This blog usually covers a number of the topics that came up during our class discussion with DW on Astroturfing and Marketing “Conversations” and this whole entry, including the comments, relates to the conversation with Ethan Zuckerman about Western Media Bias and the Chinese Olympics.

-CK

First, in social networking sites’ advent onto the political scene, are we entering an era where Americans wear their votes on their sleeves much more than before? And if so, does that matter?

We’ve been talking a lot about how grassroots approaches are more en vogue than ever, in part because of the Web…but I wonder if the other side of that is that voters “pick sides” more conspicuously — by joining Facebook groups, becoming a “supporter” of their favored politician, etc. (I know I have been much more up front about my allegiances this time around, largely because of Facebook.) This may not be a bad thing if it means more people are engaging with the issues and contributing to the political debate. On the other hand, I think there’s a legitimate concern that social networking sites might lead to politics becoming more of a superficial popularity contest. Now that people can broadcast their political preferences with the click of a button, I see the potential for quite a “bandwagon” effect. Ultimately, will the benefits from increased political participation outweigh the potential harm of fostering (or deepening) a “herd mentality” among voters?

Second (and harder to answer): is Web political involvement (including on Facebook) as meaningful as “real world” political involvement? When people join politicians’ Facebook groups, are they strengthening democratic ideals? Or encouraging a sort of “democracy-lite” society? (In this respect, we run into a familiar question: is the Web a substitute for or add-on to real-world behavior/ media/ relationships?)

NYT columnist Thomas Friedman has one view, expressed in this article that appeared in the Times last fall. Trippi (who thinks the internet has encouraged campaigns to engage people in “real dialogue”) and DW seem to have a different view. In Broadcasting and the Voter’s Paradox, DW (who will kill me for quoting from his writings) says: “Voting is gloriously paradoxical. Each person gets one and only one vote, equal to everyone else’s. When we vote, we are mere faces in the crowd, yet we rejoice in our mere-ness. Yet with that one vote, we express what is unique about us.” And later: “We don’t yet know what the effect will be now that we have remembered that democracy is about connecting as much as about standing alone in a voting booth facing a lonely, existential decision.” So he seems to think Web involvement may end up being MORE meaningful in some ways.

Will voting post-Facebook still involve expressing “what is unique about” ourselves? Or will we veer too sharply toward becoming “mere faces in the crowd” of our Facebook groups? Will we really do more talking and “connecting”? or just more clicking?

Some preliminary observations – I was glad to see that they allow for the ability to go “offline.” (Can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to avoid my friends!) I tested it out as well (I was intrigued) and out of the 10 or so lines of text I sent, about half didn’t go through (apparently there’s still some bugs to be worked out!). One thing I would comment that I don’t like, is that I can’t pick and choose who I have on my chat list. Why does Facebook automatically assume that since I’m Facebook friends with someone, I also want to talk to them?? Seems odd to me….

The idea of chat is nothing new, but I feel slightly annoyed by Facebook adding this feature. I already have Skype, msn Messenger, AIM, and gchat, not to mention my cell phone, my land line, my four e-mail accounts. I think people can reach me if they want to. (but what if I don’t want them to??)

Also interesting to note, seems Facebook has learned from the past. Right in the blog post announcing the chat feature is a paragraph on privacy. Facebook seems to understand that this issue is important to its users, and bringing in new features without consideration of privacy will create a bad-for-business backlash. (Who can forget the “newsfeed” debacle)

The web has definitely made a difference in how we communicate, and how much we communicate. But like we said in class, what about the quality of how we communicate?

I was talking to some of my friends (the live ones, not the Facebook ones) today about this new feature. A comment from one of them – “Facebook is about to implode because of its overwhelming usefulness”

Is this making the Web less different but making more of a Web difference? Better technology allows us to emulate real life much more than ever before, and at the same time it allows us to do things we’ve never been able to do before, such as “chat” with someone who is half a world away.

The NY Times featured an article this past week on Austin’s South by Southwest music festival, and it made some interesting observations about today’s music industry that I thought were relevant to our discussion of the web difference in the music world. The author reiterates the point made in class that more and more musicians will turn to concert sales to make their living (as opposed to record sales). He ultimately characterizes the festival as “as close as the concert business gets to a level playing field.” He adds, “Big names and small play the same beery clubs, through the same sound systems, without their accustomed arena video setups or undistracted audiences.”

So in the growing popularity of these live music festivals, we see another example of the Web breaking down barriers to entry in the music business, a development which we in turn expect to improve information flow, increase choice, and drive competition.

I don’t know much about the festival, but Wikipedia says it is the largest revenue-producing event for the city of Austin – bigger than things like UT football games and even the more storied Austin City Limits music festival! (For more, see this article.) So it seems clear that the internet – by bringing about phenomena like the decreasing importance of major record labels, the popularization of off-label music on the Web, and increasing fan demand for live concerts – is also having a significant impact on local, non-Web entities like local governments/ economies. I think all this is interesting because music is one area where the Web has enabled a distinct online culture (MySpace, Bradsucks) to develop, but everything we’re seeing now suggests that the benefits from this online community are being transferred to (or at least shared with) the non-Internet world.

Brad of Bradsucks seemed to be focused more on the opportunities to make (and distribute) a new kind of music that have been made possible by the Web. He said he was less into the live performance opportunities, and is happiest when he’s at his computer, mixing and recording songs. But for many other musicians, the internet is changing the landscape of the live music industry and, in so doing, creating all kinds of opportunities to do what they love most – perform in front of a music-loving audience. All in all, it seems like the web difference in the music world has benefited all musicians. I wonder if this is truly a Pareto improvement vis-à-vis the artists themselves – or if there are some musicians out there who were happier before all these changes?

Passing around a copy of the New York Times the class highlights what in the paper is metadata. David Weinberger, who is leading the class, wonders why no one chose to highlight the headline as metadata, which boldly proclaims Spitzer’s indiscretions (John Palfrey suggests it was perhaps too seedy for us!). The problem is that the headline can be data itself, we even have headine news. But the headline is also imparting information about the information in the article which makes is a borderline case, it tells you about the article only if you choose to read it. Is the font size information? Metadata? Yes, it tells you in all caps this guy screwed up big. Placement on the page is also metadata. So the newspaper itself is metadata, even the difference between NYT online and the paper version in terms of space. The fact that something appears in the print version gives us information about the article because there is limited space (claims of all the news that’s fit to print notwithstanding). Does the space between words tell us something? (other than the dominance of oppressive mainstream gramatical structures!) Spaces are metadata because they show you the end of the information you care about, you are told this is the end of the word.

Existential Crisis Alert after the jump

It was suggested that words themselves can be seen as metadata, they are conceptual tools that tell us about something else as does our choice in using them. Could you argue that everything encoded with words is metadata? Yes, but for now we want a class of information that is metadata so we wont take the bait. The problem is framed as: does one think everything is information and relates to everything else, which means it becomes impossible to differentiate information from information about information.

Organising information and metadata pre-web

Melvil Dewey – the Dewey Decimal system inventor, also founded societies to promote simple spelling, the metric system, and shorthand. Came from a tiny school in Massachusetts, had limited experience of the world. Decided as a Senior to organise the world’s knowledge, using a conception of information/knowledge in the tradition of Hagel etc. Went with 10 top categories, then 10 within each, then 10 more. See the classification system here

What guides the order of the categories? Vaguely from something conceptual/ethereal to more practical. Follows philosophers ordering of knowledge, which means philosophy is the top rank. The entire system is an ordered list, the top always indicating the most importance.

The third most important topic is paranormal in Philospophy and psychology! Religon is all Christian! It has been updated, Islam now includes Bahaism and more. Where is Budism? 294.6, didn’t make it to the left of the period, only a billion budists, but Dewey didn’t have many books about budism, he lead a cloistered life. Why hasn’t this been fixed? Mainly because it would be just too embarrassing. Did fix the computer stuff by putting it into the zeros. If they did make an update, think of all the problems: the ordering of Shiite and Sunni, where do Jews for Jesus go, is Palestine as a country, gender stuff (women’s education but not men’s). There doesn’t appear to be a way to fix Dewey. This comes up everytime you have a taxonomy.When you decide how to divide things up your hand is forced.

Organising information on the Web

Amazon gives you an unbelievable set of information about a book. Even SIPs, Statistically Improbable Phrases, that you can search by other books for. User generated metadata. Amazon has multiple categories. An endless amount of metadata. What does it tell us? Sometimes it helps us decide whether we want the book, a SIP might give us a reason to buy from Amazon rather than someone else, maybe it helps us to look for other books. The metadata ties things together that otherwise we never would.

JP poses the question:

If the idea is that by using metadata we put down markers that might be useful, might we go to far and have too much information

Compare Amazon to an old style library card system. Differences with a library card: less space, limited time, rules of how to structure, static rather than dynamic. Amazon can change in time, anybody can change parts of it. Searchability suffers. Ability to sort suffers. Can’t have multiple copies really. No structure to adding metadata. Social life of information says dog eared is interesting. Most effort given over to excluding information.

Recap: systems that rely on taxonomy are fixed systems and tend to be very rigid. This is in a sense mainly because when we work from paper we inevitably lose flexibility.

Taging

Go to Flickr, where you can search on tags provided by other people. There are also groups that a picture can be added to, such as one for pictures of noses. People can even tag other people’s photos depending on settings. What about when there is too much metadata broken out of a taxonomy. Compare Flickr with Corbis which has a 70,000 word taxonomy that has synonyms, a controlled vocabulary. Flickr has an open ended system whereby any tag can be thought up by a user on the spot, no matter how idiosyncratic. Flickr can create clusters of images, automatically generated based only on the tags. This is an analysis of multiple tags. With enough tags you can create order.

Wikia – the search engine launched by the founder of Wikipedia which is a combination of human and machine. The web difference is that you can combine the human inputs with the technology on top. The web means you can update taxonomy much more quickly: the Library of Congress has a flexible taxonomy and will make extra categories when it needs them. When you move online there is no limit to the number of categories that you can create, because you can use faceted structures to organise data it doesn’t matter how many new categories you add to the taxonomy. The LoC has more stuff than it can categorise, 150 million objects, training people in a taxonomy doesn’t scale. LoC put 3000 photos from the 40s into Flickr in order to jump start the metadata. They put the metadata they already had in and within days users had filled up the tag list. Ran out of tags on Flickr at 75, people hacked it. Can put a tag on the picture annotating it. The comments section has lots of comments.

What do we gain and what to we lose from this system?

In Google Books we can search by “call me ishmael”. We get the book back, is it metadata? Someone argues that it is not, the search that leads to it is the metadata. Would Herman Melvil be metadata? Depends on the context – when it gives you the information that he is the author. DW says everything is, is it the information age that makes it so or is it the frequency of use that makes it so? DW suggests it has been useful to have a strict distinction between data and metadata, because we have been stuck organising the real things, when we get too many things we need to separate the data and metadata. We had to reduce the amount of information. When we went into the digital world we started to replicate with databases, but now we realise that anything can become metadata – anything can functionally become metadata. The importance of this is that we just got much better and finding things and will be much better at it – a huge web difference.

An article in Slate suggests Google Books could be used to discover long-existing plagiarism.

Similarly, another source suggests that Google Books and Amazon are the “greatest plagiarism detector ever created.”

Is posting on the Internet when you should be sleeping a Web norm? A comment on the talk page for the Shakespeare’s Sonnets Wikipedia entry (”I posted my comment when I should have been sleeping.”) reminded me of the banner on Rageboy’s EGR blog (”where we write at night when we should be sleeping. and it shows.”).