One of my favorite stories about technological innovation involves the founding of Reuters. Back in the 1830s and 1840s, as telegraph lines were being strung across the world, the usefulness of the revolutionary new communication system was hampered by gaps in coverage. In Europe, for instance, the Belgian telegraph line ended in Brussels, while the German line didn’t start until Aachen. Messages had to be transcribed and carried over land across the 77 miles separating the two cities. But a couple of entrepreneurs saw a business opportunity in this problem. In 1849, they bought a flock of carrier pigeons and used them to fly messages between Brussels and Aachen, reducing transit times dramatically. Within a few years, their little company had itself taken wing, becoming one of the world’s leading telegraph agencies and, in time, a media giant.

Gears, Google’s newly introduced set of software tools that allows web-based programs to continue to run even when a user loses his Internet connection, is a modern-day analogue to Reuters’ carrier pigeons. It fills a gap in a new and as yet incomplete technological system, helping ease the way to the future. We know that software is moving online – that the applications we use will increasingly run in distant data centers rather than on our own hard drives – but we’re still a long way from having the persistent, ubiquitous broadband network connections that will allow those applications to run with the reliability of traditional, locally installed apps. There are gaps in connectivity – just as there were, for many years, gaps in the telegraph system (not to mention the rail system, the telephone system, the electric grid, and the highway system). Because people live in the present, not the future, finding ways to fill these gaps is crucial to technological progress – and can also present a big business opportunity. (As I described in an earlier article, mending disruptions can be even more lucrative than creating them.)

In a decade or two, we probably won’t need a stopgap like Gears. For now, we do – and Google’s wise to provide it.

I confess: I’m not a natural-born tagger. A while back, when Amazon.com began allowing its customers to tag its products with descriptive labels or keywords, I thought it would be a good way of categorizing and cataloging books I’d come across that I might want to remember in the future. But after tagging a couple of books, I lost interest. It didn’t seem worth the fuss.

Some people, though, are more dedicated. They’ve found creative ways to use tags to label and categorize Amazon’s products – for their own benefit and for the benefit of others with similar interests. I recently received an email from a reader of this blog who described how, in browsing for DVDs at Amazon, he came across some creepy keywords that users had used to categorize movies. The 1985 French coming-of-age film L’Effrontée, for example, had been tagged, as shown in the screen shot below, with such keywords as “child nudity,” “infant nudity,” “young girl,” “bare butt,” and “nymphette”:

If you click on any of those keywords, you get a neatly organized list, sometimes going on for many pages, of other movies that users have tagged with the same label. A lot of the tags on L’Effrontée also appear, for instance, on the Amazon page for the Oscar-nominated 1998 Norwegian movie The Other Side of Sunday:

One possible explanation is that the tags are being added by people who are offended at seeing things like naked babies or bare behinds in movies – and are trying to warn off likeminded folks. But, let’s face it, that’s a stretch, particularly when you view the tags in their totality (or look at the buying patterns that Amazon documents). What’s really going on here, almost certainly, is that weirdos are using keywords to, in effect, set up special little sections of Amazon’s store tailored to their peculiar tastes. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. You don’t have to travel far down the long tail of demand before you start finding unsavory niches. And it certainly could be argued that, however distasteful this kind of tagging may be to most people, no one’s actually being harmed by it, at least not directly. Should we really care what motivates people to watch particular movies in their own homes?

Still, the practice of this sort of communal tagging at a popular mainstream site raises some difficult questions, not least for the site owner. Does Amazon really want to be known as a company that makes it easy for people to find movies labeled as containing “child nudity.” If it were a physical store, would it set up a “child nudity” section in its movie department? I don’t think so.

But there’s another twist to this story. The keywords, it turns out, aren’t actually coming from Amazon’s customers. If you scroll further down on the DVD pages, you find another set of tags which are coming from Amazon users – and are, so far as I can see, fairly inoffensive. The unseemly tags appear to be part of the information on movies that Amazon automatically imports into its site from the popular Internet Movie Database (IMDb) site. Although there’s no indication that the keywords come from IMDb on Amazon’s main product pages – theye tags are described simply as “plot keywords recommended by customers” – if you click deeper into the product information you find an indication that that is where they’re coming from. And, indeed, the user keywords at IMDb precisely match those found on Amazon.

There’s a useful warning here. Commercial site owners don’t just have to keep an eye on the words, pictures, tags, and even categories being added to their pages by their own users. They need to be cognizant of the user-contributed content they’re pulling in from other sites as well. Once it appears on your site, it’s your business. What they say about sexually transmitted diseases seems to apply equally well to data in the Web 2.0 age: You’re not just sleeping with your partner; you’re sleeping with your partner’s partners.

UPDATE: Another twist: In a comment on this post, a reader notes a fact that I missed: IMDb is in fact a subsidiary of Amazon.com, having been acquired back in 1998. I had convinced myself that Amazon was probably unaware of the kinds of tags it was pulling in from IMDb. I guess I was wrong.

Tomorrow’s New York Times features an amusing article on how H.J. Heinz’s foray into user-generated advertising is backfiring. The company is holding a big YouTube contest to get people to create video advertisements for its ketchup. But the entries are almost universally crappy, the contest is generating ill-will among some in the target audience, and the company is actually spending more than it would have if it had just hired an ad agency to put together a campaign.

Turns out, that’s par for the course. The companies that have jumped onto the user-generated-ad bandwagon “have found that inviting consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves. Many entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them requires full-time attention. And even the most well-known brands often spend millions of dollars upfront to get the word out to consumers.”

To add insult to injury, the worst ads (from the advertiser’s perspective) tend to be the ones that become most popular on YouTube. One of the most-watched Heinz ads “ends with a close-up of a mouth with crooked, yellowed teeth.” The Times reporter quotes the reaction of a viewer: “Were his teeth the result of, maybe, too much Heinz?”

Yesterday, John Battelle noted that Resource Shelf had spotted some intriguing domain registrations: On Wednesday, Google (or someone at Google) registered the domain names ClimateSaverPC.com and ClimateSaverPC.org, while Urs Hoelzle, a top Google engineer and one of the masterminds behind its cutting-edge computing system, registered ClimateSaverPC.us. As Battelle wrote: “Innaresting!”

Google has deep expertise in designing and assembling energy-efficient PCs – it reportedly has hundreds of thousands or even millions of them running in data centers around the world. The company has also been pushing the computer industry to reengineer personal computers to dramatically reduce their energy consumption. Urs Hoelzle has been particularly active in this effort, having recently cowritten an important paper about the design of PC power supplies.

So, given those newly registered domains, it’s not hard to conjure up a scenario in which Google draws on its expertise to launch an amazingly efficient low-cost PC into the market. Is the much rumored “Google PC” about to finally show its green face?

I asked Hoelzle, in an email, about all this, and he graciously shot back a reply:

Interesting to see that people spend their time tracking my domain registrations. You only have the partial story though – granted, a full-fledged PC for $10 will make headlines, even without the Google OS on it, but the true story is the built-in source of cheap and infinite energy in this puppy, a breakthrough technology that allows the PC to be entirely self-powered for an unlimited duration as long as the user clicks on some discreetly placed, highly relevant text ads :-)

He then removed his tongue from his cheek and concluded:

If you want a more serious answer – I won’t comment on my personal matters. Concerning PCs, our response to inquiries about the mythical Google PC remains the same as before: “We have many PC partners who serve their customers exceedingly well and we see no need to enter that market.”

So there you have it: The mythical Google PC remains mythical, and we have no idea what may or may not happen with ClimateSaverPC.com. But this story has produced one shocking revelation: irony exists in the Googleplex.

Feel free to roll around in them like a pig in … clover:

In Strategy & Business, I have an article (pdf) about the application of “peer production” to business innovation. The title the magazine gave the piece is “The Ignorance of Crowds,” but it’s really more about the weaknesses, or limitations, of crowds. I argue that peer production works well for manifold, time-consuming tasks that don’t require a lot of coordination among workers but that it’s not going to help you come up with a great new idea or give a product the kind of polish that often creates a hit in the market.

In the latest edition of the Financial Times Digital Business podcast, I look at Microsoft’s prospects, asking the all-important question: What exactly does Microsoft have in common with Barry Manilow?

In another podcast, I talk to Supernova impresario Kevin Werbach about why we shouldn’t confuse the Net’s effect on business with its effect on culture.

It’s hard to get much insight into how Google goes about choosing locations for its data centers and negotiating deals. Usually, the company seals the lips of everyone involved with non-disclosure agreements. But in the wake of the search giant’s most recent deal to build a center in Pryor, Oklahoma – for which Google’s chief of global operations, Lloyd Taylor, received a rather blingy medallion from Oklahoma governor Brad Henry (see photo) – the head of the MidAmerica industrial park in which the data center complex will be constructed let slip a few details about the process. In an interview with the Tulsa Free Press, Sanders Mitchell described, among other things, how Google refused to disclose its identity until after the final contract was signed:

It was March 11, 2006 and Mitchell was basking in the glow of having just landed a major client in Gatorade when the call from Google came. After an initial period of disbelief, the MidAmerica people received a delegation from their mysterious suitor, a suitor that had some very specific needs but was light on such details as just who they were.

“For quite some time,” Mitchell recalls, “I had no confirmation as to who I was dealing with. I had it narrowed down quite a bit, but until the final contract was signed they (Google) wouldn’t admit who they were. It was an interesting time” …

“We never,” says a Google representative, “comment on who we’re talking to, who we’ve considered, who we’ve rejected. We feel that when we come to an agreement, that’s the time to make an announcement.”

So what were the lures that made Pryor so enticing? “We had all the things they needed,” says Mitchell. “We had 800 acres of prime land that they could use both for their initial data center and for whatever expansion they plan to make in the future. We have plenty of electricity, and we have plenty of water to cool their equipment if they have to generate their own electricity as sometimes happens when we get a power outage in Oklahoma.

“They haven’t really discussed this, but I think one of the things that made us attractive to Google was that we were ready to move on the spur of the moment. We had an 86,000 square foot building already in place, which we had built on speculation. That means they are going to be able to be up and running in a fraction of the time of any other place.

“We also had a lack of red tape I think they found a huge advantage. In other locations so many agencies have to sign off on a project that it can be a year or more before any real movement can be made. I don’t think the team at Google was willing to wait that long.”

So how did Google discover the industrial park in Pryor, Oklahoma? According to Lloyd Taylor, it found it by searching the Net.

The Financial Times reports on some revealing comments that Google CEO Eric Schmidt made to the press in London:

Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

That should make life a lot easier for all of us.