I'm still digesting the Google Base news. Google puts out a press release about three times a week. Many are for PR purposes and irrelevant; Google Base is not. And not for the reasons people are speculating, namely that Google is going after eBay or craigslist. While that may be true, the significance of Google Base is, from the perspective of search and the web as an ecosystem, much more profound.

War was beginning...

The onion in the ointment of web search has always been unstructured data. The web is full of information. That information came from a relativly structured source: a human brain. It was then transplanted out onto the web as plain old text. While other human brains had no problem understanding the semantic connotations of "Baseball practice is at 7:30PM at Thursday", robots, like Google, could make neither heads nor tails of it (for the most part). Information rich in semantic meaning has been dumped onto the web in plain text form for years, losing meaning in the process.

We get signal...

A while back, Tim Berners-Lee (he worked with Al Gore on this little thing called "The Internet") had a vision for The Semantic Web, which solved the above problems. To make a long story short, this never really got anywhere, and we all went along dumping our brains out on the web with no context. Everyone, that is, except for bloggers, whose RSS feeds contained some of the richest semantic markup available for content in the history of the world. The Semantic Web became a far off vision that only those who understood the Trouble with Triples could comprehend.

Hello, Gentleman...

In an effort to push things in the proper direction, a small group of individuals and companies began working on ways to structure information, in an attempt to prevent SDL (Semantic Data Loss) and create better search in the process. The history here goes back quite a bit, so I'll skip to the end, which is often called datablogging, microformats and/or structured blogging, all of which attempt to make the process of capturing the meaning of content easier both for the producer and the consumer. Things were moving along nicely in that direction; Google Base, however sends a proverbial "Make your time" to all those services, since Google Base essentially allows content producers to explicitly tell Google what all those little bits of data mean and how to interpret them.

You Have No Chance to Survive...

So Google Base is an attempt at tackling structured search. Assuming we have a clear picture of the service (which I'm not sure that we do, but speculation is fun anyhow), Google Base represents a centralization of the structured web at Google, which is, in my humble opinion, not what we want, for various reasons (a simple one: that means Google gets to decide how you acess the data. You don't want them telling you how to do that).

For Great Justice...

The answer, I think, is to continue to push forward with semantic web technologies, whether that's a big 'S' or a little 's'. The structured data needs to make its way out there, at the edges. Marc Canter's work with digital lifestyle aggregators and the coming of structured blogging to Wordpress/MovableType are all going to help in this cause; I think it needs to go further than that, with outreach to existing sites, as well as new services that are sure to come online. Then anyone, Google included, can pick up the structured content and do with as they please. As for Google Base, I'd be happy if it became an open means for distributing content. I send something to Google Base, and it shows up everywhere. As we see a proliferation of specialized sites, I think there will be a big market for these types of services. As an example, Whizspark already acts as a data gathering tool for events, but as a service to their clients, they could ensure that event data is distributed to all the various event services (Eventful, zvents, MySpace, Google Base, etc.).

It's a scary world we live in; even with new ways of finding relevant information popping up daily, still upwards of 75% of traffic to content sites comes from Google. If we move to giving them the content as well (a la Google Video), we might was well do away with the web, drop all our domain names, and have everything as *.google.com. I don't think that's what we want, or what is in the best interest of the web as a whole.