The World Wide Web is almost 20 years old. It was originally created to solve the problem of sharing and updating information among collaborators. In seemed natural at the time to create a one-to-one correspondence between a document and a specific Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A document, and hence an information object, lived at a particular address. If you wanted to visit it, you went there. This had the architectural consequence of making all documents — hence ideas and information — technically equal. From the point of view of the computer, all destinations were IP addresses, which are a sequence of characters. Descriptors like “http://www.theatlantic.com/” and “http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/” are really just aliases for the actual IP addresses adopted for the convenience of the human user. But technically, they were equal; and more to the point, equally accessible to users on the Internet.
Availability in the print and broadcast age depended on many factors besides the quality of the product. The barriers to entry in the newspaper and broadcast industries were so high that monopoly position, financial clout and even political permission were prime determinants of market share. The advent of World Wide Web equalized physical distribution and meant that content would play an increasingly larger role than logistics in determining the popularity of a given document. Overnight, a number of formerly unknown information providers shouldered their way to the top of the Web traffic heap on the strength of what they wrote, rather than who they wrote for. The sudden shift of authority away from the publisher to often unheard of authors prompted Peter Steiner of the New Yorker to draw a cartoon in 1993 captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows if you’re a dog.”
But it wasn’t quite true. Readers could — and did — distinguish between authors who wrote like dogs and those who didn’t. In the beginning, online reputations were built and spread by word of mouth. But this was a slow process which best served individuals who were “wired” to social networks or members of bulletin boards where such information could be exchanged. For those new to an ever-expanding and soon incomprehensibly large Web the problem of where to start; of what sites to visit that weren’t dogs became a major hurdle.
Enterprising developers who saw a market opportunity in helping readers find ways to find nuggets in the vast ocean of the Web attacked the problem in various ways. Site counters were developed to show at a glance how heavily visited a site was in order to serve as a proxy for quality. A seven or eight figure site visit count became the Web equivalent to the New York Times masthead. This was good insofar as it went. But the problem for newbies was how to find such sites to begin with. To answer this challenge developers began to create search engines. The idea of search engines is to allow someone, who doesn’t know anything about a subject, to find the best places to start learning about them. Initially search engines like Altavista relied on linguistic matches to find the most relevant and useful matches. However, even the best linguistic matches returned too many false positives. Altavista was good, but it was not good enough.
The most astute developers realized that the problem of separating dogs from good authors was really about effectively capturing the judgments of human beings about the value of a site. Human beings alone could a tell a dog from an author by reading the content of a site. The reason site counters worked was because they tallied the “votes” of the Internet audience in a way that was visible to the reader. But to find a way to this site required a further step: capturing the human-generated information and embedding it into the search engine itself. Once this problem was solved the result was Google.
Google’s algorithm uses a patented system called PageRank to help rank web pages that match a given search string … a PageRank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (”incoming links”). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.
The concept of the Internet as an implicit voting system for ideas is a powerful one which has not yet been brought to its logical and ultimate conclusion. Along the way to reaching it, entrepreneurs and developers will have to overcome a number of challenges principally involving the interaction of human valued information. Part of the problem in today’s online world is that is still driven by concepts inherited from the newspaper and broadcast world. But that’s going to change and change faster than we think.
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69 Comments
1. Amit Green:In the past something that worked very well with blogs was ‘tracebacks’.
This was about four years ago when blogging was in its infancy.
Tracebacks helped, as they indicated someone who had taken their time to write their own blog post & was linking to another blog.
By following tracebacks, you could find other new blogs, with high quality information.
Another concept that worked really well, four years ago when blogging was in its infancy, was ‘blogroll’.
A blogroll would lead you to other trusted blogs from your blogs you trusted.
Both ‘tracebacks’ & ‘blogroll’ was a ‘Transfer of Trust’ mechanism that used to work superbly.
Over the last four years, both these mechanisms have fallen down & become almost unusuable (most peeople no longer use ‘tracebacks’, and almost no one keeps their blogroll up to date)
In fact today, ‘tracebacks’ & ‘blogrolls’ are almost useless.
I’m start a new free open source project to address many of the issues that Wretchard mentioned here, and especially to help, again, capture the value of ‘tracebacks’ and ‘blogroll’.
We also need a mechanism for ‘transfer of trust’ among commentators.
This is to help *readers* of comments get more value, while not requiring the creator of a blog, to spend hours trying to moderate comments.
Email: amit@mixie.org
Sep 8, 2008 - 6:17 pm 2. enscout:W:
Sep 8, 2008 - 6:44 pm 3. newscaper:“capturing the human-generated information and embedding into the search engine itself.”
Ahh,but doesn’t that eventually lead to consensus of ideas?
The perfect tool for commies, socialists and one-worlders all.
Anybody checked on Cuil lately?
:p
What a miserable yet utterly predictable failure.
Sep 8, 2008 - 6:53 pm 4. Charles:Here’s a physorg article about a new search engine. According to the article
According to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo index only about 0.2% of the Internet. The remaining 99.8%, known as the “deep Web,” is a vast body of public and subscription-based information that traditional search engines can’t access.
To dig into this “invisible” information, scientists have developed a new search engine called Infovell geared at helping researchers find often obscure data in the deep Web.
Sep 8, 2008 - 7:14 pm 5. wretchard:YouTube is another entity which attempts to use human-derived information. Each YouTube posting has two numbers of interest: ratings and views. And I suspect a lot of readers use these metrics in deciding what YouTube video to watch.
Sep 8, 2008 - 7:22 pm 6. Amit Green:For those that have the time, and read lots of blogs, the web functions as an excellent filter of separating dogs from good authors”.
This is because the reader, over months & years, develops a good sense of which authors are trustworthy.
When you see one trusted author recommending another, then you *know* you had better pay attention.
Take this example:
“MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Truth About Russia in Georgia. I got home from the gym the other day and there was a message on my answering machine — it was Michael Yon, calling from Afghanistan on satphone to make sure I’d seen Michael Totten’s latest report. That tells you how good he is, doesn’t it? . . . So read it, and learn that much of what was reported was wrong.” – See: http://www.pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/archives2/023423.php
Here you have one author I trust (Glenn Reynolds) saying another author I trust (Michael Totten) saying read a third author I trust (Michael Yon).
Its like: Wow. I’m off to read the article to find out the trust about Georgia .vs. Russia.
Michael Totten is here: http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/08/the-truth-about-1.php (its long, but well worth reading!)
Wretchard by bringing up Google & then saying “Along the way to reaching it, entrepreneurs and developers will have to overcome a number of challenges principally involving the interaction of human valued information” is making the following point:
Once you can create tools that capture the “Glenn Reynolds & Michael Totten recommend an article by Michael Yon” – and ‘transfer that trust’ to other….
Well you might have something … shall we say valuable? Not as valuable as google, but still VERY valuable.
And the web is moving that way, fast.
I’m looking at starting a free open source project, to make this kind of ‘transfer of trust’ capturable, so everyone can use it (not just those that spend hours reading blogs each day).
To “capturing the judgments of human beings about the value of a site”, and then share that judgment with other human beings.
Email: amit@mixie.org
Sep 8, 2008 - 7:24 pm 7. Amit Green:Project: openblogging.org
“YouTube is another entity which attempts to use human-derived information. Each YouTube posting has two numbers of interest: ratings and views. And I suspect a lot of readers use these metrics in deciding what YouTube video to watch.”
Amazon does this also.
From all the comments on a book, they highlight the best comments (i.e.: bring to the top).
I was just having lunch with someone today, who said that makes Amazon so valuable to him.
He can look at a book and just quickly read a review without scanning all the comments.
The comment that rises to the top, is the one other humans have voted they like.
SO:
Those that have time vote on best comments.
Those that don’t have time, can just read the best comment.
This is an example of ‘transfer of trust’
Sep 8, 2008 - 7:53 pm 8. Brock:PageRank has a limitation though. Wikipedia & Digg have the same limitation. They are easily lead astray by mass misconception.
If it’s deliberate you may call it a GoogleBomb, or psyops, but often it is not. The writings of convincing but wrong thought-leaders can spread further and faster in this modern era. On balance I believe we are much better off, but I am still sometimes concerned about how quickly harmful memes can spread, particularly among those who seem to have no natural defense.
Sep 8, 2008 - 7:58 pm 9. Bob Murphy:Brock, it would be a great thing if we taught primary school students how to use the web and how to crosscheck with keyword searches and other such things to eliminate or reduce lies, propaganda and other things that are just plain wrong.
Sep 8, 2008 - 8:35 pm 10. Bob Murphy:The biggest thing about the web to me is the mind boggling number of resources. It is very easy to crosscheck.
I have been a journalist for 35 years and the net and the web are blessings for the research I have to do.
And to Wretch, Amit et al, illuminating and though provoking. Thanks for hitting the keys.
Sep 8, 2008 - 8:36 pm 11. Ken Anthony:I think whatever system is used should attempt to avoid too much complexity. Any system can be gamed, but with complexity it can be gamed in more subtle ways. In other words, thumbs up/down with enough voters may be better than some system where the votes are weighted even if that seems counter-intuitive.
Perhaps pagerank will lead to a neural net type of A.I. system? I’m not sure if that would be good or bad.
The deep web seems more of an intractable problem because now you’re looking at dynamic pages generated from a database and some algorithm. Or just pages that aren’t referenced externally.
It just seems to me there will always be significant limitations to any search engine.
Sep 8, 2008 - 8:43 pm 12. Amit Green:Brock: “PageRank has a limitation though. Wikipedia & Digg have the same limitation. They are easily lead astray by mass misconception.”
Yes, exactly.
That is Wretchard’s point. Once you could use ‘hits’ to find value. Then you could use ‘links’ to find value. Now you can’t anymore (well you can, but it doesn’t work as well as it used to; and it continues to slowly break down).
“The concept of the Internet as an implicit voting system for ideas is a powerful one which has not yet been brought to its logical and ultimate conclusion” …
Brock has it right, if you let dogs votes on “the problem of separating dogs from good authors” you can lead to mass misconception/
The logical and ultimate conclusion is to let ‘good authors’ vote on the ‘problem of seperating dogs from good authors’.
Now you have something!
Sep 8, 2008 - 8:49 pm 13. Alexis:On the internet, nobody knows if you are a dog, but they do know if you are a troll.
Sep 8, 2008 - 8:59 pm 14. Alexis:I wouldn’t count out the old fashioned media if only because many places have no other outlets for gathering and disseminating news; there will still be a market for local news that bloggers are unlikely to break soon. The strongest effect of online media appears to be the decline of the editorial page and the know-it-all columnist. Even so, Thomas Friedman hasn’t lost his job at the New York Times due to competition from Powerline and the Daily Kos. At least not yet.
Sep 8, 2008 - 9:01 pm 15. jwillie:Riffing off Shannon’s information theory, the ideal web discovery mechanism would dynamically calculate a “personalized” signal-to-noise ratio for every link one encounters on the web, weighting all prospective incoming signals according to the reader/viewer’s continually updated information preferences, inclusive of trusted sources and their derivatives, etc. If only i could entrepreneurially riff a few of the inherent economic possibilities…
Sep 8, 2008 - 9:07 pm 16. Mad Fiddler:Irony.
The image that comes to mind when I think of the Gray Lady as it approaches the end, is of Punch Sulzberger as the pilot of a tattered Huey straining to rise from the roof of the Times building, while frantic figures of Tom Friedman, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, and Maureen Dowd cling to the aircraft, and pistol whip the lesser stringers and contributors and faceless fact-checkers weeping and gnashing their teeth below.
Wait. That can’t be right.
There haven’t been any fact-checkers at the NYT for decades.
Sep 8, 2008 - 9:18 pm 17. NahnCee:There will always be room for mass media in the hours and days after a disaster. I think, however, the verbiage — the “reporting” — will increasingly go away and we’ll be left with just the pictures.
Although I can’t imagine the assassination of Kennedy, or that long horrible day of 9/11 without the media’s talking heads striving to make sense out of the chaos even though they knew — and we knew — that lots of what they were reporting was nonsense. In a way, the television and radio networks are the spider’s web that holds the country together, but only in those times of immediate emergency and peril.
Newspapers just aren’t necessary at all any more, either for information or for on-the-spot pictures.
Sep 8, 2008 - 9:30 pm 18. Alexis:I do wonder about the wisdom of ratings in places like YouTube. The problem with allowing ratings is that organized mobs of activists can promote certain sites or systematically deface the reputation of other videos by consistently giving it low ratings.
I think one needs to weigh the opportunity cost of either allowing one’s video to get rated or not allowing ratings. The number of views for a video can also be systematically distorted, often for profit.
As it is, I think there may be a career ahead for the YouTube critic, who would manually sift through the digital detritus and tell people what videos are worth watching. Just as there is still a market for books written by food critics, there would be a market for online newspapers dedicated to promoting “The Best of YouTube”. The YouTube connoisseur market may even become segmented much like the rest of the internet.
There is also potential for YouTube to become a giant talent show for Hollywood scouts, to the point of turning YouTube into an employment bazaar for filmmakers.
Still, I’m more amazed by how well the big media have adapted to new technology than by the occasional success stories of “new media”. Let’s face it — ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN are anything but slain.
Sep 8, 2008 - 9:36 pm 19. js:The RNC was a meme tsunami.
Sep 8, 2008 - 9:51 pm 20. sfblue:Good point, Alexis. Remember the digg scandal a couple years ago. As long as there are ranking metrics human derived or otherwise, there will be legions of paid net marketers scheming to game the system.
Sep 8, 2008 - 10:50 pm 21. sfblue:Maybe the best search engines in the future will use a mesh of metrics that can identify and mitigate attempts by marketers to game the system. There are bibles written on how to get your page ranked high on Google.
Sep 8, 2008 - 10:55 pm 22. fedya:@Amit Green:
“Along the way to reaching it, entrepreneurs and developers will have to overcome a number of challenges principally involving the interaction of human valued information”
Recent events, notably the Russkie excursus in
Georgia, left me thinking, “Yes, trolls are obvious; dogs on the internet are similarly obvious”.
Now, I am not so sure. Ratings don’t matter if humans are no better than cyborgs at determining the cyborg-icity of a blog commentator.
And there can be no doubt about it: blog commentators exercise a preponderant influence over blog behavior, no? (open or closed comments, no difference???)
Sep 8, 2008 - 10:59 pm 23. fedya:@sfblue:
Maybe the best search engines in the future will use
From your keyboard to G-d’s Ears!
Sep 8, 2008 - 11:02 pm 24. fedya:@sfblue:
“We flagged your post, now shut up”.
Gangsterism exhibited by “Craig’s List” “anonymous” censors is sufficient evidence that there is yet no effective defense against anonymous thuggery.
Liberty as we understand it is not an established fact on the internet. This is due to the fact of practical anonymity by “communities” of decisive power over what any one is permitted to publish.
What made sense in the village commons or “on the village green” is stupifyingly irrelevant now. Freedom of the Press does not exist when anonymous crowds on Craigs List or Digg wield censorious (”flag it”) power.
Sorry, folks, but this is an existential problem. Not only does no one know you
Sep 8, 2008 - 11:11 pm 25. fedya:‘re a “dog”, no one knows you’re a fascist, rat bastard in league with other fascistic, rat-like bastards.
…which is to say, “Pray fervently, Pray.”
Sep 8, 2008 - 11:18 pm 26. fedya:…which is to say, it may not matter if our (USA) military “gets it”. DARPA’s internet could very well have sealed our doom, no?
Please, convince me otherwise…
Sep 8, 2008 - 11:24 pm 27. fedya:…which is to say that “Libertarians” are utter F****ing asses.
Sep 8, 2008 - 11:26 pm 28. JJ Joseph:@Brock:
“The writings of convincing but wrong thought-leaders can spread further and faster in this modern era. On balance I believe we are much better off, but I am still sometimes concerned about how quickly harmful memes can spread, particularly among those who seem to have no natural defense.”
This is the big weakness of the web & Google today. I keep thinking of this when I read the plaintive bleating about Russia invading Georgia – all the while recalling Bush-the-elder’s promises to Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t expand if Gorbachev allowed Germany to unite. Am I the only one who remembers this? If the US (hiding in NATO’s skirts) is aggressively encircling Russia, sneaking it’s powerful nuclear missiles right up to Russia’s front yard, you’d think we’d hear more about it on the web than just the feeble & shallow stuff from Michael Totten. The web isn’t helping one bit to blow away the fog of deceit that’s encircling us here at home.
Sep 8, 2008 - 11:35 pm 29. fedya:@JJ Joseph:
aggressively encircling Russia
You give me hope, Sir, that I am wrong that the “Internet” is nothing more than internet inanity. After all, are you not obviously who you are?
Ah! But after thou, my dollink! After thou?
Sep 8, 2008 - 11:38 pm 30. Wadeusaf:The very idea of gathering “news” is changing, not what is or is not considered to be news. The bias of an author is no different today then in say 1776, and with the exception of breaking news of science and technology just as difficult to grasp as human behavior.
It is the speed, access and huge coverages that make the weighing of sources imperative. The solution will be an independent gathering of facts and data, supported by a choice of relevant analysis and put out by subscription via link. In depth analysis available to users for a price, teasing is free.
Stratfor is a one example, PJM another. Closed Networks (the deep web) a third is closer to Stratfor than to PJM, but insulated. Is there another variation on the theme? Small businesses will soon have cost effective and enhanced multimedia capability. So will the neighbor hood garage band.
Sep 8, 2008 - 11:47 pm 31. starling:Charles said “According to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo index only about 0.2% of the Internet. The remaining 99.8%, known as the “deep Web,” is a vast body of public and subscription-based information that traditional search engines can’t access. To dig into this “invisible” information, scientists have developed a new search engine called Infovell geared at helping researchers find often obscure data in the deep Web.”
Charles, there is one thing (maybe more than one!) that I don’t understand about this. I get that there is much information on the web that can be accessed only via subscription. But there are so many such sites that wouldn’t it be prohibitively expensive for a pay-to-search service like Infovell to maintain subscriptions at all these sites? Or do they have some other ways of accessing the information that doesn’t cost them so much money?
Sep 8, 2008 - 11:58 pm 32. Tomorrowist:I think the ultimate solution will involve the concept behind those cloud like pictures which detailed which sites connected to which other sites. These pictures demonstrated that conservative sites tended to link to other conservative sites; and that liberal sites tended to connect to other liberal sites.
Currently, if I want to learn about a [articular key phrase, I can get a list of websites based on “the judgments of human beings”; this comes from Wretchard’s description of Google. This would be like finding a blind date by asking everyone who they think would be good for me. In the future, I expect to be able to get a list of websites based on “the judgments of human beings” I trust. Such a search engine would not weight all links equally; it would give greater weight to websites I have endorsed. This would be like finding a blind date by asking my friends who they think would be good for me.
This would help conservatives find sites judged appropriate by other conservatives; liberal sites would not be linked as often. The same would go for liberals; conservative sites would not be linked so often. The best part is, both liberals and conservatives would have get links with fewer porn sites … unless the searcher expresses a positive judgment for porn sites.
Sep 9, 2008 - 12:03 am 33. OldOzzie:The Web is older than 20 years, the original was ARPnet was created in 1969, followed by Captain in Japan, Prestel in Britain, Bildschirmtext in Germany, and Minitel in France in the late 70s.
The Airlines telecommunications P1024 were fore-runners of packet switching that morphed into X25 and TCP/IP.
Sep 9, 2008 - 1:32 am 34. Doug:Are most polls reliant on telephones?
I would guess one of Obama’s best Demos (young folk) heavily skew toward cell phones.
…let us hope the meltdown continues.
“There was no active combat, so I did not choose to serve.”
GI Obama – GastroIntestinal
Sep 9, 2008 - 5:23 am 35. programmer:Last year around the last of November, my city had a spectacular ice storm. Power went out all over. I work at home, didn’t have a generator, so there I sat, twiddling thumbs. How did I keep up with what was going on? Local newspaper. A thoroughly, in the tank, liberal rag. But wow!, they did a stupendous job on local reporting. Off came the stupid clown suits, on went the serious reporter suits, and these guys and gals went to work putting out the paper every day with really useful information about what was happening, what the city and state was doing to help, constant updating on tree removal, power line replacement, where to go for scarce resources, who to call for help, where to find a phone if you didn’t have one. I can not praise them highly enough.
However, eventually order and power was restored and back came the clown suits, glasses and false noses and the incessant liberal drum beat started again. But for a brief, short time our local paper demonstated what real journalism is/was. By the way, I was without the internet for almost a week. Strangely, I didn’t miss it,…much.
Sep 9, 2008 - 6:19 am 36. Bart Hall (Kansas, USA):Richard, you might also have added a para or two on the early ’90s search engines, such as Gopher (toth UMinnesota).
I remember the small celebration when there were actually a hundred Gopher sites that could be accessed. Eventually it was a thousand, and Archie came along to Gopher the Gopher sites, followed by Veronica with the same function at a higher level.
All of those early engines were ftp-based. It was Mosaic that seemed to launch the shift to documents living exclusively on the web instead of files living in a computer and transferred across the web to another computer.
Sep 9, 2008 - 6:27 am 37. Pseudo-Polymath » Blog Archive » Tuesday Highlights:[...] 20 years for the web. [...]
Sep 9, 2008 - 6:32 am 38. JA:Speaking of memes, a new one just arrived over the airwaves to the effect that Kim Jong-Il had a stroke. Anybody know anything about this?
Sep 9, 2008 - 8:04 am 39. Dave:FEDYA: Be informed that Libertarian Vin Suprynowicz of the Las Vegas Review Journal has announced that this year he will be voting—————-Republican!
Sarah. Sarah Palin
Baptizing Infidels Too.
Reading your post above I was reminded of Hanson’s dissertation on the comparative freedom of Redcoats versus that of Zulus.
Sep 9, 2008 - 9:15 am 40. Aether:The substance was considerably different from some currently popular assumptions.
OldOzzie:
“The Web is older than 20 years, the original was ARPnet was created in 1969″
Umm, I beg to differ… while the INTERNET has is been around for than far more than 20 years, The Web, as in “HTTP://WWW.x.x” is roughly 16 years old, starting, as bart indicated with Mosaic.
The real breakout of the World Wide Web came in 1993-94 in conjunction with two development’s.
1) The creation and commercialisation of SLIP (Serial Line Interface Protocol) by Richard Adams (founder of UUNET), which enabled ubiquitous dial-up Internet access, and which AOL utilized to build their customer base
2) The creation of Netscape by Marc Andreesen which was the first really good, popular Web browser.
Sep 9, 2008 - 10:12 am 41. Charles:Starling
But there are so many such sites that wouldn’t it be prohibitively expensive for a pay-to-search service like Infovell to maintain subscriptions at all these sites? Or do they have some other ways of accessing the information that doesn’t cost them so much money?
//////////////
I know there is a lot more to the web than google indexes.
I don’t know how Infovell indexes sites that Google doesn’t index.
I do know that google’s spiders can’t get by certain kinds of url’s. Richard’s url is very spider friendly.
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2008/09/08/the-rise-of-the-meme/
But other kinds of urls baffle the google spiders. for example if you have strings that end like this: ?more=2078201
or others the long strings that require a http://www.notlong.com shorting service
It may well be that the new search engine has the ability to index urls that google can’t get at-and never mind subscription sites.
Sep 9, 2008 - 10:54 am 42. fedya:@Dave:
You lost me, but I wasn’t making much sense, so…. If I were to try to make sense I would probably write something like the following:
Of the many memes that comprise the internet phenomenon, quite a few have to do with freedom of expression, democratisation of the means of expression, fostering communities of interest, new forms of intelligent social decision making (e.g. hive mind, or wisdom of crowds), theories of autonomous social self-organization, and on and on and on… heady stuff!
And one cornerstone of these experiments is anonymity. Anonymity is widely considered essential to true freedom. Anonymity is presented as an antidote against potential government oppression and an universal cure for evil practices by big organizations (insert favorite baddies here).
Many experiments along these lines appear to have been wildly successful. Craigs List is widely thought to be free both as in beer and as in Liberty. Digg, SlashDot and others are held up to represent something superior because they aggregate the free actions of free individuals to achieve a quality superior to the old-fashioned [and un-free tyranny of an] editor. Blog comment threads vary but clearly provide information that was unlikely to found in one place in the old days of face to face meetings or edited media.
The problem is that groups (I would prefer to call them “gangs”), operating surreptitiously, game these systems. Craigs List asserts that it depends on its “community” for self-policing and the anonymity of the “community” is not to be compromised. Non-compliant posts are “flagged” and repeat offenders are sniffed out and permanently banned. This works. But to the extent that it empowers anonymous, self appointed groups (which I’d prefer to call “thugs”), it enhances neither Liberty nor a free market of anything, ideas or otherwise.
Consider that anti-”business” policies could make it easier for gangs of thieves to use Craigs List as a safe place to move merchandise at much higher rates and prices than traditional “fences” can. Prices that are glorious bargains compared to face to face markets’ prices. Prove it, right? Right.
Digg in particular has been tarred with accusations of anti-conservative editing by self-appointed groups working in cahoots with the management.
By jettisoning face to face contact and replacing it with anonymity, we subject our spheres of discourse to two problems, both pointed out previously by Wretchard. First, willful self-misrepresentation by manipulators (”trolls”, con artists, information warfare) and second, nagging fears of The Singularity and non-human control of media in a Post-Turing Test world.
Anonymity is problematic. It loosens restraints on civil behavior and enables criminal behavior. “Checks and balances” are no longer concrete. How is it that Anonymity is a Sacred Cow to libertarians (such as myself, sorry, my bad to have used the capital “L” previously)? Anonymity has become a shibboleth appropriated by small-”L” liberals and “Progressives” alike.
People cynically say that anonymity is a myth in the Internet Age, so how do we explain anonymity being so popular as a fundamental freedom? Mechanisms such as required registration do go a long way to tempering abuses, but, for example, Craigs List refuses to require even anonymized registration for their “flag-happy” community.
Do anonymous cyber thugs operate surreptitiously in ostensibly free online environments or is that crackpot paranoia? What is the consequence of anonymity in social relationships? I’d suggest that if libertarians and liberals continue to treat anonymity as sacred, we promote loss of Liberty, not extension.
Does that make sense?
Sep 9, 2008 - 12:07 pm 43. DougS:“I do wonder about the wisdom of ratings in places like YouTube. The problem with allowing ratings is that organized mobs of activists can promote certain sites or systematically deface the reputation of other videos by consistently giving it low ratings.”
Something like that has long been an issue with Amazon reader reviews. To make sense of them, you have to kind of ignore the star ratings and make sense of why people like/dislike a book, read between the lines to figure out the agenda behind the opinion.
A less political version of this phenomenon is looking at the consumer electronics and software reviews and figure out how many reviews should be read as: “I was too stupid to figure out how to set it up/install it.”
Sep 9, 2008 - 12:21 pm 44. 2x4:OBama Hopium trend:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/110137/McCain-Now-Winning-Majority-Independents.aspx
Sep 9, 2008 - 12:31 pm 45. Eggplant:2×4 said:
OBama Hopium trend:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/110137/McCain-Now-Winning-Majority-Independents.aspx
This is certainly good news. However if you go over to Real Clear Politics, you can see that the Messiah is still leading in the Electoral College. I’ll start rejoicing when the Anointed-One is behind in the Electoral College.
Sep 9, 2008 - 2:21 pm 46. Roy Lofquist:Cuil:
Just checked there – vast improvement. I’m a bit of a blabbermouth and have a rare name. How rare? When I lived in Manhattan I was the only Lofquist in the phone book. When I google my name I get a little over 2,000 hits. When Cuil first came out I got close to 300,000 hits. Today just under 5,000. Pretty dumb of them not to account for the circle jerk:
A -> B -> C -> A -> B ……………
On search engines:
I’ve followed the AI stuff for about 45 years. I’ve written programs in about four different versions of LISP. They have made absolutely no progress. They try to sell pattern recognition as intelligence. It ain’t. Flies can do that. Kurzweil has fallen for that same illusion.
A few years back the Japanese invested $5 billion in a database that was to be searched by an inference engine called Prolog. That was a complete and utter failure.
Google just announced that they had cataloged 3 Trillion distinct pages. The problem is NP Complete – totally intractable by any known algorithm.
Chill’un we’re just going to do it the old fashioned way – hard work.
Sep 9, 2008 - 2:54 pm 47. 2x4:Eggplant, sure, but some pollsters have a substantial “Zero” bias.
FL, IN, OH seem to be in the McCain leaning category, but designated as toss-ups. That would give you 246 right there for McCain, compared to 217 for Zero.
OTOH, maybe it is good to have lower/uncertain figures on official polling sites. Obamabots should be kept in uncertainity of how many dead voters they have to produce.
Sep 9, 2008 - 3:15 pm 48. elijah:urban proletariat
Sep 9, 2008 - 5:19 pm 49. trangbang68:perhaps the peasants cling to their religion and guns
When I think of pigs with lipstick on; I think of the Hollywood skanks who gush over O-Dogg.
I had an ant farm when I was a kid. Does that make me a community organizer?
Sep 9, 2008 - 6:01 pm 50. Bob Murphy:As for the notion of anonymity it is quite nice here at BC.
Sep 9, 2008 - 6:30 pm 51. Lifeofthemind:Because we know so little about each other our ideas/words tend to float or sink on their own merits.
I really like the way a person’s experience only comes up if it is relevant to the matter at hand so there’s little big noting.
Perhaps the more we know about some people the more we get caught up in their personality the more we react to that when we should be keeping our eyes on the main game.
The only reason I use my name is because I haven’t bothered to think up a pseudonym, and there are some clever/amusing ones here.
Posters at Obama web site and allied sites (Kos etc.) go on that Pallin said she is a Pit Bull with lipstick but change it to a pig with lipstick. Candidate Obama hesitates then says “You cannot put lipstick on a pig.” The crowd roars knowing approval. Can the candidate deny the slur? I predict Obama will be hounded by posters of himself in the Mussolini pose, only with lipstick.
Sep 9, 2008 - 7:09 pm 52. Lifeofthemind:@Bob Murphy,
Sep 9, 2008 - 7:14 pm 53. Roy Lofquist:I assume you use a pseudonym like everyone else and your real name is something like Wesley Butkis. How many Bob Murphys are in the phone book? Come to think of it as land lines and phone books go away we become even more anonymous. Political polls depend on registered land line numbers. The perception of reality becomes even more skewed.
Dear Lifeofthemind,
I think you are doing a great disservice to Mr. Murphy. Besides calling him a liar. The use of screen names has always discomfited me. No ethical editor in America would publish a letter without a full name and address disclosed by the author.
It signifies to me a kind of paranoia. You are hiding behind the wall of anonymity because you are afraid that you will face stigma or shame if people knew that it was you saying these things.
To me it shouts lack of testicles or ovaries.
Regards,
Sep 9, 2008 - 7:48 pm 54. Roy Lofquist:Roy
Dear Lifeofthemind,
p.s., My name is Roy Lofquist. My address is 2353 Shuttle Circle, Titusville, Florida 32796. My phone number is 321-383-3847.
Regards,
Sep 9, 2008 - 7:59 pm 55. Roy Lofquist:Roy
Dear Lifeofthemind,
Please forgive the typo. The number is 321- 383-8347.
Regards,
Sep 9, 2008 - 8:01 pm 56. Lifeofthemind:Roy
@Roy,
Sep 9, 2008 - 8:16 pm 57. Doug:Bob Murphy is an intelligent gentleman whatever his name or residence. You are an ass.
Correct on Bob, haven’t met Roy, yet.
Sep 9, 2008 - 8:17 pm 58. Doug:John Fund: Obama sends a mini-army of lawyers to Alaska to go after Palin
Knucklehead said…
“This whole Palin thing is just getting to be good fun!
BTW, My Better Two-Thirds really didn’t know who Biden was prior to Obama picking him. She’s been paying some attention since. Her take? “He’s going to say something really stupid and insulting to women when he debates her. You can just see it on his face – he’s in love with himself.” I can’t ’splain his self-love logically leads to saying something stupid and insulting to women in a debate with Palin, but heh, she’s been correct far too often, despite what appears to me to be lack of logical connection, to argue with.“
Sep 9, 2008 - 8:21 pm 59. Lifeofthemind:Their is a very human need to give order to the Universe. In the Bible the first thing God does is draw lines, set catagories. We see a collection of unkowns and the first thing we do is arrange it into boxes. That leads to Aristotelian logic, which I was taught is a more effective form of intellectual engineering than the wooley holistic Platonic approach.
In another place I was just attempting to how come the Obama campaign is performing as a cross between a rickety bus losing its wheels and a asthmatic doing a belly flop. The anology I came up with is the Frankenstein Horse.
The Democratic coalition has six main legs reaching back to the New Deal. One other leg that is more recent can be added.
1. Labor and associated white ethnic groups.
2. Jews and associated intellectuals.
3. Media, film and successor industries.
4. Homosexuals and other disaffected social identities, including women.
5. Black Americans.
6. The Old Left Socialists and their New Left children.
7. Recent immigrants, especially Latin but also Asian.
The interests of these groups are frequently mutually exclusive which has made managing the coalition difficult. For example old labor competes with new immigrants and blacks can see themselves in competition with Jews or immigrants and socially unsympathetic to homosexuals. On the other hand to some extent the groups can support each other with identities bleeding over to more than one pillar.
Hillary had established ties with 6 legs of the Democrats Frankenstein horse. She may have thought she also had the Old Left 6 on board or that she could ignore them.
Obama has managed to offend members or leaders in most of these key groups. It appears to me that he has largely alienated groups 1, 2 and 4 has no deep connection with 7 and has a tenuous connection with the old guard in 5. That leaves him only the Media in 3, the hard core revolutionaries in 6 and the street soldiers of the Black community.
Sep 9, 2008 - 10:08 pm 60. Doug:PJ Blogger Charlie Martin on Fox News
Debunking Palin Rumors
Flares into Darkness Heeeeeeeeeere’s Charlie!
Sep 9, 2008 - 11:23 pm 61. oldefogey:OK – I’m not only old but kind of dense. How does Wretchard maintain a site that allows comments but doesn’t get the wingnuts that pop up everwhere else?
Even Wretch’s trolls are brighter and better behaved than most.
Take a serious columnist like Michael Barone and each column is followed by cursing drivel from commenters.
Is there some sort of screening that isn’t obvious when you make a comment?
The little hissy-fit between Roy and Life stands out because they occur so seldom.
I have been amazed about this for a long time but it only seemed pertinent today.
Sep 9, 2008 - 11:40 pm 62. Doug:Interesting. I’ve never stopped to think about comments on MSM sites. They are so mindless I’ve only read a few.
—
Spengler: How Friendless Obama Lost the Election
“Combine a child’s response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had no natural defenses.
He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in but not of the American system. No country’s politics depends more openly on friendships than America’s, yet Obama has not a single real friend, for he rose so fast that all his acquaintances become rungs on the ladder of his ascent.
One human relationship crowds the others out of his life, his marriage to Michelle, a strong, assertive and very angry woman.
If Novak’s report is accurate, then Michelle’s anger will have lost the election for Obama, as Achilles’ anger nearly killed the Greek cause in the Trojan War. But the responsibility rests not with Michelle, but with Obama.
“Obama’s failure of nerve at the cusp of his success is consistent with my profile of the candidate, in which I predicted that he would self-destruct. It’s happening faster than I expected. As I wrote last February: ‘It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama … Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama’s father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals.’ By all rights, the Democrats should win this election. They will lose, I predict, because of the flawed character of their candidate
Sep 10, 2008 - 1:15 am 63. Roy Lofquist:—
Obama succumbed to the character weakness I described in a February 26 profile of (Obama’s women reveal his secret).
His peculiar dependency on an assertive and often rancorous spouse, I argued, made him vulnerable, and predicted that Obama
“will destroy himself before he destroys the country”
Dear Oldefogey,
That was not a hissy-fit. What I would like to do is drag him out of his hole and thrash him. I’m 65 and not in the best of shape but I’ll give him the first punch free. Somehow I suspect he’d use that opportunity to go elsewhere.
He is a pretentious bigot who hurls vile insults at people from behind the curtain of anonymity. I’ve mixed it up with the best of them – men. I know all the common ones in six languages. Men – not juvenile coffee house philosophers who wax poetic about Socrates and compose haiku whilst rolling a joint.
What I have learned, from painful experience, is that you can call someone every name in the book except one – liar. That one’s going to get you some loose teeth every time.
He is not a troll. He is something much worse – a deranged college dropout.
Regards,
Sep 10, 2008 - 5:23 am 64. Lifeofthemind:Roy
Wretchard has created a community where people of varying backgrounds can do what the net promises and rarely delivers by safely bringing a variety of talents and experiences to examine a problem and literally create knew knowledge. As a long time member of this community I treasure the ability to share and gain from those who come here. The abusive conduct of Roy is disturbing not only because it drags into this Club the atmosphere of the streets but because it is a direct and deliberate assault on just those rules that make this place work. It is easy to ignore someone who resorts to torrents of abuse and slander however the presence of someone who is attempting to change the very fabric of the blog to expose persons to cyber bullying and threats is much more serious. Roy is attempting to bait me into revealing personal information which I do not do precisely because he is the person that I choose never to sully my life with. He had no legitimate reason to begin this with me at all. He is seeking for purely personal reasons to exclude a voice from the conversation because he wishes to determine the outcome of the debate. The only voices before today that I suggested blocking from the site were the open cut and paste agents of the Kremlin for wasting bandwidth. Roy’s attacks on the very fabric of this community are much more serious and I do ask Wretchard to consider what is in the best interests of his Club.
Sep 10, 2008 - 7:25 am 65. NahnCee:Roy sounds like he’s old, cranky and in pain. I wonder if he’s also self-medicating. In any case, there are much more interesting things to pay attention to than a self-indulgent sick person semaphoring for attention. And name-calling.
Old Fogey – change your name. I was thinking this morning that hurling the epithet “old!” is now the same sort of insult as “stupid!” or “fat!” used to be. And I wonder why and how being perceived as being “old!” has attained the same level of denunciation as “pedophile!”, for example. In any case, naming yourself “old” just detracts immediately from your arguments and does give unnecessary ammunition to the frothing moonbats you’re lamenting about on other sites.
Sep 10, 2008 - 10:03 am 66. Roy Lofquist:Dear Juveniles,
“I assume you use a pseudonym like everyone else and your real name is something like Wesley Butkis. How many Bob Murphys are in the phone book?”
Those, sir, are fighting words. I dare you to call someone a liar to their face.
“Roy sounds like he’s old, cranky and in pain. I wonder if he’s also self-medicating”
What can I say, Dear Nahncee? Personal ad hominen attacks without provocation do not a rational, mature person make.
Regards,
Sep 10, 2008 - 10:23 am 67. Bob Murphy:Roy
Yeah, funny about Roy going all “toey” (Australian idiom for wanting to fight), here. He has some intelligent stuff to say but then goes all funny.
Sep 10, 2008 - 9:48 pm 68. Bob Murphy:As for the correspondent wondering about there not being many moonbats and other types of cretins here; I have seen quite a few of them elegantly dispatched by BC regulars. They just didn’t have a sporting chance. Manifestly out of their leagues. There may be some other mechanism at work here that I am unaware of but these dynamics help to make the site self policing.
@Lifeofthemind
Sep 10, 2008 - 9:55 pm 69. WebElf Report Blogroll News « The WebElf Report:There were 220,000 Murphys in the US in the 1970 census and 27 Robert Murphys in the phone book in my native San Francisco when I left there in 1973.
And I dropped my middle name to make it just that little bit harder for people who don’t know me to find me. I just like being where I am at the time without dragging around a whole lot of baggage.
Google is a glorious thing. Friends from various periods of my life find me easily by adding a few recognition factors to my name but cold callers simply can’t do it.
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