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 Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 UnitedStates The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) 4415 Euclid Ave 3rd Floor Cleveland Ohio 44103 USA1Interview and transcription April 25, 2009
Matthew Theobald, Founder, Internet Search Environment Number (ISEN) andCEO, Internous LLCA Database of Databases [46:13]Introduction
Hi, it’s Matt Theobald, Founder of Internous.com. the database of databases, which isgoverned by the Internet Search Environment Number, is like an ISBN number for booksexcept that it is for databases or search environments. And a search environment can beany structured set of information with its own algorithm, like a database, a librarycatalogue, a P-to-P environment, a blog, in a searchable environment. A searchenvironment is one of these types of things, and the search environment is all of them inconcert. So what we attempt to do is to identify each one, catalogue and classify it, andmake it searchable and make it therefore, a database of databases.
What are you passionate about? [1:06]
What I’m most passionate about is connecting people’s minds with the body of knowledge and the body of knowledge would be this search environment and the manysearch environments that are on the Internet and the human mind; so, a cognitiveinterface between minds and databases. So, if you think of social networks as beinginteractions between communities of individuals with minds that are in some ways verysophisticated databases, exabytes of information, and then you’ve got large and smalldatabases which could be in some cases maybe exabytes of information, terabytes of information, or just kilo bytes of information, and connecting the databases that interestand inform and reward the knowledge that people desire to help them make decisions toimprove their lives and their communities.
What would you like people to know, think, feel and do? [2:06]
Being asked what I would like people to know, think, feel or do: what I want people toknow is that there is a deep, hidden, darker, invisible and structured web of informationthat is in databases that is vastly larger than any contemporary search engine and it existsright now. The current search engines index the surface web, which is purportedly by beststatistics, .2% of the information that is available on the Internet. So Google, Yahoo andthe rest only skim the surface of the surface. What I want you think about, is the number of databases that are out there that the content is not indexed by any of the contemporarysearch engines. There could be several hundred in your community, there could beseveral hundreds of thousands in your state, there are definitely millions in the U.S. andthere are probably tens of millions around the world. When you think of URLs in Googlefor example, passing the trillion URL mark what we’re talking about is about ten millionURLs that are database interfaces that contain 500 – 650 times the information that is onGoogle or Yahoo. What I want you to feel is the depth of knowledge that is already outthere that is hidden, in a sense, but it is already there. You can find these things through
 
 Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 UnitedStates The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) 4415 Euclid Ave 3rd Floor Cleveland Ohio 44103 USA2Google by adding the word “database” to your search. But still that is not going to be thataccurate because the word database has to be on the page you are searching to find it. Iwant you to feel empowered by the knowledge that no brand of search utility has a totalgrasp or no near a total grasp of the amount of data, the amount of information that’s outthere on the Internet right now. What I want you to do, is I want you to consider theinformation at Internous.com, on the blog and on the website, and think about it. Some itis obtuse and future oriented and intentionally vague, that will become more clear, and asit becomes more clear, what we will be ready to do is ask you to is to find the databasesthat are of interest to you and begin book marking them, and then once we are ready to begin cataloging them, you can contribute those as suggestions for the overall collectionto share with people who have similar communities of interest and communities of  purpose.
What do you see for the future? [5:10]
For the future, the future is already here in a lot of ways in the sense that social networkshave humanized technology a lot more and I think there’s been a separation betweencomputer culture or technical culture and techies and the rest of the world and as peoplein the rest of the world become more technical, the technical people have to become morehuman and I think that gap is closing faster and faster and a generation from now it may be accomplished. But I think the task for information literacy for people that are lessliterate regardless of age or generation as far as information literacy is the most importantissue to be able to sort out where you’re information is coming from, what’s importantfor the task you are trying to do and be able to sort out the vast amount of informationthat is coming on to the network, so as there is more and more information coming on tothe network and there is more and more people coming on to the network, it presents a problem, but it is also more of a solution than it is a problem. So I have a very brightview of how technology will be humanized and how humans will be technologicalized – or a synthesis between the real world and the Cyber world and how the Cyber world is just a tool to enhance reality and reality is much more important than sitting in front of acomputer screen. The computer screen is going to become more mobile, moretransparent, there’s going to be enhanced data access from a visual point of view justfrom wearable computing and access to technologies to enhance your mobile existence inthe real world. So I think that as usability becomes more practiced and more embedded indevices and as the cognitive interfaces I was talking about before that cognitiveenhancement or cognitive augmentation would occur in the Internet user widely andrapidly.
How did you prepare for this project? [7:51]
The idea first came in August of 1996 in the end of graduate school in a standardsworkshop where my Professor Carol Hurtz said that standards were very important andvery powerful and were very valuable financially. So I thought that I should come upwith a standard and, like I said before, I just kind of combined the ISBN and DNS ideaand assigned it to search engines and thus was born the International Search EngineSerial Number, or ISESN number, replacing the “SE” for the “B” and the “S” in the “BS”
 
 Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 UnitedStates The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) 4415 Euclid Ave 3rd Floor Cleveland Ohio 44103 USA3in ISBN and ISSN. I went to Rick Worley who was Webmaster at IUPI and working onthe early job site on an online career center, which became Monster.com – the first jobsite on the Internet – started by Bill Warren, he said, “Well, why don’t you just call it the“ISEN” number? Well, that’s a better idea. So Rick and I had been dialoguing about thisconcept of cataloging databases and registering them like web pages like a DNS registry,since 1996. Rick went on to spend 12 years at Monster as Vice President, and the last half of that career there was the Vice President of Analytics and Traffic Monitoring as well ascommoditization and monetization of basically resume content, the descriptive contentabout a human being as an individual, which is not that far of an idea from a descriptiveresume about a database. We’ve always talked about connecting the mind to the body of knowledge that if you look at somebody’s resume you might be able to glean what kindof databases they are willing to look at and be able to map that professional interest toresources that fit that professional need. So, Rick has been involved since then. When Igraduated in 1996 I took a job working with the National Information Consortium, whichis a parent company of several companies, including Indiana Interactive which at the timeand still runs IN.gov - Access Indiana. I was involved in registering the IN.gov domainand was the third non-Federal dot com domain to my knowledge after New York and thestate of Massachusetts, Indiana was third. The first job I had at Access Indiana was toorganize all 92 counties into a template system that would offer a template web page toevery county in the state. Since they didn’t have web servers they’d be able to dial in andadd information to this template. Then eventually they got web servers that wouldmigrate that template off of our site and turn it into their own thing, so we started off as atemplate system to guide them along. It unified – you can search each county in the stateof Indiana with the same subject category so you can know where you were no matter what county you were in. But once the counties took them over they made them into their own nomenclatures and that cohesiveness was lost, but independence was gained. At thetime in California had thirty-eight out of fifty-two county websites and Indiana hadninety-two out of ninety-two and was the first state in the country to have a full web presence for each county. I ran out of work to do there and decided to offer to redesignthe state home page and was able to get a graphic designer and a programmer and aboutthree months to do it. At the time we had about 80,000 pages of static information, butsome very basic principles like alphabetization of departmental agency, proper alphabetization, which I think requires a Masters in Library Science, or some libraryexperience, Education, Department of, Department of Education, being able to indexthings very simply provided a way for people to get to the same information very easily.That design was approved very quickly and went up and lasted in a very static way, non-dynamically delivered HTML, just static HTML, for about three years without changing.After I completed the Indiana project I was asked to move to Iowa to start the IowaAccess project and they already had a website, but out of forty, fifty agencies they knewwhere about twelve URLS were and they were the big agencies, The Department of Transportation, The Department of Education and each agency had been given a sum of money to start their own web presence but there was no overarching governing of standards for what government web pages should look like. My job as InformationArchitect of the Citizen’s Information Network was to create a single portal to all state
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