The Other Five Billion: Google Focuses on Truly Universal Publishing for Content Nation

Estimates of how many people have regular access to the Internet vary widely, but the latest leading estimates available today show the total base of people using the Web at about 1.6 billion people. That's huge in and of itself, of course, but it overlooks a key factor: other current estimates have the total world population weighing in at about 6.7 billion people. In other words, about three-fourths of the world's people have no Web access. As ubiquitous as the Web seems at times, it is just in the early days of having a social and economic impact on the world at large.

While a portion of this non-accessing population could be chalked up to older people who will never make the leap across the digital divide, an even larger portion are people who are yearning for the economic and social opportunities afforded by Web communications. As I outline in the Content Nation book in Chapter 3, in the back alleys of New Delhi poor children with no previous exposure to computers were given access to the Web via a PC embedded in the wall of a building. Almost immediately they became what an adult would consider "computer literate" and started teaching one another how to publish and how to collaborate on content. The five billion-plus people who are awaiting access to the Web are largely these people, ready to make use of globally accessible and highly scalable publishing tools to change their work, their lives and their future as soon as they get their hands on them.

The question is, though, how people who have very few resources can participate in Content Nation, the global community of the millions of people already influencing the world through social media publishing. One company that is hot on the trail of answering this question is Google. Google's corporate mission is defined in very broad terms: to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. The breadth of this mission includes organizing information from people who may not be literate or have a type of literacy that's accessible to only a relatively small group of people who speak local dialects. This is a particular concern in nations such as India, which has over 100 spoken and written dialects and languages in use amongst its citizens today, with only a small fraction of them speaking English and many who don't speak or read Hindi or other prominent native languages.

Enter Google Noticeboard, a beta service developed by Google Labs India that begins to bridge the gap between the world's publishing "haves" and "have-nots" - and that provides a new way for even sophisticated content publishers and sharers to relate to one another. Google Noticeboard enables people with limited or no literacy and who have at least some access to communications technologies to publish and share voice and text messages with other people equipped with Google Noticeboard technology on their PCs or who have everyday mobile phones. In small villages and other communities where access to computers is limited, Google Noticeboard is designed to allow those who have access to a computer that can be accessed by a community to share Google Noticeboard's ability to send and share messages.

Once installed on your computer, Google Noticeboard provides a very simple and almost text-free point-and-click interface that enables people to record voice and text messages and to categorize them using simple graphic icons - no language knowledge is assumed except by the person administering the computer. Messages can be listened to and read by people using that communal or personal computer, or they can be sent to another person's phone or email account listed in the administrator's Gmail contact list. In this way people who may not have access to computers can still share information and messages with their community by sending or replying to Google Noticeboard messages.

The graphic icons used to define the default Google Noticeboard categories give a hint as to what the designers of the system had in mind for communal messages: money, religion, relationships, agriculture and education are key targets for Google Noticeboard messages, though users may define their own categories. The concept of Google Noticeboard is in some ways a direct descendant of Agropedia, an initiative in India to build a repository of local agricultural knowledge that can collect information from anyone equipped with a telephone. Instead of spending untold fortunes trying to educate people in how to communicate in commonly published languages in order to receive and to disseminate information, both Agropedia and Google Noticeboard flip this model on its head and try to get people to build knowledge with whatever level of literacy they share in common with their peers.

Google Noticeboard enables people to communicate to groups and individuals at the lowest common denominator of available publishing technologies but still have the ability to scale their communications rapidly to be available to a broader community. Add in any number of contacts from a community or personal Gmail contact list and pretty soon you have the ability to form both knowledge bases and markets with large groups of people. And this is using only the core Google Noticeboard tools: if extended into Google's emerging Google Voice services, based on technology acquired by Google from GrandCentral, and enhanced by Google's emerging ability to search audio sources, Google Noticeboard can be thought of as the broad foothills of an emerging strategy to revolutionize shared audio as a key content source for globally-scaled publishing. People may be in awe of Craigslist's ability to enable people to build person-to-person commerce and relationships, for example, but imagine how people who can post voice or simple text classifieds to their peers in remote villages around the world can begin to change their lives.

Given that many of the five billion people who do not have personal access to the Web are not likely to become literate in the languages most commonly used on the Web any time soon, Google Noticeboard also holds out the potential for social media to connect these people to the power of publishing before they've ever had a real taste of the "old stuff" from many traditional media sources. In other words, after millennia of holding the keys to publishing while leaving much of the world's population illiterate and with no access to publishing tools, we may be on the edge of human civilization re-emerging as infinitely scalable communities who hold the ability to organize their own native communications as they please. In some instances this will mean that people choose to invest in their traditional cultures and languages, ensuring a diversity of outlooks and techniques that may eventually help humankind to ensure diverse approaches can compete to solve globally scaled challenges. In other instances it may mean that these same people opt for online translation services to participate in broader communities around the world.

Whichever way this plays, the highly scalable communications of social media are beginning to empower the three-fourths of people around the world who have been largely ignored by traditional content and technology companies. In Content Nation I highlight the "Big Sombrero" economy, the massive value being created through social media enabling people connected through social media to build markets for their goods and services together. The Big Sombrero economy many not power a huge surge in the consumption of mass-market goods,  but it may enable local and specialized economies all around the world to scale massively as never before - enough to create a whole new level of wealth in the world previously abandoned by major economic interests.

Too often we think of the social media revolution in terms of relatively exotic toys such as iPhones and sophisticated online services oriented towards relatively affluent people. Google's focus on being a simple and effective solution that can reach the broadest audience possible is opening up an addressable marketplace for social media and basic human communications five times larger than the one that most companies are chasing. In the process of doing so the real story of human evolution in the hands of Content Nation is just beginning to take form in a way that could change the shape of the global economy - one village, one message, one person at a time.