The free world

This is a favorite topic of mine, the idea that seems prevalent that there is a whole lot of free stuff that isn't being captured in GDP, but has real value, and we should count it to see how great the virtual world is, and so forth. I touched on this last week in a post where I talked about Yglesias's idea that low-selling books should be virtually given away rather than sold for big amounts of money.

The larger issue is expressed well in an older post by Yglesias:

One noteworthy trend we’re experiencing of late is the rising prominence of social production—the creation of valuable information goods on a non-commercial basis. Probably the clearest example is Wikipedia, a hugely useful service that doesn’t produce any economic “value” in GDP terms. Of course valuable activity that doesn’t register in GDP is nothing new—just ask moms spending time taking care of their kids. But the transition to the digital economy is changing things in important ways. In particular, it’s simultaneously making it cheaper than ever to produce and distribute information goods, but harder than ever to capture revenues from information goods.

This is true, but Matt sees this in extremely positive terms, particularly with the idea that retirees will embrace the free economy:

In the future, it might be common for grandpa to spend a couple of hours a day tinkering with open source software. Or maybe he’ll make it his business to attend city council meetings and write on the web about them. People will write whole books and distribute them for free to people’s kindles. A lot of this material may have a “crank” quality to it. But much of it will be genuinely well-informed, and reflect a lifetime of knowledge. Already, I can see in DC’s local blogosphere that there’s a fine line between an annoying busybody and a vital source of information. As the cohort of people with the most time on their hands to just pursue their interests becomes more digitally literate, I think we’ll probably see an explosion of non-commercial activity in a variety of fields. And one important source of success for commercial enterprises will be finding ways to hybridize commercial and non-commercial elements of the production/distribution process.

He kind of limps to the close (endings are tough for me too):

One important implication of this is that we’re almost certainly shifting from a world in which a large and important set of activities aren’t captured in the national economic statistics to a world in which a large, important, and growing set of such activities isn’t captured in the conventional statistics.

I think this is all way too positive. Ultimately, an economy is about doing something or making something that can be exchanged (generally using the medium of money) for something of value that you want. All this free activity is cool and neat, but a whole lot of it comes from a community that is fortunate to have the leisure time to do things that happen to be of interest to others.

Wikipedia is useful (don't tell John McIntyre I said so), but few are lining up to pay for it. There is a hobby quality to it, and to a lot of what passes for so-called "social production." The Internet is great in that a lot of things that people might have done for fun can now be made useful for other people, but we shouldn't confuse that with the workings of a real economy. Some of the most successful projects of the past few years have uncertain realities in a financial sense, and rely on the contributions of people who choose to work on them...and can choose not to work on them.

It's nice to think that a whole army of grandpas are going to go out and donate their time to things that profit a lot of people who are better off than they are, but that's not a sustainable resource that anyone can count on. There's a reason that we have newspapers that assign people to cover city council meetings and write about them and get paid for them - it's called work. I don't think the populace should have to work their civic knowledge around Granddad's annual trip to Florida.

Speculations on significance

I've been having Internet connectivity problems the past couple of days, so who knows if this post will even make it, but I'll give it a shot anyway. As a result, there were a number of hanging-fire posts that require links and quotes, and I won't be able to give you those (because I have few links that are working right now).

What I can do is expound, briefly, on the significance of the Internet. It's a topic I've taken up before, and I tend to have a conservative view of such things. My usual question is, what would happen if X disappeared tomorrow, how would life change?

If we woke up tomorrow and the internal combustion engine had simply ceased to exist or to work, our lives would be dramatically altered, largely because we have about a century of building institutions around it. Where we work, where we live, our leisure-time activities, these choices have mainly been predicated on the idea that we have a tool that allows us to, for minimal expense really, travel hither and yon with relative ease. Had we no cars, our homes would be insupportable, our stores would be unsupplyable, and it is not at all clear (though an interesting counterfactual to mull on) what we could to survive.

And we can substitute any number of things for X and come up with similar results. Electricity, water distribution, the use of steel in construction: We can posit a world in which these things weren't developed, but it's difficult to see how we would get from the world we have now to a world in which those things didn't exist.

To me, the Internet has not yet reached that level. I'm not trying to minimize its importance in transferring information about the world, and it has brought about many changes. If the Internet suddenly disappeared, there would be huge inconveniences to a lot of people and organizations that have made it an integral part of their existence.

Yet, the pre-Internet institutions still, for the most part, continue to exist. We still have universal mail service, paper on which to write our letters, and stamps with which to mail them. We may get our news online, but we still could wander down to the newsstand and pick up a paper if we had to. The new networks such as Facebook and Twitter, whatever their potential might be, are still not necessary to the living of anyone's life; you can still join a bowling league if you want to.

Obviously, anything in that preceding paragraph might change, especially in the media universe. We may be very close to the moment when a major American metropolitan area ceases to have a newspaper of record, abandoning the field to the World Wide Web. But, even then, a large number of people will get their news from the radio or television, and the Internet will continue to be one option among many.

If you want to argue that the trend is clear, that the Internet will one day have at least the importance of the automobile or any other invention, I'm not disposed to disagree with you. But the overheated rhetoric, the embarrassing TIME essay by Ashton Kutcher about the founders of Twitter (I'd link to it if I could), the bandwagon-jumping of people who should know better, all this is still based more on a view of the future, not the reality of the present. We haven't yet scratched the surface of all the ways we might end up using the Internet, but it will take a lot of work to make that happen. So maybe we can tone down the fervor, OK?

Isn't the medium the message?

Yglesias, in In Defense of Twitter, contends that:

The idea of a “banal and superficial” medium simply doesn’t make much sense.

Curiously, his quote is from Twitter-using Senator Claire McCaskill, whose defense is "ultimately not that interesting."  (Talk about backhanded....)

His contention is that the medium has little to do with the message, that content should be evaluated irrespective of how it's delivered.  He has a point, I suppose, but I think he overstates it.  There are limitations in the Twitter format which make it inappropriate for certain kinds of information conveyance, and I sense that its current popularity is pushing those boundaries.

The question is not, is the medium bad, but is it being used for the right purposes?  George Stephanopoulos interviewing John McCain using Twitter may enhance both men's credentials as with-it, modern, tech-savvy guys, but it did nothing to improve the knowledge of the body politic.  A Twitter message is 140 characters - think about that, 140 characters.  There may be forms of discourse that are appropriately expressed in that space, but there are many more that cannot.

One of the discussion topics for the future is how we're going to deal with the multiplicity of platforms on which we can express ourselves.  [A related topic is how that expression will fit into a business model, but that's for another day.]  And Yglesias may not be the best person to speak to that subject, as he has far more options than most of us.  If he's writing something for his Twitter feed, and he has a thought that will take him past the 140-character barrier, he can "repurpose" it for his very successful blog.  If he has a big thought that can't be contained within the confines of his blog (or is potentially more lucrative), he has a big enough name that he can find another outlet for it, up to and including a book.

But Twitter is smoking hot right now, much more than a new blog would be, and people are going to try to utilize it regardless of message.  We'll lose some deep arguments that might have some value.  In the end, it probably doesn't matter all that much; just as we can't add infinite blogs to our feed readers and have any hope of keeping up, so too will we tend to limit our Twitter feeds, and a lot of the hype and noise will settle down (when your boss and your parents and your children are all tweeting away, are you really going to care what Ashton Kutcher has to say?).  I expect Twitter to become much like the blogosphere; local clusters will emerge and be much more important than the mass that gets the attention now.

At the same time, we can't assume that the limitations of Twitter don't make it somewhat more likely to be "banal and superficial," and it takes only a few minutes on it to convince the discerning person of that.

Note: Yglesias stumbles at the end of his post, when he writes: "There’s no tool so good as to produce good work when badly used."  That has nothing to do with the rest of this entry, as no serious person contends that Twitter magically transforms garbage into flowers...do they?

Facebook?

It has come to my attention that someone has started a Facebook group for fans of this blog. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about that, just as I'm not sure how I feel about Facebook in general. It's flattering in a sense, but I have no idea how anyone is supposed to use it or enjoy it.

A few months ago, I got on Facebook, mainly to see what it was about (I've criticized it a few times for being relatively content-free, and I really can't do that unless I have some experience with it; my experience has not changed that opinion). I don't really feel like doing a detailed critique of social networking sites right now, but it strikes me that Facebook and MySpace tend to be relatively passive ways of maintaining what they have brilliantly called "friendships." There is an illusion of intimacy that comes from being enmeshed in the minutiae of someone's day-to-day life, but that's a far cry from being an actual friend.

I'm sure there are those who could find ways in which Facebook has actually enhanced life; I know it's been used as a platform for fund-raising (though I'm not certain that Facebook is required for that), but I wonder about costs vs. benefits. A lot of people spend a whole lot of time on what strikes me essentially as filling in a form (for those people who think that engaging in social networking is somehow high-tech, let me tell you - it's not). Are the benefits that these sites provide really worth the time and energy people spend on them? I guess that's a personal decision, but I didn't find it especially compelling.

Twitter is similar, something that I've been on and not been grabbed by, but I know quite a few people who find it useful (though they may actually mean "interesting," which is something quite different). Of course, I spend rather too much time on this blog, and I would guess many would find that a waste of time. Each to their own, I suppose.

The perfect Google

There is outrage across the Net that Google had an outage to their Gmail service; they were down for 2-1/2 hours on Tuesday. It's their sixth outage in the last 8 months, and represents downtime of "about 10 to 15 minutes a month" over the last year. (At the higher estimate, this constitutes 99.97% uptime.)

Apparently some of the contracts Google has with corporate customers call for 99.9% uptime, but it's per month, so they will be providing credits for this month's outage. This last problem came from some new software that caused "cascading problems" from one data center to another.

Of course, the drama here comes from expectations that Google, this great monolith of the Web, should do nothing wrong, never disappoint a customer. We naturally expect a level of quality from this highly-publicized company that we would never expect from a normal service provider.

But let's look at this without the sense of awe that surrounds this successful company. Google's main business, that which has given us a new English verb, is search. We assume that their search is perfect because it's so vast in its results (and its mindshare).

We're comparing, however, apples and oranges. Google search is not required to hit 100%; we simply have no idea what results we're missing, because they're not there. Try putting the same query terms into a number of search engines, and you'll get a widely varying number of hits. And Google does not always have the biggest number. These companies are using different algorithms, different caching strategies, different indexing, so they're going to come up with different results.

Hosting web mail is quite different. It's not just a matter of having a strategy that's superior (though I quite like Gmail), or better software, it requires keeping the machines and attendant software up 24/7. This skill set is different from writing cool search or app software, and we shouldn't evaluate a company's ability to do one by how well they do the other.

If you have a business that's dependent on 100% e-mail uptime (a problematic strategy, if you ask me), then you need to get away from the thinking that the great Google will ensure that for you because, "they're so great." They may have really neat mail and feed readers and maps, but that has little to do with keeping server software humming.

Transparency and Wikipedia

At the risk of beating a subject into the ground (right, like I've never done that before), I'm going to take up the matter of Wikipedia one last time. For those who haven't been following my saga, last Thursday I wrote a short post in which I linked to a post by John McIntyre in which he offers some sources that he, in his role as a copy editor for a newspaper, finds preferable to Internet darling Wikipedia. Later that day, I considered the topic further and expounded on why I have dropped my standards in dealing with a world that no longer seems to value correctness. Friday I went through the comments that McIntyre received, some of which demonstrated a proper grain-of-salt approach to Wikipedia, but a few of which showed a disturbing belief that it is something beyond criticism. Finally, Saturday I discussed one of the comments in particular, pointing out what an ineffective rhetorical device the term "bitter" is.

[I received a couple of good comments on these, to which I did not take the time to formulate answers. To the Saturday post, I received a thoughtful response from Citizen Carrie, in part:

A problem I've found with a lot of the links to "references you can trust" (e.g., from state library associations, schools, and yes, from John McIntyre, etc.) is that it looks like the links were set up by someone who took a 2-week .html class 10 years ago, and no one has bothered to go back to update the information....[After getting less information than she needs,] at that point, (and this happens to me every single time, and I admit I should probably hunt a little more), I give up on the "trusted source" and fall back to Google and my built in BS-meter.

Broken links are a huge problem on the Web, and, like an unmarked dead-end street, cause more frustration than would seem seemly. But, as I alluded to before, the very point of a reference work is that we should not have to rely on our own judgment, no matter how well-honed. Wikipedia breaks that relationship between our sources and us.

On Friday, I received a comment from the oddly-named Anonymous, which was insightful and funny:

The problem is not Wikipedia's existence per se, but its insistence on calling itself an encyclopedia. And, contrary to Hartman's claim, it does just that. Under the logo it simply says "The Free Encyclopedia," not "The Encyclopedia that anyone can edit," and of course even that would be misleading. It has been suggested that "Jimbo's Big Bag o' Trivia" would be more appropriate.

Jimbo is, of course, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose very fame (check out the embarrassing TIME profile from 2006; of course, it was written by faux-trendmeister Chris Anderson) and ersatz significance belies the disingenous claims of the Wikipediaphiliacs that it's a work in progress, don't take it too seriously by, say, reading it for accuracy or anything.]

Here's the main point of today's effort, and it is an attempt to sum up the discussion here and at John McIntyre's place: Wikipedia, and much of the so-called New Media, values transparency over accuracy. I've written about transparency before, but, perhaps, not enough.

Transparency is a concept, along with accountability, that is seen as the magic, and simple, bullet that will solve various of our woes. Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington D.C. public schools, babbles away about accountability as if that alone will solve the massive problems of that unfortunate city.

However, transparency is the thing that will get us where we need to be. Eric Schmidt of Google appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos yesterday, and he was touting the idea that what the various government spending schemes need is transparency, that if we put all the details of what we're paying for online, we'll be able to measure the effectiveness of these giveaways and make adjustments. (I never think of Rep. Barney Frank as being a funny guy, but he pointed out that another of the panelists, FedEx's Fred Smith, might prefer it if we mailed out the details to every American. Heh.)

I'm all for transparency, really I am, but it seems like a pretty pat cure for things. I have two initial concerns about Schmidt's idea, and these objections typify my reluctance to cite transparency as a quick and easy answer.

First, how far does transparency extend? It's one thing to see a line in the list of federal expenditures that says, "$223M - Funding for support of Revillagigedo-Gravina multi-modal transportation infrastructure," and another for someone to call it the Alaska "Bridge to Nowhere." The first looks perfectly supportable, the second is ridiculous. It's not clear that a list of all bailout expenditures would have included $18B of bonuses for Wall Street executives.

Second, who figures out what these things really mean? As Old Media (costly digging out of information) is replaced with New Media (pictures of Britney Spears), there will be fewer people left to figure out that it really is a bridge of dubious usefulness. We could argue that bloggers will ferret out this information (for free!), but, unless it's picked up by the relatively few sites that get major traffic, that's unlikely to be a comprehensive solution.

This attitude, that transparency is a magic answer, is the major contention made by those who find Wikipedia a new paradigm of information. "You can see the edit history," they say, as if that's sufficient. Of course, that requires the reader to know that Fred419 can be trusted to enter only true information, while Spacebalz is notoriously unreliable.

As Anonymous said, Wikipedia does purport to be an encyclopedia. Its adherents claim even more: that it is a model for peer something-or-other. Anderson on founder Wales:

Today Wales is celebrated as a champion of Internet-enabled egalitarianism. He describes himself not as antielitist but as "anticredentialist." That's a key distinction. It means that amateurs can have as much to contribute as professionals and that talent can be found anywhere. Everyone predicted that mob rule would lead to chaos.

Instead it has led to what may prove to be the most powerful industrial model of the 21st century: peer production. Wikipedia is proof that it works, and Jimmy Wales is its prophet.

So when a defender writes, "Wikipedia is not a primary source, not a secondary source and again does not claim to be any of these," that is clearly untrue. Wikipedia is sold as this transcendent thing that elevates hoi polloi over experts, and claims that transparency is somehow better than accuracy. What this does is elevate data over information, and, frankly, what I'm looking for in a reference work is information.

[By the way, McIntyre had another post on the subject in which he posits a conversation between a skeptic and a believer - very entertaining.]

Bitterness

As promised, this is a follow-up to my last post concerning Wikipedia. I won't even begin to rehash everything there. I wrote that a fervid commenter didn't do a very good job of arguing his case, as he failed to realize that his defense (that Wikipedia was known to be inaccurate, but it didn't matter because people used it, people liked it, and people don't care much about accuracy anyway) was a faint effort indeed.

In his third passionate comment on the subject (you can go to the original post by John McIntyre to follow this discussion), after some more of the unconvincing support of Wikipedia, he wrote:

As such, your writing John is mostly (and increasingly so, in my opinion) steered by bitterness.

There's no real follow-up or citations here, though he does go on to write:

Wikipedia will improve and will adapt to the latest situations if so required. Any debate on this (how tumultuous it may be) should be welcomed, instead of being questioned by you.

Of course, McIntyre is allowing these comments to be published on his blog, so it seems obvious to me that he is welcoming this debate, but I'm not the one spluttering on about this.

Here's my main point. The word "bitterness" is rapidly becoming the end of all arguments. We're asked to believe, not just here but on my blog and many other places throughout BlogWorld, that an assignment of bitterness is the ultimate in argumentation. McIntyre is "bitter" about something, and should no longer offer his reasons on the topic. I'm "bitter" about something, as a (former?) commenter expressed, and so my judgment on, say, economics or politics is immediately suspect.

Anyone who's taken Intro to Logic recognizes this for the ad hominem argument it is, but the people who use it seem to find it a devastating critique. It isn't, of course, it's just a way for a weak arguer to claim, "I win. My comments come out of passion and logic, yours merely from bitterness."

It's clear that this particular commenter is out of steam, as he concludes his effort with:

And this is where I will stop feeding the trollz :D
Goodbye folks. Live long and prosper \/.

He dismisses what is actually a fine discussion by claiming that anyone who disagrees with his contention that Wikipedia is great is a troll (and throws in his kewl use of 'z' and his 40-year-old Star Trek reference as proof of his Internet bona fides).

But it does keep him from having to support his questionable logic any further, and maybe we can all be thankful for that.

I've heard of cows

The discussion about Wikipedia continues at You Don't Say, John McIntyre's blog about language and journalism and other things. McIntyre has expressed (understatement alert) serious doubts about the usefulness of Wikipedia in a series of posts, the last of which engendered a post from me yesterday. (My contribution to the discussion can be recapped: I would love to maintain the kind of standards that people like McIntyre defend, but I have been beaten down by dedicated corporate mediocrity, which I regret.)

The comments to his post have been interesting (the fourth one is particularly entertaining), with many of them taking a guarded middle ground on the reliability of Wikipedia. The best comment so far (from Brian Cubbison of the Syracuse Post-Standard):

Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. Also, it is not the tool for Mr. McIntyre's job. In his job, he needs an answer with a high degree of confidence now, not an average of accuracy over time -- or an orbit of claims that sometimes comes nearer to the truth. We shouldn't have to clash over that.

Wikipedia is not a compendium of facts. It's a potluck of links to better sources, and can be useful that way.

I also admire the way Wikipedia tracks changes and corrections, better than any newspaper has ever managed to, even online.

Wikipedia touts that it's easy to update, but an online encyclopedia written by scholars can be updated.

Wikipedia claims it can put more experts on a topic than an encyclopedia can, but there's a point of diminishing returns if the experts and regular people are undone by knuckleheads.

Wikipedia is free, and there's a legitimate concern over whether the free economy is really the get-what-you-pay-for economy.

I guess the lesson here is that different sources of information are appropriate for different uses and users; the question is, what is it legitimate to expect from those sources? McIntyre works for a newspaper, and still needs sources that come as close to guaranteed accuracy as can be had. That means, one trusts a dictionary on which a team of lexicographers have worked for decades.

So, can Wikipedia have some usefulness, if not to a professional like McIntyre? Perhaps so, just as we expect less rigor from a child's encyclopedia than we do from a grown-up encyclopedia, maybe we can see Wikipedia as a starting point for subsequent research, not the last word. Of course, that requires a level of judgment, and one of the purposes of a reference is that the untutored user wouldn't need to have that judgment when consulting it.

We're left where we started, that Wikipedia may be useful if you already know enough about the topic to ensure that it's reasonably accurate. That's the way I use it, not linking to its entries from this blog unless I'm fairly certain that it's a good entry.

So this question as to the legitimacy must remain unanswerable for now. We can then ask another question: what do people believe about Wikipedia? If everyone has the grain-of-salt approach, a hesitancy when relying on it as a primary source, then it could be seen as a relatively benign thing.

But I'm certainly not convinced that people see it that way, not after numerous articles by Malcolm Gladwell wanna-bes touting Wikipedia as the next great revolution in information, one that allows us to throw off the shackles of corporate-controlled knowledge, or some such.

I will grant that Wikipedia itself, on its About page, does hedge its bets a bit (among all the statistics telling us how wonderful it is). Even there, we see problems:

Users need not worry about accidentally damaging Wikipedia when adding or improving information, as other editors are always around to advise or correct obvious errors, and Wikipedia's software is carefully designed to allow easy reversal of editorial mistakes.

Because Wikipedia is an ongoing work to which, in principle, anybody can contribute, it differs from a paper-based reference source in important ways. In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles more frequently contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism.

The word "always" in the first quoted sentence bothers me, as does the clear admission that there may be "significant misinformation."

As is often the case, Wikipedia's supporters may be a real source of the problem in perception. Three of the 14 comments to McIntyre's post are from a Derk-Jan Hartman, who makes the case for Wikipedia, well, somewhat strangely:

You criticise Wikipedia in your comment for labelling/presenting itself as "an encyclopedia". That is not entirely true of course. We present ourselves as "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit". That is an important distinction.

It requires an odd concept of how clauses work to argue for a distinction here. Hartman goes on to contend that the objections of those people who find Wikipedia unreliable are meaningless, because a lot of people use it, and most of them don't really care how accurate it is:

Wikipedia is as "faulty" in presenting reality, as all the other impulses people receive in their life, and thus adhering to the current standards within the broader society.

There is more from Hartman, which I think I will leave to a subsequent post, but his impassioned defense of Wikipedia (and his use of "we" makes me believe he has some extra interest in it) does very little to convince me that it's a new paradigm for knowledge. He's essentially saying that it isn't reliable, but people like it, and it will take time to get "every article up to the best standards."

So where's the disagreement? McIntyre, as a professional information handler, believes that Wikipedia is not useful for what he does, and he tells us on his blog that if you value accuracy as he does (and must), you shouldn't find it all that useful either, certainly not as an authority.

Hartman, as a Wikipedia advocate, admits, as does Wikipedia's own page, that it's subject to inaccuracy, still has a long way to go, but that's OK because a lot of people use it, and don't care about accuracy anyway.

It seems to me that these two gentlemen are in fundamental accord about Wikipedia, and Hartman might want to tone down the rhetoric a bit.

Cows...and more, alas!

The redoubtable John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun, about whom I wrote earlier today, has responded in a post titled, McIntyre is having a cow about Wikipedia (title taken from a statement I made in my post).

In his post, McIntyre puts forth his brief as to the inherent unreliability of Wikipedia. As a copy editor for close to 30 years, he feels that Wikipedia is a refutation of what he has worked for:

I work as an editor. My whole professional effort for nearly three decades has been to make sure that the published texts at the newspapers for which I have worked are, as far as human fallibility and the pressures of time will allow, factually accurate, grammatical and clear.

To do this requires knowledgeable, trained editors. To become a copy editor at The Baltimore Sun, an applicant has to run the gantlet of the usual scrutiny of resume, interviews and reference checks — and a grueling test that covers a dozen categories of general knowledge and an extensive section of texts to be edited. Those who have taken it remember it.

The book and magazine and newspaper publishers who have been dismembering their editing staffs have been doing so in desperation, for economic motives. What leaves me spluttering is the Wikipediaphiliacs’ apparent belief that such editing doesn’t matter; everything will even itself out.

McIntyre correctly points out the fallacy in that last theory, concluding:

The consequence is that you can trust Wikipedia only when you already know the information.

That seems right on the money, as I indicated when I stated that I link to Wikipedia only when I'm sure it provides a reasonable summary of a topic I know fairly well (I am deliberately ignoring the case where the information changes after I link to the entry; that gives me a headache). McIntyre then links to a post by David Sullivan, who writes (and I'm going to quote even more of it than McIntyre did):

Yet certainly the idea underlying Wikipedia is: We have met authority, and if it is not all of us, it is illegitimate. The idea of editing -- the idea of newspapers -- in the end rests upon, yes, dear reader, we do in fact know some things in more depth and detail than you do, and are better trained to judge them, just as you may be better trained to design a house or repair an electrical system. I believe this. Yet a voice in my head still says, yes, and Robert S. McNamara said he knew better than the American people did what needed to be done in Vietnam. Just as it can be hard for a parent who recreationally used drugs to draw a firm line for children, it can be hard to oppose proferred advances that aim to give all power to all the people. Yet standards cannot result from universal input on standards, because who then has the right to say, alas, it is your ox that shall be gored?

So here's my story: I felt, and likely still feel, just the way that McIntyre and Sullivan do, that there need to be standards, that we just can't plunk down words or computer code any old way we happen to feel like it and have any hope of being understood. That doesn't mean I want to take away playfulness in language, or observe rules of foolish consistency (I do end sentences with prepositions sometimes, and I've probably split a few infinitives), but there is value in defining things in a consistent manner. I've done a bit of informal translation, and it was amazing to me just how difficult it can be to find just the right word.

But, behaviorally, I've relaxed my standards considerably in dealing with the outside world. I'm reminded of a project I worked on, and I have two anecdotes:

First, I had a manager who would run memos by me for correction and annotation. He was a great guy, but not much of a writer, so I would mark them up fiercely. After a time, he began calling me "Mr. Picky." After a few days of this, I turned to him and said, "Just how un-picky do you want your programmers to be?" He returned to calling me by my name, but I realized something.

Second, same project, to pump up our clients, someone would put posters up telling how great this lousy project was going to be (it turned into a big lawsuit later). These posters were seasonally-oriented, a seemingly dubious choice given that the biggest problem was how late the project was becoming. At any rate, one day a new poster was spread across the walls of the client, and it said, "Alas, spring has sprung" (and then some other words about how great everything was going to be).

All of my readers are smart and see the problem right away. "Alas" is a term of sorrow or regret, not one of celebration. (It was actually an appropriate choice, but that was not the place for honesty.) No one who saw this poster in preparation, not from the client, not from the high-priced big-city consultant, pointed out the actual meaning of this word.

That same evening, a partner in my firm happened by. He was a man known for his emphasis on quality, even a certain fastidiousness. I said, in my offhand way, "Didn't anyone notice the problem with the first word of the new poster?" He looked, grunted, shrugged, and walked away.

And there's the essential problem of standards and Wikipedia and all the things that McIntyre and Sullivan (and I) are writing: no one cares. Imprecision is seen as spontaneous and genuine, precision is the province of stuffy lawyer types.

When I say to a manager that we should get the menu items and order consistent in an application, and he says we don't have time for the "extras," we know that no one cares. When I point out that a word in documentation doesn't have the right connotation, I can see that no one cares.

So now I tend to let things like that go, and I'm not real happy about it, but my desire for correctness, at this time, in this culture, can only be perceived as negative, as fussy. I have to go along with Anything Goes, or risk calling attention to my age in a field where 40 is suspect, 45 questionable, and 50 too old (because only old people are so picky). I swallow my feelings that customers are ill-served by this lassitude.

I'm not proud of that, because it means I'm contributing to it, but that's the way of it.

Some useful links

John McIntyre at You Don't Say, intrepid copy editor at the Baltimore Sun, is having something of a cow about Wikipedia. In this post, Wikipediaphilia, he inveighs against the "self-correcting" nature of this Internet font of wisdom, arguing that the massive number of errors and the instability of entries that anyone can correct should provoke skepticism, rather than blind faith.

This seems like good advice; I generally link to Wikipedia entries only if, after reading them, I'm pretty convinced that the content is useful and generally correct. If I have marginal knowledge of a topic, I'll usually link to something more reputable.

Of course, the question is, where do you go if not to Wikipedia? I pretty much flail around, at least after checking my own library (that's right, I own actual books with information in them). Fortunately, McIntyre helps us out here in a subsequent post, References you can trust. I won't repeat them here, but he offers about 10 links he finds reliable. So add those to your bookmarks, I have.

More on Twitter

Kevin Drum follows up his earlier post on Twitter (which I referred to here) with a cautionary tale about one Twitterer who has, apparently, become lost in the steam tunnels. He then goes on to talk about his own early experience (though he doesn't summarize the comments from his last post where he asked for suggestions on how Twitter can be used, some of which were enlightening to me).

He concludes, correctly I think, that Twitter is similar to Facebook in that "it doesn't really make too much sense unless you spend a lot of time with it." And that's right, they are so profoundly different in form of interaction that there is a critical mass that a user needs to get to. I haven't, which is probably why I don't recognize how central they've become to people's lives. (The same is true of any somewhat-deep-but-different user experience. For example, if all you know of Flight Simulator is, you take off, then run the plane into the Sears Tower, you know very little compared to the person who can actually land the plane.)

Twit-erific? Twit-ilicious? Twit-pendous?

Adjectival forms aside, I have often wondered what Kevin Drum is wondering today, what's the deal with Twitter? I know people who use it regularly, but I've never quite gotten the attraction of 140-character messages. Yes, I could ask the people who use it, but I might seem dangerously out of touch. So I'm happy to have Kevin ask the question of his larger readership, and the first few comments are interesting, at least in terms of the kind of communities being built on top of it. I'm still not certain we should be entirely comfortable with the sound bite nature of it, but at least I'm beginning to think there's something there.

The future of the Web

I have been critical of some of the claims made for the Internet and the World Wide Web, as I believe that much of the hype is just that, people trying to credit themselves for being smart enough to see the next big thing. My doubts, which I've expressed here a number of times, come from trying to look at what's really going on, and asking myself if the ramifications of the Web have been truly transformational. I've concluded, no, not yet, and have encountered some disagreement (on the blog, more in real life).

I've never actually said that I don't disbelieve that the Web might have that power some day, just that it hasn't reached that point yet. TIME's 2006 choice of "You," the blogging, YouTube-uploading, commenting, "creating your own content" You, as Person of the Year was provocative, but not really convincing. Much of so-called Web 2.0 is less about empowerment and more about having a broader forum to run one's mouth, and I cheerfully admit that this blog is less socially significant than I would prefer to claim.

When a bunch of early adopters get together, it's easy to see why they might choose to believe in the importance of that life decision; it's less easy to see why those of us who have not yet fully embraced the "brave new world" would go along with it, even to the point of feeling inadequate if they have not fully Web-ized their lives.

So I like to point out evidence that, maybe, just maybe, we are not, as a society, as far along the online curve as some of the more radical adherents would claim. (Again, I am not a Luddite; we are moving along that curve, and, while there will be unforeseen problems, we will and should keep doing so - we are simply not close to the position of Columbus glimpsing the New World.)

Yglesias quotes Henry Farrell as to how the Obama campaign used the Internet, "as a means to facilitate real world volunteering, rather than an end in itself." He goes on:

So it’s perfectly clear that Internet activity wasn’t seen a form of mobilization in itself, contrary to the impression given by some of the more breathless coverage, but rather primarily as a means to more efficiently organize the traditional forms of direct contact.

Yglesias comments, focusing in particular on the political, but I think his words can be extended to other realms:

But only a tiny fraction of the electorate comes from the age cohort that’s really embraced the internet and thinks of email, IM, social networking, etc. as second-nature. So for most voters, it’s natural to use the internet as an efficient means of organizing non-internet interactions — like how at the office people will send out an email to organize a meeting. But as time goes on, it seems plausible that the gap in efficacy between online interactions and things like face-to-face conversations and (especially) phone calls might close, making it more plausible that you would organize online specifically in order to generate online contacts.

This pretty much summarizes how I feel, that we're in the early stages of seeing how the Internet will change things. But, in some ways, I'm actually more optimistic than most. I think the amazing expense of the expansion of airports (most notably for me, O'Hare in Chicago) is throwing money away, because I think videoconferencing is getting more viable and acceptable every day. Some good-sized percentage of business travel is going to disappear into the Web, and many of our assumptions about growth will be shattered.

There are a lot of other examples we could find, but I'll leave it there for now. The Internet is still a young technology, it doesn't need outsized claims to be made about it, and we will see more of our lives centered around it. That will bring profound changes, but, once again, they haven't happened yet.

On the nature of comments

I've written before about how disappointing I find most of the Web 2.0 talk to be (I'm defining it in the most common way, as the new user-generated content of blogs, videos, comments, etc. that actually have the populace "creating" their own reality on the Internet - or something like that). I'm not an extremist, I grant that some of it has been useful in terms of forming communities and making information more broadly available, but many of its successes are not so much revolutionary as extensional. That Obama raised so much money over the Internet implies that his people saw it as a more effective marketing channel and made it happen, which does not reflect a re-ordering of reality.

Obviously I'm not going to say anything against blogging, but there is evidence that consolidation is occurring, that it's getting harder for voices to emerge from the vast pool and be heard. This is in no small part a matter of time; I barely have time now to post a time or two a day and read the blogs I already have in my feed reader and do the other things I need to do, so I'm certainly not out cruising Blogger for new people that I then would have to keep up with. It certainly seems clear that there is this big clump of sites in the middle of the Internet, or maybe it would be more accurate to say a clump of clumps differentiated by subject matter (I'm not sure how much intersection there is between the political blogs and the entertainment blogs). Those of us not in one of the clumps have a one-way relationship to the big boys and girls, and there's little hope of that direction changing, probably less of being invited to join the clump. (I've seen some graphs that purport to demonstrate the clumping, though I am unable to find any at the moment. What would be interesting is if they would show directionality, so that we could see quite clearly that Androcass is way more likely to link to Andrew Sullivan than Sullivan is to Androcass - oh, well, his loss.)

And comments, oh, comments, the vast cesspool of profanity and scatology and various unsavory -isms. Not all comments are vile or unhelpful, but far too many are, as I discussed here in a post about Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn's decision to turn them off, citing the time it took to handle and reject the out-of-bounds ones.

However, even in their most benign form, comments suffer from some structural deficiencies that make them fail to live up to their promise to provide a forum where well-intended people come together to mull over the ideas expressed in the original post.

First, there is the possibility that the "relationship" between the original poster and the commenters will become unidirectional, with the poster never actually dealing with the comments that the post generated. For example, I have stopped by Charlie Rose's comments section several times, and never once have I seen someone from the show, let alone Charlie, respond to anything there. That may be excusable - would we rather have Charlie writing comments than preparing for his program, maybe wiping down his "table"? (I have wrestled with the priority dilemma myself, as I talked about here, and I don't get many comments at all.)

There are those who would say that it is unnecessary for the instigator to remain in the conversation, that the "community" can maintain the flow of ideas, but it still seems like a cheat somehow ("I've invited you to my home, now I'm going to go up to my study and lock the door...have fun!"). And, as I've pointed out, the "community" is far too often co-opted by toxic notions.

Second, there's the matter of thread structure. If you've ever tried to hold an organized discussion via e-mail, you've experienced this. Response A comes in, response B talks about some of the issues in A, response C was written before seeing B so it rehashes some of B's points and ignores others, and so on. By the time you get to response J, you have 20 issues on the table, but only three or so which are "hot," and you end up having to schedule a meeting to resolve these threads.

Some blog software tries to deal with this by allowing the discussion to be organized into formal threads, but this solution relies on the ability of commenters to self-organize, something that works far better in theory than in practice. Other blogs or sites rely on human intervention to spin off new threads whenever necessary, but any popular site soon becomes a nightmare for that human.

I bring this up because of a curious experience I had yesterday. Kevin Drum wrote a post in which he solicited comments on more blogs to read (I know, running counter to the trend I mentioned above, but Kevin may just have more time than I do). I saw it, listed a few of my favorites (sent another, because I forgot one, but that's not material to our story), and posted. His comments are moderated, so I expected to wait to see them go up, but I went back a few times, and didn't see them. In the meantime, comment after comment is going in. About four hours after the initial post, mine still aren't there, so I write another post to see if anyone has any insight and...boom!...it goes up immediately, no delay at all.

I figure, glitch (though this has happened a time or two before on Kevin's site), and I turn off the computer and go about my business. This morning I hop on, and there are my two posts, in the time sequence I wrote them, apparently finally pasting muster with the Drum process.

But here's the thing. No one is ever going to see them. In the example I used above, it's as if response D was written, then it mysteriously drifted about the ether while responses E through Q went up, then it's placed back in the queue as response D. If you have an interest in the discussion, you might monitor the posts to see what there is that's new, but you're not going to go back up to see if something's been inserted between C and E.

It would, of course, be equally strange to put new messages in the queue at the time they're approved, as they'll seem totally out of context, creating random discussions. About the only solution I can see would be to hold all messages in abeyance until the fate of each one is determined, in sequence. But then I can imagine a lot of people wandering away, figuring the discussion had come to an end.

I guess the real solution is not to take 4+ hours to decide whether a message is suitable, but to try to make that approval process happen in real time. So I wonder what Kevin is doing where that isn't happening. It all makes it pretty difficult to feel a part of a discussion, and, once again, demonstrates that we still have a long way to go before realizing the potential of Web 2.0

How much is Androcass worth?

There are no end to articles and blog posts trying to figure out how we can monetize the magical arena of Web 2.0. There are persistent rumors that some of the biggest brand names of our brave new interactive world are not close to turning a profit, that Facebook and MySpace and on and on have found no way to pull in the bucks. Perhaps it's finally occurring to people that, when someone sees several thousand ads a day (and, if you appreciate the insights of semiotics, you know it's at least that many), there's a tendency to zone out and see none of them. And subliminality doesn't translate into lucre.

So here's my idea. We've all heard stories of authors writing comments on Amazon touting their own books to get the star rating up. This is an extension of that: prominent people sell their blog comments. How much would it be worth to get a comment by Paul Krugman on your blog? Matt Yglesias? Androcass? (The last, maybe not so much.)

Think of the prestige factor, as your blog would be seen as one of the central axis that dominates the Web. If anyone believes that, say, Andrew Sullivan reads and comments on your blog, you automatically become an insider, sweeping you into that rarefied air of the big time Internet pundits.

And the best part of it is, the expert doesn't have to lift a finger. If you write a post about liquidity, and you think your traffic would be perked up with a comment from Brad DeLong or Mark Thoma, the Celebrity Comments Bureau will go out, find an existing blog post on the subject, preface it with "Good post" or "Interesting thought," and shoot it right to your site. No muss, no fuss, and a nice stream of income for the bloggers who've given us so much.

But there would be enticements other than money for our celebrities. We could set it up like an auction site, and the bids would determine value. Imagine the ego-stroking possibilities when the price of an Andrew Sullivan comment shoots past that of a Rich Lowry; why, you'd have big-time people checking their rankings several times a day.

I'm pretty pumped about this idea, so, if there's anyone out there who knows enough prominent people to get this going, drop me a line. There are millions in this idea, I tell you, millions.

Curious merger

I have to confess that, despite being in the software field, I haven't paid much attention to the Microsoft-Yahoo merger/takeover. When I did think about it, the combination seemed peculiar: a brand (Microsoft) that has never really figured out the Internet acquiring a brand whose best days seem far in the past (the Internet past, that is). What would Yahoo have that Microsoft would want: antiquated search, a lot of e-mail accounts? They may be profitable, but their valuation seemed a little low for the price Microsoft was willing to pay.

So I will defer to Greg Glockner at Dwaffler for his explanation (in the post Microsoft: Crazy like a fox). You can read his reasoning for yourself, it seems quite sound to me, both in the reason for the acquisition (quick summary: keyword-based advertising patents) and the possible implications in the future. Good read.

Freedom has its limits

About a month ago, I posted on the in vogue theory that we're moving to a free model for, well, everything. This has been pushed by Chris Anderson of Wired, but others have also weighed in with their belief that bandwidth and storage and software are moving to a free model, where value-added activities provide revenue. I expressed doubt about this, that Google mail space is not actually part of a market, but something subsidized by other activities. The new theory is akin to saying that cereal boxes are moving to a zero-cost model, since you're only paying for the cereal inside.

For more evidence of this, consider the web site griddlers.net. Griddlers are puzzles, also known as Tsunami, Paint by Numbers, or Nonograms, in which a grid is surrounded by numbers that are used to deduce which squares in the grid should be filled. It's pretty interesting, somewhat mathematical, certainly more intriguing than Sudoku. I have delved into these somewhat, being an inveterate puzzler, and they're pretty addictive. And the best web site I've seen is the aforementioned griddlers.net (I'll call it gnet from here for convenience), which is extremely well programmed.

gnet has been free during its five or six years of existence, never using ads to generate revenues (other than some mentions of their own griddler products). A while ago, they created a new application, and, rather than offering it free, they decided to move to a subscription model:

Our goal is for Griddlers to continue to be the highest quality site of its kind. We have been thrilled by your response. It has remained free, because we want to share this enjoyment with everyone. But, all of this success comes at a cost.

The increased use puts a very heavy load on our server. If we want a site that performs well and can continue to grow and improve, we need to upgrade soon and this will be expensive.

Even though all the puzzles on our site are free, after considering many options we decided to make the New Applet availabe uniquely to subscribers. If you want to use it fully, you’ll need to become a subscriber.

All Griddler-lovers will be welcome on the site whether you subscribe or not. Most of the features you currently enjoy will still be available. New features will be created especially for our Subscribers.

To reiterate what they said above, the existing functionality was still available to non-subscribers (except they did sharply reduce the number of puzzles a free user could save). But it was pretty obvious that innovation was going to be slanted toward subscribers. A subscription is not particularly onerous, $40 a year, but it was still a dramatic change to the model.

About a week ago, they made another change: the selection filter to omit puzzles that have already been solved was taken away from non-subscribers. For people who have done a lot of puzzles, this is a major change, as now they have to search through every puzzle in a category to find one they haven't done yet. The explanation:

During rush hours you can see 1300-1400 people online. They try to find their solved puzzles amongst 50,000,000 records and select their type of puzzles from dozens of thousands of records. By all means it is a huge task.

Our resources are limited. As much as we try to upgrade the site, the speed of growth is faster then us. Note, that all the work on the site has been done voluntarily. However, maintaining and hosting a large site like ours cost money. Making a subscription is actually giving life to the site.

What is interesting here is how this bucks the so-called trend. This site has been free, then features were added that are available only to subscribers, now functionality is being removed. And this is why the "free" model is unsustainable - everyone has to agree that everything is free before any one thing can be. If gnet were receiving free server space, they might not have to make the changes.

One wonders how this site started. Did the founders start it as a hobby, then found it got away from them? Perhaps the initial development was interesting enough to do for free; now that the tasks are largely maintenance, they'd like to be compensated.

I don't find anything wrong with the model they're adopting. They're still providing some service to those who won't or can't pay, but one does wonder how much functionality they can remove from the free version before their customers become dissatisfied (actually, from the comments that were left about this change, some people are already planning to walk away, though I would think it will be a small number).

But this is the same model as, for example, we're seeing now in Chicago about telecasts of Cubs baseball games. The team used to offer 144 games a year (out of 162) for free on broadcast television. Now the number's down to 60, with the rest offered on cable, and the 15% or so who don't have cable are out of luck.

It's dangerous to take a couple of examples and assume they represent a trend, but it is also risky to assume that "everything will be free." I'm sure griddlers.net could adopt an ad-driven model, but, for some reason, they haven't. My guess is that modern technology will actually permit different kinds of models, that some sites will insist on subscriptions for full functionality, others will become free (with copious ads or attempts to sell added value), some may go to transaction-based pricing.

But the attempts of some big thinkers to get us to accommodate ourselves to an inevitable "free" model may well reflect their desire to be in on the next big thing far more than a realistic appraisal of where we actually are going.

Click me, choose me

I wrote a post earlier today in which I continued a discussion on how disappointing (to some people) the progress on the Internet has been, how it's failed to solve big problems, how innovation seems to have been lost.

Maybe part of the reason is that we have used the Internet in ways like this. Here is an article on the 30 fastest declining occupations. Instead of writing them in an old, Web 1.0 list, the Boston Globe thought it would be more fun to put them in a gallery, so that each one could have its own page and a picture (check out the picture of wood, or the one with file folders).

Is anyone really going to click through all 34 pages to see every one of these? Having gotten all the way to page 33, are you then going to check out the fastest-growing jobs, another 33-page gallery? (This one features a guy listening to headphones to illustrate computer software engineers.)

And, just to pick on the Boston Globe a little more, here is something even more pointless: a gallery of 25 pages in which the reader is asked to participate in a click poll to determine, yes, which celebrity of a presented pair is taller. You can decide whether Ashlee Simpson or her sister is taller, or Sean Connery vs. Pierce Brosnan. (I'm surprised there isn't a legal disclaimer pointing out that your vote will not actually change the height of any celebrity.)

This is how we use this remarkable technology, for faux-interactive galleries and polls. Coming tomorrow to the Boston Globe: Which number is larger? Which country name has more occurrences of the letter 'e'? Whose tattoo is that? (Oops, they've already done the last one.)

Are you sure it's not suckitude?

From Why does everything suck?, a trenchant post titled Too Much Suckage, in which Hank Williams discusses how disappointing the Web is, in that it is not producing anything truly useful:

Are we all so devoid of creativity and insight that the best we can come up with is some new mashup on some old mashup all mashed up?

The answer is almost certainly yes.

Williams links to three interesting posts, one notes of a talk given by Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo, another by Paul Graham that essentially calls out the venture capital (VC) companies for not finding the next Google, and the last by Umair Haque that calls out pretty much everybody, in an impassioned call to action (which he parochially restricts to Silicon Valley).

Haque's is the one most on topic, if the topic is the basic uselessness of most of the innovation we're seeing today. He feels that the "radical innovators," whether they be VC firms or technical wizards, aren't doing enough:

There are huge shocks rolling across the global economic landscape. Here are just a few. Food prices are skyrocketing. The financial system is melting down. Energy, of course, is more and more toxic, and costly. We are all, make no mistake, dancing on the precipice of economic cataclysm.

It is the obligation of radical innovators to create new value by solving these problems - or cede capital and resources to those who can.

But today's revolutionaries are sheep in wolves' clothing. They're lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they're cutting deals with one another to...try and sell more ads. That is, when they're not too busy partying.

I have no doubt that these people have a point. I certainly get the feeling that most of what I see is derivative; everyone is adding social networking to their websites, because, of course, I want to bond with every other person who checks on Cubs scores.

But I think that these people are asking too much from the Internet, especially as it's been rolled into the fervor over the so-called Web 2.0. I'm not precisely sure what that is, but no one else is either; the definition seems to be coalescing into the user interactive aspect of the Internet.

And most of that is junk. Look, I write a blog, so obviously I feel there's some value in doing so. I like reading other people's blogs. But, if they all went away tomorrow, I'd survive. The ability to leave comments on, for example, newspaper stories has less value still. I admit it's kind of neat to get some feedback from a columnist I've enjoyed reading, but it's not so neat, obviously, that I'd pay anything for it. Slapping a comment section on everything may seem cool, building new communities and all, but the general level of comments makes it far more of an ordeal than providing an opportunity to interact with fellow thinkers.

I love the idea that economic cataclysm is going to be solved by using the Internet; it sounds very neat and clean and cool, but it's highly unlikely. Economics comes out of real activities, real added value, not out of a virtual mental frame. There's a reason that buzz-worthy Second Life hasn't made any money, there's no there there. Nothing has received more press than MySpace/Facebook (they're pretty much the same thing), but there is no clear context for generating revenue. Even such a "success" as YouTube is not as much a success as the average bicycle shop, if you measure success by feeding one's family.

We've been told time and again that the Internet has brought us a revolution, but let's get serious. Where's the revolution? It's been used mostly as another marketing channel by people with things to sell. There's a lot of boring chitchat about potential Lost spoilers, or people's uninformed opinions about the Dancing with the Stars results.

It undoubtedly has made some things more convenient, but I don't think we've even reached the point yet at which the sudden disappearance of the Internet would be catastrophic. It may become that central someday, but I don't believe it's close to that now.

The closest analogy to the Internet is television. When television came to the living room, it was heralded as a great boon to education, a way of exposing Americans to politics and making them better citizens, an extension of human minds.

What have we actually received from television? Maybe a little of that here and there, but, mostly, it's a pure entertainment medium. You can tell that when you see the priorities of the broadcast networks - how much convention coverage will there be this summer? After all, you can't expect the selection of our leader to take precedence over another episode of Deal or No Deal.

And the Internet is heading the same way. It can be used for shopping, for watching television or movies, for having "conversations" that would bore you in a tavern. But that's a far cry from solving global famine, or the energy crisis, and I think we're very, very far away from the point where it can even begin to help with those problems. The people above who are disappointed with the failure of the Internet to wave its magic wand are asking an awful lot of it.