Norwich City fan, book afficionado, and all-round nice guy Shane Richmond has been blogging about the future of newspapers and how they might adapt to the ‘next web’. Tim Malbon responded in his blog [link no longer available] with an even more extreme vision of a world in which there’s so much data available about our preferences that we will end up with no real choices of our own, only those deemed to be of interest to us by Google or whoever. I think this latter vision is completely wrong.

Shane’s posts are well argued, as always, and are informed by his experience as the News Editor of the Telegraph.co.uk. Tim’s is compelling, but, I think, fundamentally flawed. Here’s the first part of why I think that: things are generally quite crap.

There are two oft-quoted exemplars of relevance on the Internet today: Google AdSense and Amazon. I have to say that I remain unimpressed with both of these, even though they represent the best there is at the moment. (I should say that my musical taste precludes me from using either last.fm or Pandora, so I can’t judge these.)

Let’s take Amazon. I buy broadly three kinds of books. First, books that I want to read myself for pleasure. These are generally so-called ‘literary’ novels. Then, I buy computer books for work. Finally, I buy presents for other people, things I would never buy for myself. Amazon doesn’t know why I’m buying these things, and unless I tell it, which I can’t really be bothered to do, it doesn’t know what I thought of them. Maybe there are people whoi obsessively keep their Amazon perferences up to date, but I have other things to do that are more exciting.

I recently bought and read all of the Booker Prize shortlisted books, most of them from Amazon. Once I’d bought them my recommendations were updated – to include the Booker shortlisted books that I hadn’t bought, plus one book from each author if they had a back catalogue (there was one first novel on the list this year). Clever, you’re thinking? Not so clever, if you ask me. This is the most basic possible recommendation. It’s a bit like buying the number one single and then being asked ‘have you thought about buying the rest of the top ten?’

In fact, the only time Amazon recommendations are useful to me is when I buy books so obscure that only a few other people have ever bought them there. Then, they very often uncover some completely unexpected ‘related’ books, related for no other reason that some other Amazon user has an eclectic taste that is similar to mine. This is the ‘long tail’, which is why Amazon is succesful, or at least why it is useful to me (other than the obvious pricing reasons).

The Guardian Review on saturday and the Observer Review on sunday are miles better at identifying books I may be interested in than Amazon are. Why? Because there’s an editorial policy (in the case of the Observer, a former editor at Faber, Robert McCrum) in place and it is broadly in line with my tastes. At Amazon there’s no editorial policy, just a load of people buying stuff and then some assumptions about their relatedness. Plus, Amazon are trying to sell me stuff, so I can’t trust their editorial judgement anyway. Newspapers, at the moment, can be trusted to slate stuff they think is rubbish.

One final Amazon example. I once bought Abbado’s most recent recording of Mahler’s 7th Symphony and Don Box’s Essential .NET, Volume 1. I can’t think of a single link between those two items, other than that I happened to buy them at the same time. But guess what showed up as a related item to the Mahler Symphony? Even someone who had little or no knowledge of classical music or computing can see that there’s no relationship between these things.

All these things are instances of the crapness I’m talking about.

I can’t see how this problem can ever be solved, unless computers have a way of knowing why I buy things and not just what I buy. Shane’s argument (as does Tim’s perhaps to an even greater extent) rests on someone solving this fundamental problem.

Next time I’ll look at human factors in the software business that may retard our march towards an automated society.

I’ve also been able to bring in a couple of my ex-colleagues from Interesource, Neil Kleiner and Abbie Walker, both of whom have worked on social media projects for a while now. Neil used to work at the Mirror, and Abbie was key to the development of DoggySnaps. They will be helping me to work through the mountain of ideas that are bouncing around and to turn them into a implementable plan.

It’s very exciting indeed.

He’s asked me to be one of those who contribute their view of what the web will look like in 2020. Sometimes I feel that I have no idea what it will look like next week, so I’m not sure what I will actually talk about yet.

Suggestions are welcome required.