Dear Congress: It’s Not OK Not To Know How Search Engines Work, Either | Hacker News Reader

Dear Congress: It’s Not OK Not To Know How Search Engines Work, Either

searchengineland.com

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What definition of "not okay" are we using?

Congress can afford to make big mistakes wrt the internet. If the internet can't afford those mistakes .....

Congress will never know anything, so it's unclear why folks are so eager to have it do things.

Dear citizens. It's no longer OK to not participate in democracy. And I don't just mean vote. I mean spread information and encourage others to vote. In essence; Lobby.

Everyone who fancies themselves someone who cares about legislation should be lobbying their friends and followers to participate with them.

If you don't, corporations will continue to do it for you.

"Dear Internet..." Oh wait, someone already wrote that blog post and it was already featured on several outlets. Look, Internet, I love you, but here's the thing: it's true. If you want to effect change, you're going to have to work within the framework of the govt. That means that posts like these, after a certain point, aren't gonna do much to help Congress understand the problems with their approach. To recap and paraphrase, Congress does not really care much what some bloggers are saying about issue x; instead the group that does the best job of figuring out how to educate Congress probably has the best chance of seeing the change they want. What say we focus on doing more of that?

> you're going to have to work within the framework of the govt.

The last thing one can say to the dear Internet: that we are limited to what we've got now.

The dear Internet, being the posterchild of disruption of old playbooks, should rather be encouraged to improve on current model of interaction with Congress and other governing bodies. How? Dunno; but somebody will figure it out, implement, deploy and popularize.

There's plenty of room for improvement, don'tya think?

There are lots of people on the internet with lots of money. The internet needs to lobby as hard as the MPAA does.

How is it any different than writing an op-ed?

Legislators read the NY Times. Or, at least, their staff reads the NY Times and tells them what was in it. They don't read searchengineland.com.

"Bing: A Microsoft & Yahoo Production?"

This reminds me of mistakes I've seen semantic analysis engines make. I'm not totally sure if this is a triumph of computing or a failure of Congress.

Watching all this political discussion happen in September, around an area I know so well, I realized one chilling thing. It’s not that Washington doesn’t know search. It’s not that Washington doesn’t know the internet. It’s that Washington doesn’t know anything but what paid lobbyists are pushing on it.

Why should any of this surprise anyone? I doubt they understand the Kreb Cycle either. The onus is on people who do understand to get off their thumbs and seek public office. Here's the next eyeopener: Most legislation isn't written by legislators.

"The onus is on people who do understand to get off their thumbs and seek public office."

Or at least to make their concerns known, and to get noticed in a big way.

There will always be lobbies and lobbyists, and most of them will be funded by pockets far too deep to compete with directly. That's why common people have to get creative and tactical with their "lobbying" efforts.

Look at Occupy Wall Street, for instance. Agree or disagree with their politics and their goals, but you have to give them credit for their marketing. Within the space of several months, they've transformed the entire cultural conversation about the state of the country.

Look at the case of the anti-congressional-insider-trading legislation currently making its way through the system. One lone congressman sponsored a bill to ban congressional insider trading, and he was getting essentially no co-supporters for his cause. This went on for years, until he found his way onto "60 Minutes." Suddenly, everything changed, and now he's being taken seriously.

If you don't have the money to pay for lobbyists, then you need to be your own publicist-marketer-organizer-activist-storyteller. It's not enough to be any of those five things in isolation, either; you've got to ply all of those disciplines, in very creative ways, to get noticed.

Tech folks should have a lot of inherent advantages in that game. They can build things quickly. They understand social media and search engines. They can think systematically about tactical approaches to marketing. Where they may need help is on the "storytelling" part of the puzzle. Developing a succinct, emotionally relatable, human-interest narrative is crucial. Because unlike lobbyists trying to influence legislators, you're trying to influence common people. Your goal isn't to get noticed by your local congressman; your goal is to foment enough popular demand to become an undeniable force.

Google maps is immensely helped by it's placement on Google whenever a location is searched, compared to say, sites like MapQuest. This is akin to Microsoft's placement of IE in Windows against Netscape.

You can argue that Google Maps is superior to MapQuest, but back in the day IE was indeed superior to Netscape. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Are you talking about the onebox, or something else? The onebox can't really be replaced by an external website.

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