, to do so much editing, then creativity and art are probably secondary concerns, and I definitely think this is reflected in the current quality of articles.