A Knowledge Protocol.

Goal

TBA

Criteria

When I (and anyone connected to the internet), can supply the following query to the protocol and receive back a few, relevant, accurate, location specific answers to the following query.

Item: Microwave oven
Location: UK
Desired: Price, make, model, size, power.
[download]

Description/Justification

That's an ambitious, maybe even arrogant, title, but I'll try to clarify my idea and maybe someone will suggest a better one.

Have you ever gone out on the web looking to find information about a particular item you are considering purchasing?

I recently needed to replace my 20 year old microwave oven. So, I started out hitting the web sites of one or two of the national chains of white goods suppliers here in the UK. The result was an intensely frustrating experience.

• All of them wanted to set cookies even before they had shown me anything that I wanted to see.

  No thanks. If I see what I want, and choose to make a purchase from you, I may allow a session cookie, that is only valid within the current domain, for the duration of the transaction.

  but otherwise: Go F...er.. No thankyou very much.

  And no amount of "It allows us to give you a better shopping experience" or any of the other lame excuses that I have recieved as replies to my complaints to sites will change my mind in this.

• Most of them either didn't work at all, or didn't work correctly without javascript enabled.

  Bad luck guys! You lost my custum before we even got started.

• Some, fewer these days thank goodness, won't work unless you are using Internet Explorer.

  Why the hell would anyone use IE (of any falvour)? It is single-handly responsible for the transmission of something like 90% of all the viruses, trojans, and other forms of internet nasties (probably 95% if you add Ooutlook Express) Why force me to use it? The upshot is, if you try, you lost me. (I just wish more people would take my lead and refuse to use websites that do these things--then 'they' would get the message).

• Flash

  Just say no. No, say "No way". Better yet. Send sites that insist on using a 300k flash animation to say "Welcome! Click here to continue", a 10 MB flash animation in an email saying "No! No flash! No how, no way. NO! Bye sucker"

• Have you ever looked at how much of a typical retail site page (in terms of screen real-estate area) is actually devoted to thing that the page purports to be about (the XYV model-pqr microwave for instance) and how much is a randomly distributed mish-mash of irrelavent information that is either needlessly displayed on every page of the site, or thrown up at random regardless of what it is that are actually doing?

  Why is Google so successful? Because of it's superior search engine technology? Maybe, now, but my original criteria for going there was the total lack of crap. With half of the search engines around, you have (or had) to wait 20 minutes for 300kb of crap to arrive and be formatted before you even got to type in your query, and as for the volumes of crap that is (was) presented after the query.

  Displayed by dictionary.reference.com after you search for how to spell: "excretia"

          Get the Most Popular Sites for "Excretia" #### Yeah, right!
  
  Suggestions:
  Exc retia #### No such word. Why offer it?
  Exc-retia #### Ditto
  Excreta
  Excretion
  Excrete
  Excreter
  Excreation
  Excreate
  [download]

  Any of the increasing number of Google wannabes that wants to attract my patronage will need to have learned that lesson.

Next, I tried Google to locate some information on "microwaves 900W UK price" and a whole slew of variations. Half the sites that turn up are US sites. Half of the rest are "Comparison shopping" sites that seemingly catch everything. Of those left, actually extracting the knowledge* that I was after, from amongst the noise, was just too painful (and probably unnecessary) to relate.

So, what I am looking for is an "Knowledge protocal".

There is an adage that I am not sure of the provenace of, nor could I locate it, but it says that:

Anything (literally anything; words, sounds, numbers, blades of grass, fossilised feces, ash on the carpet, or the absence thereof; anything) is data.

Once collated (in some fashion), data can become information. Whether said information is useful to any particular viewer is dependant upon a variety of things.

But what I am seeking is not information. Visiting the Ferrari website to look for data about the fuel consumption of their vehicles, I might be presented with a banner informing me that

Micheal Sheumacker's wife's sister has a friend that markets deoderent products for porcines.

This may well be "information" (of the FYI or FWIW kind), but it certainly isn't what I went there seeking.

It isn't knowledge.

So what would a knowledge protocol allow me to do?

Scenario. I send a query of the form.

Item: Microwave oven
Location: UK
Desired: Price, make, model, size, power.
[download]

to some anonymous email resender* (controversial: but why not use the distributive power of spam for good rather than bad?)

The resender forwards the query to anyone whom has registered as a respondant to enquires concerning "Microwave ovens" in "UK". For the registration process, think along the lines of subscription to newsgroups and mailing lists.

The resender forwards the request devoid of identifying infomation to a Knowledge Protocal Port.

The deamon responds with:

1. The requested information as defined by the "Desired" card
2. To make it commercially interesting, a single url that should lead to a page that expands upon the requested information. And specifically, the requested information.

Of course, there will be those that will either just link to their standard home page, or to a page that carries a re-direct to their standard home page, or otherwise try to subvert the rules of the proticol. But here the mailing list anology extends to the provision for kill-lists. Some way of extending this so that if enough* people place a particular responder on their cheaters-list, then that responder gets de-registered as a mechanism for keeping responders honest.

This may sound a little like various other things around, say Froogle, but it's not. First, I've read sincere and reasoned discussion that worries whether Google isn't becoming rather too powerful. I'm also not sure, but doesn't Froogle take money to place your goods/services on the index?

The whole idea of there being a central registry, or a for-money service negates the purpose of the protocol. Whilst I would want the protocol to cater for the distribution of commercial information, it should not be limited to, nor dominated by it.

So, rather than a central server that would require hardware on which to run, and maintance staff, and salaries, and benefits packages et al. Why not utilise the power of Kazaa-style distributed filesharing protocols. With a suitably defined and simple protocol, leveraging existing experience with things like ftp/html/smtp etc., it should be easy to produce simple clients that would distribute the database in such a way that there is no need for centralisation and all the overheads that brings with it. Every client becomes a part of the distributed service.

Help needed

That pretty much concludes the inspiration and justification for the idea. However, I am having considerable difficulty trying to whittle that down to a single goal. Part of the idea of the parent post is to allow collective thinking to come to bear on such problems, so I am going to leave the definition of the goal open for now, and settle for a loose set of Judgement Criteria as the starting point. Maybe, if this thread, and this post grabs enough mindshare to interest people, then both of these will be refined over time to better reflect my aspirations for it.