> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.lorcandempsey.net/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# The ping is the thing
- URL: https://www.lorcandempsey.net/the-ping-is-the-thing/
- Published: 2005-10-08T12:32:23.000Z
- Updated: 2020-10-28T21:02:26.000Z
- Author: Lorcan Dempsey
- Tags: Institutions, Social, Systems

[Stories](https://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story%5Fid=4484119&ref=lorcandempsey.net) need hooks, and the [Economist](https://www.economist.com/?ref=lorcandempsey.net) has one. Libraries versus conversations. Make that *big-assed threaded conversations*.  
Architecture follows metaphor, says David Sifry of [Technorati](https://www.technorati.com/?ref=lorcandempsey.net), and he goes on to suggest that the search engines were built on the metaphor of the library. 

> As librarians, Mr Sifry acknowledges, Google and Yahoo! are “brilliant” – he has no intention whatsoever of competing with them in general web search. His idea for Technorati is subtly different, but has huge implications. Mr Sifry starts out with a metaphor for the web not as a library but – slipping into some technical argot common in Silicon Valley – “a big-ass threaded conversation”. Or, more poetically, a “river of human chatter”, constantly joined by other creeks and brooks and ever flowing. And whereas a library is by tradition a place where people whisper, Mr Sifry’s internet is a cheerfully noisy place. \[[Face value | The life and soul of the internet party | Economist.com](https://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story%5Fid=4484119&ref=lorcandempsey.net)\]

When it comes to blogs and conversation, the *ping* is the thing: blogs update various services as entries are published. And this explains the [acquisition](https://www.verisign.com/press%5Freleases/pr/page%5F035944.html?ref=lorcandempsey.net) elsewhere this week of weblogs.com by Verisign. Verisign talks about how it makes available ‘intelligent infrastructure services’ to network applications. They are staking a claim to provide ‘intelligent infrastructure’ which sustains the fabric – the ping network – of blog connectedness and real-time availability.  
Further on search engines and libraries: from *The Search* by [John Battelle](https://battellemedia.com/?ref=lorcandempsey.net):

> In short, the search engine of the future isn’t really a search engine as we know it. It’s more like an intelligent agent – or as Larry Page told me, a reference librarian with complete mastery of the entire corpus of human knowledge. *[The Search](https://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/1591840880?ref=lorcandempsey.net)*, p.252\] 

YAGWALLM – yet another group with a library like mission.  
Ping and crawl, alert and search: they make connections that are changing behaviors and expectations. Whether or not you describe Google or Yahoo as library-like, though, should be a less important issue to us than figuring out which services libraries interact with these connected spaces.