Text is universally understandable:
Text is an accessible format that is accessible by a large number of people. Most of us like visualizations more than reading through text, but disabled users have problems going through graphical elements. Computers also cannot handle graphical data well. All data, if translated to text does not only benefit disabled users, but also computers. It is even better for computers if the text is in standardized structures. Digitized text is searchable and findable.
Most books don’t find their way into google. I wonder if amazon could digitize all the books they sell and make them searchable with out publishing the whole book on the internet. Also, Why can’t NYTimes allow only google spiders to crawl and index their archives?
The captioning on TV gives rise to an interesting application. TVeyes scans the captioning for a specified keyword and sends you an email with a brief transcript. Now all I need is an Email2RSS service that publishes all emails from an address to RSS to get the results into my aggregator. Ray Ozzie also talks about email to RSS. Eightlinks has an implementation of Email2RSS in Perl.
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