Thinking Beyond Bibliographic Data: Structure is Sexy
I want to buy a cool CDMA phone. Google is no help. I get results from 2006. Twitter? More noise than a parking lot of Civic-modders. I resorted to checking telco sites individually and I was on the verge of giving up in despair when gdgt.com went live last weekend. On the site I searched for the exact type of phone that I wanted and in about five seconds I was reading user comments about whether one phone in particular met my needs. A months long quest completed.
That may not sound very interesting or remarkable but I think it is important to booksellers and book publishers because it is all about structured data.
GDGT.com is run by two tech journalists — Peter Rojas and Ryan Block — who know their way around the web. They are former employees of a pioneering tech blog called Engadget. To them also, one assumes, social networking is old news. GDGT.com is a product database with a blog layer and a social-networking layer over top. It may not look much different from any other tech blog or it may seem like yet another social network (YASN) but it is quite a different animal. The gadgets are the proxies through which the users connect. Add to the database first. Connect with other users second. The hierarchy from a typical social network is inverted.
Indigo and a host of book publishers have created social meeting spaces for book lovers but none that I know of have an open database policy. At best you can add descriptions, reviews, and tags but that content lives beside the product. It is incidental to the product search. As an alternative imagine product selection like Amazon’s with user editability like Wikipedia’s plus a highly structured database that would let searchers drill into books topic-by-topic. That is a powerful next-gen book site.
So my take away from GDGT? The database is the secret sauce. Publishers are notoriously lazy about their data and metadata. Some retailers too. Database innovation sounds boring but would be a win for everybody.
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