Google Ocean to Extend Planetary Quantification
January 26 2009 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Information Year: 2009 Rating: 5 Hot
If the rumors prove true, Google is about to add 1.35 quintillion liters of water and 361 million square kilometers of surface area to its Earth and Maps applications with the long-awaited release of Google Ocean.
According to CNet reporter Stephen Shankland it's rather likely that Google will announce the new monster app next week at a star-studded Google Earth event:
Gore is set to join Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, at the on February 2 event at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco's newly rebuilt aquarium, planetarium, and natural history museum. But it's another speaker's name that gives the tip-off about what the event might be about.
That person is oceanographer Sylvia Earle, explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society and the founder of the Deep Search Foundation.
When viewed together with Google's space-based initiatives (Google Sky, Google Moon, Google Mars), the Ocean project indicates that Google is very clearly working to lay down the scaffolding (3d wiki) for Total Systems Quantification (TSQ), a very necessary strategy considering the company's mission to make all information universally accessible.
Though most bloggers and Google analysts view this mission as esoteric and tangentally related to primary revenue, I believe the core team sees it as absolutely critical to their ongoing mission and future revenue. Wherever there is information, Google is there too. It just so happens that systems maps serve as the perfect platform through which we can deposit and contextualize information, thus generating knowledge. The more expansive and finer the maps, the more potential for knowledge that Google can then act as gatekeeper for.
This core philosophy also explains why Google's Knol has escaped its recent project killing spree. If it's not related to TSQ or the prosumers required to build out knowledge it's not core and essential to Google and liable to get disappeared.
