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February 28, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
danah said, in Academia and Wikipedia, “All the same, i roll my eyes whenever students submit papers with Wikipedia as a citation.”
I didn’t comment on this at the time, but grading papers over the weekend, I had a student cite the Wikipedia for the first time, referencing its entry on the OSI Reference Model. Seeing it in the footnotes, I wondered what the fuss was about. The Wikipedia article is a perfectly good overview of the Reference Model, and students should document, to the extent they are able, the sources of their research. When they have learned something from the Wikipedia, in it goes; to exclude it would in fact be dishonest.
Curiously, the Wikipedia reference came in the same week that another student was referring to Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, an essay that is tremendously influential and, in a bunch of non-trivial ways, wrong about the inherent politicization of reproducible art, and especially of film. I’m much more worried about students overestimating the value of the Benjamin essay, because of its patina of authority, than I am about them overestimating the value of the Wikipedia as a source for explaining the 7-layer networking model.
And I assume I am hardly alone in the academy. Hundreds, if not thousands of us must be getting papers this year with Wikipedia URLs in the footnotes, and despite the moral panic, the Wikipedia is a fine resource on a large number of subjects, and can and should be cited in those cases. There are articles, as danah has pointed out, where it would be far better to go to the primary sources, but that would be as true were a student to cite any encyclopedia. If someone cited the Wikipedia to discuss Benjamin’s work, I’d send them back to the trenches, but I would also do that if they cited Encyclopedia Britannica.
To borrow some Hemingway, this is how the academy will get used to Wikipedia — slowly, then all at once.
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February 27, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
 Brittanica editor Robert McHenry's “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia" is criticism of Wikipedia asserted that quality declines over time. Rather silly, as the one thing that is known about the quality of a given Wikipedia article is that it is better than it was before and will get better with more time and attention. In "The FUD-based Encyclopedia" Aaron Krowne has not only fisked McHenry's claims, but relates open content to open source -- a very similar topic to what I just contributed to a forthcoming book on open source to be published by O'Reilly. Krowne sees McHenry's efforts as similar to the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt campaigns waged by threatened by incumbent software vendors. But of particular interest to M2M readers is Krowne's first two laws of commons based peer production, and the illustration of their interplay:
(Law 1.) When positive contributions exceed negative contributions by a sufficient factor in a CBPP project, the project will be successful.
With wikis, as phantom authority pointed out, transaction costs are low for making a contribution and even lower for fixing mistakes.
(Law 2.) Cohesion quality is the quality of the presentation of the concepts in a collaborative component (such as an encyclopedia entry). Assuming the success criterion of Law 1 is met, cohesion quality of a component will overall rise. However, it may temporarily decline. The declines are by small amounts and the rises are by large amounts.
Coding is vertical information assembly, marked by dependencies between contributions. Writing, as in the case of Wikipedia, is horizontal information assembly, which has little dependency. You can get the date of birth wrong in an article, but the article still generally works and can be built upon in the process. Doing the same in software could result in a Y2Kish meltdown. This distinction accounts for the authority models that Krowne describes later in his article, owner-centric and free-form. Krowne also adds a correlary for the two laws:
(Corollary.) Laws 1 and 2 explain why cohesion quality of the entire collection (or project) increases over time: the uncoordinated temporary declines in cohesion quality cancel out with small rises in other components, and the less frequent jumps in cohesion quality accumulate to nudge the bulk average upwards. This is without even taking into account coverage quality, which counts any conceptual addition as positive, regardless of the elegance of its integration.
Dependency is not necessarily a negative factor, as it can prompt refactoring. It has been said (link? will refactor in later) that Wikipedia could not be a poem because of inherent structure. But I wonder what impact a language or fact-checking refactoring tool could have on cohesion by highlighting dependencies.
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February 26, 2005
Posted by David Weinberger
I’ve posted the longish overview section of an article I wrote for the latest issue of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0. The article is called “Taxonomies and Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves,” which is pretty much what it’s about.
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February 25, 2005
Posted by danah boyd
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February 23, 2005
Posted by Seb Paquet
This workshop will take place during the WWW2005 conference in Chiba, Japan. The deadline for electronic submission is March 4, and the papers from the previous workshop of the same name can be found here.
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February 21, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
Fascinating new effort called Social Physics, affiliated with Berkman, with two large goals:
- Create a robust, multi-disciplinary, multi-constituency community for addressing, vetting and conducting experiments in such issues as privacy, authentication, reputation, transparency, trust building and information exchange.
- Develop a reusable, open source software framework based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform that provides core services including: identity management, social network data models, authentication management, encryption, and privacy controls. On top of this framework we are also developing a demo app that provides identity management and social networking functions, tools to create peer-to-peer identity sharing and facilities to support communities of interest around emerging topics.
I’m generally skeptical of identity management — it has the same hollow ring as knowledge management — but since the focus here is on trust building, rather than simple transactions that treat trust as a binary condition or simple threshold, this will be worth watching.
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February 17, 2005
Posted by David Weinberger
While del.icio.us is delicious, fac.etio.us isn’t facetious. It’s a thought experiment embodied in software from Siderean, a company that creates faceted classification systems for big-ass enterprises. (Note the “facet” in “fac.etio.us”? Damn clever!)
Faceted classification assigns a set of parameters (facets) to the objects it’s classifying and then lets users sort them using the facets in any order. For example, appointments in your calendar might have facets for time, date, person, location, subject, and importance. You could then ask to sort first by person, then by location, and then by date, and a minute later walk through them by importance, then date, then subject, etc. In short, faceted classification systems let you construct trees with the roots and branches in whatever order suits you at that moment. And faceted systems never lead you down branches that have no fruit.
So, Siderean is playing around with doing a faceted classification of about five days’ worth of bookmarks at del.icio.us.
...continue reading.
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February 16, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
JWZ has a great rant on the brokenated nature of groupware, written after a conversation with a friend building an open-source groupware project:
If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
When words like “groupware” and “enterprise” start getting tossed around, you’re doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you’re coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred “seats” of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won’t make anyone happy.
He then offered a more upbeat definition of social software than ‘stuff that gets spammed’:
But with a groupware product, nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it’s just fundamentally not interesting to individuals.
So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.
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Posted by David Weinberger
Lloyd Dalton has created another experiment in tagging. This time, we get to tag colors.
At Colr.org, you can choose any color and tag it with any tag. A search for tags turns up all the colors with that tag.
You can also create a scheme, clustering colors you find copasetic. For example, search for “baby” tags and you’ll currently find six colors with that tag (e.g., “alice blue bambino”) and two schemes (“baby blue” and “baby pink”).
It will be interesting to see if we folksonomically develop color clusters. For example, if you tag a light blue as “sky,” it won’t be found when people search for blues, so you might want to add a “blue” tag as well. On the other hand, a search for “sky” turns up 11 blues already.
By the way, Lloyd is also the author of Plans, a free online calendar. (I like the fact that the Plans home page is not shy about listing the “competition.”)
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February 14, 2005
Posted by danah boyd
Hypotheses:
- There is a cultural divide between different groups of users of IM, namely the always-on’rs and the just-came-to-chat folks.
- The divide is due to a recognition of IM as a presence tool vs. just seeing it as a communication tool.
- The just-came-to-chat folks assert a power differential between peers by demanding that the always-on’rs pay attention to them when they appear.
- IM exacerbates power-differentials by implying that there is equality in participants, as though it is an equalizing context.
This is brought to you in synopsis of a brain candy rant on apophenia.
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Posted by David Weinberger
Alex Primo at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and his research group have released a prototype of Co-Links. It allows readers to add links to any word on a page. A single word may have multiple links. The user can either go to one of the linked pages or see metadata about it. It’s a cool idea. You can try it here..
It’s available as open source software. Extra cool!
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February 12, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Wednesday night a bunch of bloggers and media executives attended a Yahoo! briefing on Personalization. Susan Mernit noted:
Yahoo's potential to own a huge piece of the blogosphere via distribution, tool sets and content acquisition did not go unnoticed by media companies in the room---just the perception they can dominate could possibly spur progress by online newspapers (I hope.) Grassroots media folk and search companies present at the event took notice as well.
Yahoo has blended personalization and RSS to form the most widely used aggregator on the planet. Keep in mind that the vast majority of traffic goes through a handful of portals (and an oligopoly of carriers) and mainstream attention follows the power-law. Most users do not enjoy the diversity or serendipity that blog readers do. Blog writers who want to make impressionistic returns will feed off of major portals. Somewhere in middlespace, the bottom up will be incented by the top down. A new editor is rising and it isn't your blogging client, nor branded aggregators, its an algorithm that supposedly will grow to know you better than people can.
Personalization is supposed to be the answer for how industrial era print media evolves into the information age. A shift from media companies broadcasting to the world to the media broadcasting to you.
If you share your tastes and demands, you get matching information. You browse without effort, sit back and consume. This is sheer bliss for marketers, you also get increasingly framejacked ads. With search, you narrowcast what you are looking for and get ads that supposedly could be helpful along the way. For now, there is no memory of your queries and profiling for others, but it will happen as a personalized search is a useful engine.
Corporate personalization is also a bargain of consummate efficiency. The value proposition of enterprises portals is reducing the time spent looking for information. Of course, part of the contract for employees is to perform a specific function and submit any conceivable data to assist the system There are no ads, all interactions are commerce, yielding ruthless modeled efficiency.
The criticisms of personalization as an instrument of control are not new. Yahoo! is actually taking personalization into new directions by emphasizing user programmability. And a branded aggregator is based on open standards, which is a big leap into a second web. But its important to realize that Personalization is not a world of ends and the means of the trend ensnare us just as before.
Over the next year or so, every major portal will have personalized aggregation of RSS. I say personalized because branded aggregators will have initial appeal the existing audience of a media site, but have no differentiation. Older media will apply traditional editorship to suggest the best feeds according to expert judgment. Newer media will suggest feeds based on what we like. Both approaches will provide limited differentiation, but even more limited utility -- because finding feeds is not a significant problem when most posts in a feed provide their own suggestions, link by link.
Brandmasters will disagree. They will say their promise is strong and trust held by the audience will lead them to trust their expert or automated judgment. But being a provider of information does not beget a relationship, you have no clue if your audience is even impressed. People trust themselves over brands and now they have their fingers on the unsubscribe button for anything they are fed. They roll their own media personally. And before trusting a brand, people are inclined to trust other people -- the promise of influential people is stronger than brands. Now more information flows through and between them, and these flows underpin relationships. Every meme is underwritten by social capital. The most influential mass or custom marketing is in concert with buzz. All media becomes saturated with advertising and consumers are sensitized with each new form. Today this happens at an accelerated pace.
A corporate portal may provide information required for process, but will fail to inform decisions when exceptions happen and hinder my ability to form relationships that help resolve them. Worse, without a diversity of input and the socialization of information, saving time looking for information is pointless when the information isn't shared in the first place.
The basic problem with Personalization is that tailoring information to you limits social discovery. Users contribute value to the database only for them and the service provider, not for each other. People design algorithms outside social context, and error arises in profiling, categorization and filtering. Narrowcasting creates micro-silos as it limits a user's view from more diverse and otherwise peripheral information compared to modes of browsing and searching. Over time, users are taught to rely upon this mode as their primary source of information. Nowhere in this mode is sharing, conversations, remixing and socializing information.
By contrast, consider how social software enables people to create their own networks. Groups form, information is shared and implicit and explicit relationships are fostered. Profiles, ties, posts, links and tags provide dimensions to explore. Spam happens as a consequence of openness, but as social networks become the new filters, it is a minor problem and yields benefits of connecting people. The appeal of personalization is sheer convenience. Today social software fails, with a few exceptions, to deliver the same level of convenience at scale, but give it time.
Replace the word information with relationship, and you get how people want to use the net, with other people. What is shared through filters is very different from a blogger saying, "hey, my group of readers would be interested in this," or "Doc makes a fine point, but when you consider what Jon says it really changes things," or "everybody I know is talking about this." When my network socializes information for me as a natural byproduct of interaction, while respecting my privacy (an important aspect of keeping things personal), I discover relationships that make my life convenient and empowered.
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Posted by Kevin Marks
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February 10, 2005
Posted by Seb Paquet
Academics often use hand-rolled systems to keep track of and (less often, sadly) share literature references. I have used my personal wiki to that end for a
while, but it wasn't the ideal solution.
Now, the rapidly-developing CiteULike looks quite interesting. It borrows from del.icio.us'
simple interface and social software features, but it is tailor-made
for academic papers that are available online. It lets you build a "personal library" (here's the one I just started),
recording bibliographic information and enabling you to tag papers for future retrieval and group sharing. For instance, here is an
ongoing stream of papers on blogging, collected by various individuals. Development is very much alive, as you can see from the development journal and the discussion list.
Because so much of the literature is still stuck behind subscription walls, surfing CiteULike can be frustrating if you're not on a university network, as you can very often be denied access to anything beyond the abstracts (even if you are, digital bouncers are legion and you're bound to bump into one of them sooner or later). This highlights how nice it would be for the public to have open access to the published research it has often paid for out of its own pocket. (The general web-unfriendliness of academic production is a pet peeve of mine - it hurts the impact and dissemination of research findings, and obviously deprives academia from influence on the "real world". How ironic that the Web was originally built in a research lab, to share results...)
(A similar service is Connotea, but I haven't done a thorough comparison between the two. And Alf Eaton's pioneering Biologging has been providing a similar service for biomedical researchers for a while now.)
(cross-posted to my personal weblog)
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February 8, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Great article on Tagging in Salon that covers the applications, social use and commercial implications. Quotes three M2Mers, but you have to love this:
"It's like Friendster for knowledge as far as I'm concerned," says Howard Rheingold. "I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they've tagged ... And isn't that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful -- and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you."
UPDATE: The Tagging story had a big focus on 43 Things. Turns out that 43 Things is a stealth project funded by Amazon. Makes the original title of this post quite prescient. Now that you know who you are sharing it with, you might want to rethink that goal of owning the collected works of Adam Smith.
The holding company responds by blog, saying the social contract still stands. Personally, this kind of private equity is so personal it should have been public in the first place.
Another Update: Further clarification on the investment timing.
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February 6, 2005
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Christopher Allen tackles the issue of social network saturation and what to do when you have more than 150 connections on a social networking service. I previously distinguished between active and latent ties and their impact on social capital. The issue is similar to Steve Gillmor's comment to the latest gang that when feeds are abundant you need social attention-based filters. Chris provides some tactics for dealing with contact overload, one of which Jeff Clavier used to prevent extending undue social credit, but I can't help but think this isn't a significant issue.
Social networking services that do not leverage social spam to grow membership do not burden your attention to function as contact repositories. Recall that the Dunbar number is what you can manage with your own faculties, so somehow you are cognizant of your active network. Having a repository of your latent ties and the ability for those in it to grab your attention, at the risk of their own social capital, is convenient augmentation.
Steve has a great point that we will need greater feed filtering as the network grows. Not for discovery of feeds, there are enough inherent and implicit ways to find good sources in blogging. But for those busy moments where you need to go on vacation or really work and want to stem the tide.
But like contacts, you only want to stem the tide at the moment of congestion. The ability to recall and search gives you the confidence to skim or skip when need be. When you initiate a connection, you have to make an investment, deciding what impact it may have on your attention and social capital. But so long as the flow is passive and under control, the augmentation is more productive than not.
Beyond overload, Adina Levin provides a far more considered take on the issue.
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February 3, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
Ben Hyde looks at four popular bookmarks at del.icio.us and plots how many times each is tagged with the same word. E.g, BoingBoing is tagged as “blog” 200 times and as “news” 90 times. The curve is that of a classic power law: The most frequently used tags are used waaaay more frequently than lesser-used tags.
Ben stresses that four bookmarks don’t constitute a significant sample, but wouldn’t we expect a folksonomy to assume the shape of a power law distribution?
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February 2, 2005
Posted by David Weinberger
ProgeSOFT is encouraging its users to tag content about its products (IntelliCAD, PRogeCAD) so they can learn from one another. It’s recommending three tags — intellicad, learnintellicad, and “learn software” — for use at del.icio.us, flickr and blog sites via technorati tags.
Great experiment, although I’m not convinced that those are the right tags, especially the “learn software” one. Is that so you can search for items tagged both as “intellicad” and “learn software”? It’ll be interesting to see how the folks develop their own folksonomy.
I don’t mean to carp. I think this is a truly interesting idea. My hat is off to ProfeSOFT.
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February 1, 2005
Posted by Clay Shirky
Back In The Day, when I was trying to explain what I meant when I was talking about social software, but before Coates pulled my fat out of the fire by doing the work for me, I had all these wicked abstruse definitions that made everyone’s eyes glaze over.
The only definition I ever found that created the lighbulb moment I was feeling was “Social software is stuff that gets spammed.” Not a perfect definition, but servicable in its way.
Comes now del.icio.us tag spam from user DaFox, as if to illustrate the principle — a single link, whose extended description is a variation on the form “Best site EVAR!” and who has tagged the site (for his or her own retrieval doubtless) with the following tags: .imported .net 10placesofmycity 2005 3d academic accessibility activism advertising ai amazon amusing animation anime apache api app apple apps architecture art article articles astronomy audio backup bands bittorrent blog blogging blogs book bookmark books browser business c canada career china christian clothing cms code coding collaboration color comic comics community computer computers computing cooking cool creativity css culture daily database deals …
The list includes another couple hundred items — that must be some site, containing as it does not just the above listed items but info relevant to Ruby programming, New York City, typography, economics, and porn. DaFox is the Canter and Siegal for the social software generation.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
In What Do Tags Mean, Tim Bray says “There is no cheap metadata” (quoting himself from the earlier On Search.) He’s right, of course, in both the mathematical sense (metadata, like all entropy-fighting moves, requires energy) and in the human sense — in On Search, he talks about the difficulties of getting users to enter metadata.
And yet I keep having this feeling that folksonomy, and particularly amateur tagging, is profound in a way that the ‘no cheap metadata’ dictum doesn’t cover.
Imagine a world where there was really no cheap metadata. In that world, let’s say you head on down to the local Winn-Dixie to do your weekly grocery accrual. In that world, once you pilot your cart abreast of the checkout clerk, the bargaining begins.
You tell her what you think a 28 oz of Heinz ketchup should cost. She tells you there’s a premium for the squeezable bottle, and if you’re penny-pinching, you should get the Del Monte. You counter by saying you could shop elsewhere. And so on, until you arrive at a price for the ketchup. Next out of your cart, the Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks…
Meanwhile, back in the real world, you don’t have to do anything of the kind. When you get to the store, you find that, mirabile dictu, the metadata you need is already there, attached to the shelves in advance of your arrival!
Consider what goes into pricing a bottle of Heinz: the profit margin of the tomato grower, the price of a barrel of oil, local commercial rents, average disposable incomes in your area, and the cost of providing soap in the employee bathrooms. Yet all those inputs have already been calculated, and the resulting price then listed on handy little stickers right there on the shelves. And you didn’t have to do any work to produce that metadata.
Except, of course, you did. Everytime you pick between the Heinz and the Del Monte, it’s like clicking a link, the simplest possible informative transaction. Your choice says “The Heinz, at $2.25 per 28 oz., is a better buy than the Del Monte at $1.89.” This is so simple it doesn’t seem like you’re producing metadata at all — you’re just getting ketchup for your fish sticks. But in aggregate, those choices tell Del Monte and Heinz how to capture the business of the price-sensitive and premium-tropic, respectively.
That looks like cheap metadata to me. And the secret is that that metadata is created through aggregate interaction. We know how much more Heinz ketchup should cost than Del Monte because Heinz Inc. has watched what customers do when they raise or lower their prices, and those millions of tiny, self-interested transactions have created the metadata that you take for granted. And when you buy ketchup, you add your little bit of preference data to the mix.
So this is my Get Out of Jail Free card to Tim’s conundrum. Cheap metadata is metadata made by someone else, or rather by many someone elses. Or, put another way, the most important ingredient in folksonomy is people.
I think cheap metadata has (at least) these characteristics:
1. It’s made by someone else
2. Its creation requires very few learned rules
3. It’s produced out of self-interest (Corrolary: it is guilt-free)
4. Its value grows with aggregation
5. It does not break when there is incomplete or degenerate data
And this is what’s special about tagging. Lots of people tag links on del.icio.us, so I gets lots of other people’s metadata for free. There is no long list of rules for tagging things ‘well,’ so there are few deflecting effects from transaction cost. People tag things for themselves, so there are no motivation issues. The more tags the better, because with more tags, I can better see both communal judgment and the full range of opinion. And no one cares, for example, that when I tag things ‘loc’ I mean the Library of Congress — the system doesn’t break with tags that are opaque to other users.
This is what’s missing in the “Users don’t tag their own blog posts!” hand wringing — they’re not supposed to. Tagging is done by other people. As Cory has pointed out, people are not good at producing metadata about their own stuff, for a variety of reasons.
But other people will tag your posts if they need to group them, find them later, or classify them for any other reason. And out of this welter of tiny transactions comes something useful for someone else. And because the added value from the aggregate tags is simply the product of self-interest + ease of use + processor time, the resulting metadata is cheap. It’s not free, of course, but it is cheap.
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