I was reading an interview today with Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopedia Britannica, in which he describes some of the Web 2.0-y tools that the company is preparing to roll out to enable readers to contribute to the encyclopedia’s content. (I’m on Britannica’s board of editorial advisors.) The interview touches, as you’d expect, on the great success that Wikipedia has achieved on the Web and, in particular, on its ever increasing dominance of Google search results. Cauz calls the tie between Wikipedia and Google “the most symbiotic relationship happening out there” – and I think he’s right.

Cauz’s remark reminded me that it’s been some time since I updated my informal survey of Wikipedia’s ranking on Google. A couple of years ago, I plucked from my brain, in as random a fashion as I could manage, ten topics from a range of knowledge domains: World War II, Israel, George Washington, Genome, Agriculture, Herman Melville, Internet, Magna Carta, Evolution, Epilepsy. I then googled each one to see where Wikipedia’s article on the topic would rank.

I first did the searches on August 10, 2006. The results showed that Wikipedia did indeed hold a strong position for each of the ten subjects:

World War II: #1

Israel: #1

George Washington: #4

Genome: #9

Agriculture: #6

Herman Melville: #3

Internet: #5

Magna Carta: #2

Evolution: #3

Epilepsy: #6

I next did the searches on December 14, 2007, and found that Wikipedia’s dominance of Google searches had, over the course of just a year and a half, grown dramatically:

World War II: #1

Israel: #1

George Washington: #2

Genome: #1

Agriculture: #1

Herman Melville: #1

Internet: #1

Magna Carta: #1

Evolution: #1

Epilepsy: #3

Today, another year having passed, I did the searches again. And guess what:

World War II: #1

Israel: #1

George Washington: #1

Genome: #1

Agriculture: #1

Herman Melville: #1

Internet: #1

Magna Carta: #1

Evolution: #1

Epilepsy: #1

Yes, it’s a clean sweep for Wikipedia.

The first thing to be said is: Congratulations, Wikipedians. You rule. Seriously, it’s a remarkable achievement. Who would have thought that a rag-tag band of anonymous volunteers could achieve what amounts to hegemony over the results of the most popular search engine, at least when it comes to searches for common topics.

The next thing to be said is: what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia – and I admit there’s much to adore – you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

It’s hard to imagine that Wikipedia articles are actually the very best source of information for all of the many thousands of topics on which they now appear as the top Google search result. What’s much more likely is that the Web, through its links, and Google, through its search algorithms, have inadvertently set into motion a very strong feedback loop that amplifies popularity and, in the end, leads us all, lemminglike, down the same well-trod path – the path of least resistance. You might call this the triumph of the wisdom of the crowd. I would suggest that it would be more accurately described as the triumph of the wisdom of the mob. The former sounds benign; the latter, less so.

UPDATE: Interestingly, Britannica and Wikipedia seem to be headed toward a convergence in their editorial rules and regulations. After Wikipedia erroneously declared both Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd dead on Inauguration Day, the Register noted that an embarrassed Jimmy Wales intensified his push to get the Wikipedians to adopt a policy of Flagged Revisions, which would require edits of sensitive articles, including those on living persons, to be vetted by editors before being incorporated into the Wikipedia site. (In what may be a preview of Wikipedia’s future, the Flagged Revisions policy has already been adopted by the German Wikipedia for all articles.) Such a move would, of course, represent a continuation of Wikipedia’s ongoing tightening of editorial controls over its content.

Internet zealots get a charge out of describing books, magazines, and newspapers as “dead tree media.” The implication is that surrounding yourself with always-on electronic gadgets connected through a vast switching network to massive data centers represents a more environmentally friendly lifestyle than that pursued by, say, an old lady sitting at her kitchen table reading the morning paper.

Whatever makes you feel good about yourself.

Today’s Sunday Times reports on a new study by a Harvard research fellow named Alex Wissner-Gross which concludes that “performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.” According to the research, “a typical search generates about 7g of CO2” while “boiling a kettle generates about 15g.”

Let me start by saying that I find those numbers to be mind-boggling. In fact, I find them to be so mind-boggling that I’m dubious of them. In addition to being a researcher, Wissner-Gross is an entrepreneur who has a start-up that sells a service for tracking the electricity consumption of web sites. So he has a commercial as well as an academic interest here. So far as I can tell, he hasn’t made public his calculations. If he’s going to throw his conclusions around, he should show us how he arrived at them.

If we assume that Google processes a billion searches a day worldwide (a reasonable guesstimate), that means that, according to Wissner-Gross’s numbers, those searches are producing 7 billion grams of carbon dioxide. Over the course of a year, that comes out to 2,555 billion grams. That equals, according to my rough and not altogether reliable arithmetic, 2.6 billion kilograms, or 2.6 million metric tons. I don’t know enough about CO2 emissions to know whether that’s a reasonable number. But somebody out there must know if it’s a reasonable number.

But Wissner-Gross is surely right about one thing: that, as he tells the Times, “a Google search has a definite environmental impact.” Adds Evan Mills, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has done extensive research on the electricity use of information technology: “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable.”

Google has been very aggressive in developing energy-saving computer technologies (much more so than traditional PC and server manufacturers) – and its efforts should be applauded. Cutting energy consumption is a business imperative for the company (because its electric bill is one of its biggest costs), and I think it’s fair to say that the Googlers see it as a moral imperative, too. But that doesn’t change the fact that its search engine and other Internet services, like those of other online companies, consume an enormous quantity of electricity.

Google is in something of a moral quandary here. It’s dedicated to energy efficiency, but it’s also dedicated to getting people to spend as much time using the Net, and their computers, as possible. (That’s the very core of its ad-based business model.) The company hasn’t disclosed its electricity consumption. It says that such details of its operations are competitive secrets. I’m sure that’s true. I’m also sure it’s true that Google doesn’t particularly want us to focus too closely on its energy use or, for that matter, on the environmental implications of our own Internet use.

If reducing energy consumption were the company’s top priority, it would launch a PR campaign to educate people about those implications. It would encourage us to be conscious of the time we spend online – and to try to reduce that time. It might even offer, perhaps as part of the Google toolbar, a little calculator that shows a running estimate of the grams of CO2 we emit during each Internet session. Or maybe it could put a little banner across its home page reading: “Is this search really necessary?”

But this isn’t really about Google, which is only supplying us with services that we want. It’s about us. We may be obsessive about turning off the lights when we leave a room, but at the same time we may happily spend hours dicking around online, oblivious of the electricity lighting up our screen, heating our chip, and powering and cooling the data centers we’re connected to. (It’s true that in some cases Internet use may substitute for other activities, such as travel, that would consume more energy, but let’s not kid ourselves: the vast majority of computer and Internet use represents additional energy consumption.) How many Twitterheads think about their electricity use before they tweet? Not many. How many bloggers think about it before they blog? Not this one.

So the next time you see some lunkhead smugly bloviating about “dead tree media,” ask him how much electricity his computers, smartphones, and other networked gadgets consumed that day.

UPDATE: Google responds, claiming the Wissner-Gross estimate “is *many* times too high”: “Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ … In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2.”

Still, the numbers add up. Google says “the average car driven for one kilometer … produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.” That means that the billion searches Google is estimated to do a day are equivalent to driving a car about a million kilometers. And that doesn’t include the energy used to power the PCs of the people doing the searches, which Google says is greater than the power it uses.

This weekend’s edition of NPR’s On the Media includes an interview with me about the upsides and downsides of cloud computing.

Next week, I think I’ll be participating in a discussion about Google, inspired by Randall Stross’s book Planet Google, at the Talking Points Memo Book Club.

Meanwhile, The Big Switch has popped up on some best-books-of-the-year lists, including ones issued by PopMatters, The Times of London, Fast Company, and Business Pundit. It was also named one of 2008’s sleeper hits in publishing by the Associated Press.

The paperback edition of The Big Switch is making its way into bookstores and, for early adopters, is available now from Amazon.com and BN.com. The paperback includes a new section, “The Cloud 20,” in which I profile 20 leading cloud computing businesses. The companies, as I write in the introduction to the section, “together illustrate the impressive breadth of the cloud computing industry, even at this early point in its development. Not all of these companies will succeed, and there are other businesses that could just as easily have made the list, but ‘The Cloud 20’ provides a sense of both the present and the future of utility computing.”

Here, in alphabetical order, are the companies I profile:

Adobe

Akamai

Amazon.com

Cisco Systems

Citrix Systems (including XenSource)

EMC (including VMware and Mozy)

Facebook

Gh.o.st

Google

IBM

Intuit

Metaweb Technologies

Microsoft

Mint

Salesforce.com

Sun Microsystems

37signals

3tera

Workday

Zoho

I recently commented on the Nature editorial that made a case for “the responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy.” The writers of the editorial, a distinguished group of academics, had noted that artificial “cognition enhancement” could boost the performance and productivity of many workers: “From assembly line workers to surgeons, many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it.”

In a posting today, the law professor Frank Pasquale takes the next logical step, offering a modest proposal for also allowing the use of “cognition-dulling drugs” by the healthy. Pasquale notes that for many types of contemporary jobs, particularly those involving repetitive computer work, “a relentless focus on well-defined tasks can offer a real competitive edge in today’s economy.” Many of the people employed in such jobs, Pasquale writes, “may experience moments of imagination or reverie positively, as exemplary thought rather than distracting consolation. For those individuals, the next goal of an autonomy-enhancing bioethics should be the development and widespread use of cognition-dulling drugs, which serve to blot out all awareness except of the task at hand. Cures for resentment, envy, or union-organizing may also serve to enhance workplace efficiency.”

“Like the happy inhabitants of [Aldous] Huxley’s Island,” writes Pasquale, “both cognition-enhancers and cognition-dullers can work together peaceably in a mutualism that discourages conflict.” Expanding on the judicious recommendations of the Nature writers, Pasquale concludes that “the key … is to carefully consider how best to develop a pharmacopeia that safely and effectively cures tendencies to insubordination, daydreaming, dissatisfaction, and other inefficient habits.”

(See also this paper by Pasquale.)

I’ve begun work on my next book, tentatively titled The Shallows: Mind, Memory and Media in an Age of Instant Information. This blog will remain semidormant for a while.

In response to the flood of prescription brain stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall on college campuses, a group of academics from Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, Penn, and other schools say the time has come to allow such drugs to be prescribed to healthy people for “cognitive enhancement.” In a commentary published yesterday in Nature, they argue that such drugs, as well as future therapies like brain chips, should be viewed no differently than communications technologies or good sleep habits:

Human ingenuity has given us means of enhancing our brains through inventions such as written language, printing and the Internet. Most authors of this Commentary are teachers and strive to enhance the minds of their students, both by adding substantive information and by showing them new and better ways to process that information. And we are all aware of the abilities to enhance our brains with adequate exercise, nutrition and sleep. The [cognitive-enhancement] drugs just reviewed, along with newer technologies such as brain stimulation and prosthetic brain chips, should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology — ways that our uniquely innovative species tries to improve itself.

They acknowledge but reject some of the more common ethical arguments that have been made against the prescription of smart pills:

Cognitive-enhancing drugs require relatively little effort, are invasive and for the time being are not equitably distributed, but none of these provides reasonable grounds for prohibition. Drugs may seem distinctive among enhancements in that they bring about their effects by altering brain function, but in reality so does any intervention that enhances cognition. Recent research has identified beneficial neural changes engendered by exercise, nutrition and sleep, as well as instruction and reading. In short, cognitive-enhancing drugs seem morally equivalent to other, more familiar, enhancements … Given the many cognitive-enhancing tools we accept already, from writing to laptop computers, why draw the line here and say, thus far but no further?

While recommending further study of the effects of cognition-enhancing drugs as well as the laws controlling their use, the authors, led by Henry Greely of Stanford Law School, “call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.” They go further to suggest, in terms that seem almost Swiftian (Jonathan, not Tom), that the government should actively support the distribution and use of amphetamines and other types of brain-boosting drugs: “If cognitive enhancements are costly, they may become the province of the rich, adding to the educational advantages they already enjoy. One could mitigate this inequity by giving every exam-taker free access to cognitive enhancements, as some schools provide computers during exam week to all students. This would help level the playing field.”

That’s the economic playing field. I worry more, though, about the possibility of leveling the cognitive playing field, as institutionally supported programs of brain enhancement impose on us, intentionally or not, a particular ideal of mental function. In a long list of questions for further research, the authors make a glancing reference to this concern: “Do [these drugs] change ‘cognitive style’, as well as increasing how quickly and accurately we think?” Something tells me that once the idea of artificial brain “enhancement” becomes accepted, through writings like this Nature commentary, that question will end up being pushed aside. Will people worry about the subtleties of “cognitive style” if they sense that the person in the next dorm or office is getting an edge on them by popping smart pills?