THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE

This little gu]y has been poking around the news off and on the last few months; it sounds like a lot of forced enthusiasm to me.

From Nature: Experts plan to reclaim the web for pop science

The project also includes an encyclopaedia that will use similar technology to the popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, is helping to create it. But that’s where the resemblance ends. All content in the Digital Universe will come from vetted experts, and articles will be reviewed by editors before going live. There will also be links to approved websites.

Sounds good, until you realize you need at 100+ meg download (it uses its own browser) to access the service, and once you get it, there isn’t much there (yet).

Critics interviewed by Nature were unwilling to speak on the record. But some believe that the project is over-complicated, and that much of its underlying technology — which still requires significant development — runs against the trend to distribute information in lightweight formats that can be accessed by cell phones or PDAs such as the BlackBerry. “If you have to rely on a high-bandwidth always-on network environment, on devices with a lot of storage, you are pretty much going in the wrong direction,” says one critic, an expert in Internet information systems. He is also unimpressed by the Digital Universe’s concept of peer-reviewing material. “There’s more than enough content on the web, even substantive content,” he says. “I’m not sure that generating new content is really a breakthrough.”

There are also questions over the business model, in which revenue would largely come from selling high-speed Internet access, with half the profits fed back into the work. “It’s an odd choice; that’s a dying business,” comments one observer familiar with the project, pointing out that in the future consumers will be unlikely to notice where their Internet access comes from.

Criticism of Wikipedia often forgets that it is ultimately a free service, and since its users contribute to its content, it have very low overhead costs. Its a model that works, but more importantly its a model that will be hard to compete against. It will be interesting if TDU can get around these initial limitations and offer a product similar in accessibility to Wikipedia. Its a worthwhile project, but I’m not holding my breath.

But he says he can’t help being inspired by the idea. “They’re trying to package science in a way that has some of the glitz and entertainment appeal of television, but that is also complete and correct,” he says. “They’re not in it for the money; actually, they’re trying to save the world.”