Aardvark, and other words that start with ‘A’
This post is brought to you today by the letter A.
I was listening to Weekend All Things Considered on Sunday, and caught a wonderful, insightful interview with the creator of a new web 2.0 information-seeking application. It’s called Aardvark, and maybe you’ve already heard of it.
Here’s how it works: the Aardvark app taps your social network on facebook to figure out who you know (or who you don’t know you know, or who knows someone you know, or, oh this always makes me dizzy) who knows about something you wanna know. Get it?
It’s like this: I’m wondering, gee, does anybody know of a good holistic doctor in Southeast Michigan?
And I ask that question via IM or email to Aardvark. The friendly rodent then does some fancy algorithmics and sends the question to people who might know about things related to the words in my question. Then they have the opportunity to send an answer back through Aardvark, who sends it to me. They self-describe as a “hub”.
My thoughts:
1. This is really cool! However, it raises the age-old information literacy issue of source authority. Why should I trust my uncleji’s cousin without knowing the guy? The idea is that someone who cares about the subject will answer, and I don’t dispute that. I’m not suggesting people will just send made-up answers to troll around. However, everybody’s got an agenda, all the time, and I don’t think Aardvark gives me sufficient metadata about the responders for me to adequately assess the authority of my sources. It’s probably better for “factual” kinds of information, but we all know that facticity is itself a tool of hegemonic dominance.
2. One lady’s “hub” is another one’s “goddamn meddling middleman who can collect my goddamn data on the frigging internet”.
3. I was happily surprised with the All Things Considered interview, because for once it wasn’t a mainstream media outlet going, “OMG YOU GUYS CHECK OUT THIS FREAKY THING ON THE INTERNET. IT MIGHT ACTUALLY HAVE SOME SOCIAL UTILITY! STOP THE PRESSES! IT MIGHT KILL US ALL OR SAVE US ALL OR MAKE US ADDICTED TO THE SHINY COMPUTER BOX! I’M SO HIP RIGHT NOW.”
Anyway, so I was happily enjoying the interview until Guy Raz (the host) asked the annoying neoliberal question I suppose many people wanted to hear: why would anyone participate when they don’t “get anything” out of it?
Now, I was in the car listening to the radio, and I have a habit of talking back to it anyway. At the particular moment that I heard this, I was pulling into my driveway with all my windows down, and my strait-laced neighbors were out in their backyard (adjacent to the driveway) arguing about their grill.
And as I mentioned in my profile, I’m an angry librarian (I have my reasons). So, when Guy Raz pushed that “oh golly, isn’t money the only thing that matters in this world?” button, I blew a fuse, and yelled at a rather high fraction of my lungs: “IT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE LIBRARIANS, A$$H***!”
And there you have it, kids: A is for Anand, Adultery, Aardvark, and Asshole.
Bottom line: Aardvark gets an A for concept, but I have to play with it more to evaluate the execution.
A is for Awesome post, Anand! Thanks for bringing Aardvark to my attention; I hadn’t heard of it before. Here are my three thoughts:
1. I had the same basic response to Raz’s “what’s in it for me?” as you did, although since I’d already read your response, mine was much less vehement. :) As a librarian, I have no trouble imagining why some people might want to help others find answers. As a net-gen-er (who’s testing out another term for my millennial status), I can also imagine putting out good vibes on the internet and expecting my useful answer karma to reap future rewards (either for myself or my friends/network).
2. Recent interactions with my local IT department have led me to believe that your Thought #2 might pretty prevalent among the business/baby boomer set.
3. I feel like twitter is already useful for me in the way that Aardvark wants to be useful to people. Here’s an example of a network-enabled reference question referral that happened in my twitter feed today:
The success of this strategy might depend on the type of people in a particular twitter community — for instance, there are a lot of information professionals among my followed/followers who seem to be predisposed to answering questions via twitter.
This example from earlier today was actually the first time I’ve done this sort of referral; I think it could have gone even better if I hadn’t been rushed to head out to my meeting when I was posting my retweet of Emily’s question (all the @ replies got a little confusing — if my structure had been simpler, Molly might have replied directly to Emily). In the past, I have answered other folks’ questions on twitter, but I’ve never used the RT function to bring other librarians into a reference question thread. The benefit of this method is that if people take advantage of the social norms of retweeting (appending the newly mentioned user with the @ symbol), everyone can follow an answer back to its source.
Could it be that this people-smart method of answering questions via referral allows us more source authority than the machine-smart method Aardvark uses? My gut says yes. But again, your network may vary.
Also, if I wanted an immediate response, I would probably… go ask a librarian.