Sowing Light

Just came across a link to a TED talk by Eli Pariser in support of his new book - The Filter Bubble.

From watching the video, the argument is interesting.  In short, he claims that the big gateway sites - Google, Facebook, etc. are increasingly using algorithms to tailor information to their viewers, only showing them what they want to see and ‘hiding’ from them all other information, be it boring or unpleasant or disquieting or what-have-you.  Ultimately, he claims, this threatens the dream of the Internet as the great connector.  These algorithms, he claims, are in the same seat as the Newspaper editors of the 20’s, and need to be programmed to include the lessons learned from those times - editorial balance, etc.

From this short presentation, though, it looks to me like he does a lot of his own filtering of facts in order to set up this equivalence between the newspaper editors of the ’20s and the algorithms of today.  The biggest difference is that in the 20s, most people saw exactly 1 newspaper, and that’s how they got their picture of the world.  On the web, you choose your sources of info.  Most people have many, and everyone can have as many as they like.

The Internet is an information marketplace and a filter marketplace.  There are any number of different kinds of filters - each person decides which ones they use, and the market as a whole decides which ones become popular.  Moreover - even the big ‘fitlerers’ that he fingers - Google and Facebook - don’t block out any information.  You want to see what your conservative friends are up to?  Click on their pages.  Facebook’s response?  It’ll show you more about them.  Want to learn about any topic at all in Google?  Search for it.  Nothing’s hidden.

The argument here boils down to a claim that lazy people who aren’t interested should be given a default mix that has broader boundaries.  Yet, there’s no reason to claim that once a particular website / filter / presentation of information becomes popular it suddenly has to change it’s magic-mix that made it popular in order to make sure people get a a balanced picture.  If people want a balanced picture there is no barrier to them getting it, besides habit.  Why does any particular website have to be paternalistic about what info it shows its users?  “They want Justin Beiber, but we’ll give them Greek Philosophy.”  It’s silly.

Should a website make it’s filter explicit and adjustable?  If people want it, then there will be websites that do.  All the rules of open markets apply.

Social Media, The Developing Future

Pretty much every time I read Seth Godin, I get a good reminder to step outside of my narrow thinking and look broader.  It happened this time as well, but there’s one point I need to take issue with in his post on Senior Management.

It’s the Steve Jobs assessment that doesn’t sit well with me. You just don’t grab dominant market share in areas where you didn’t even have a footprint without having a deep understanding of how the market currently works.  It’s also misleading to claim the Apple has no significant online or social media presence.  iTunes doesn’t obey the rules of the open web, but it is certainly both an online and social destination.  By any metric you’d like to use, it’s one of the top destinations of the Internet.

Organizational Dynamics, Social Media Apple, SethGodin, SteveJobs

My spider sense tells me that we’re looking at Web 3.0 on this one - the next big step up - and what could very well be a serious crimp in Facebook’s style. It’s a communication and collaboration platform. It’s open. It’s got an API. It’s open to community development. It’s got Google momentum and mass exposure to make it happen.

It’s email, it’s live chat, it’s a wiki, it drags and drops files from the desktop, it embeds itself everywhere. Garden walls comes down. And it’s open - it’s just the beginning. Think whiteboard, think document collaboration, think task tracking, think project management, think collective web browsing. Zing!

You can see a demo and dig deeper at the Google Wave Site. Mashable gives you a distillation.

My wheels are just starting to turn on this one…sensing big potential…bubble, bubble.

Social Media, The Developing Future

My brain balks at fully understanding Twitter. I feel as if I can understand other media - newsprint, TV, Wiki, whatever. Twitter feels to me as if it’s half born - as if we haven’t yet seen what this baby is going to do.

In essence, it’s the pure social network - no frills, hobbies, books I’ve read, pokes, movie reviews. It’s just nodes, directed connections, and the ability to pass messages along those connections.

The power is multiplied when combined with URLs. Nodes, directed connections, and the ability to pass ANYTHING along those connections.

We’ve spoken for decades about electronic communication becoming the nervous system of the planet. This baby is laying it bare and bringing it out to the edges.

Organizational Dynamics, Social Media, The Developing Future twitter

Massive messaging markets (3M?) are changing the game in news reporting. The generation of news is already a distributed and complex interweaving of parsed and recombined news streams - we can expect that to only grow and take on new forms. It will be staccato and rapid fire.

Living in what is arguably the most focused-on city in the world, I am well acquainted with how even reputable news outlets routinely slant their stories.  With tens of millions of news providers, all of whom adjust and filter what they report consciously or sub-consciously, how will we judge what is true?  How do we judge truth in the Twitter age?

Instinctively, we judge the reality of a message by how distributed and consistent the corroboration is from multiple sources.  This already is, and will continue to be, gamed by groups with targeted agendas.  Any group with a semblance of organization is busy flooding relevant forums with their message.

When the same message comes from varied quarters - people from many different backgrounds - it starts to earn believability.  But this too can be gamed. 

‘Witnessing’ has a certain power and weight - one who claims to have seen an event with their own eyes.  Yet, the claim is easy, how do I know it’s true?

A rare, but convincing, argument for the truth of a story is when it is propagated by someone with an explicitly contrary agenda - a story which is injurious to the teller. To even come to this evaluation, though, I need to be acquainted with the teller’s true leanings.

Social Media Truth, twitter

These are Marshall McLuhan’s words (circa 1955) about the impact of electronic media on the human psyche and society.  Substitute ‘twitter’ for ‘teeter’ and virtually anything for Eisenhower and you have a compelling picture of the present age. Information moving instantaneously to all parts of the globe, he writes, is explosive. 

We can, and do, have world events pouring through us like electricity.  I can easily become a twitching, twittering nerve cell in a massive identity-robbing global network.

What are the emotional impacts of this for the individual?

Do we have a moral obligation to be present to all of this information - to feel it?

How can I live if I do not put up walls or selectively empathize?

Who do I become if I do put up walls and selectively empathize?

Poltics Unusual, Smart Folks, Social Media, The Developing Future McLuhan, twitter

This is the third in a series.  Part 1 covered the basics of the Semantic Web vision. Part 2 gave a brief overview of 3 problems in the way - all of them of a technical nature.  This post looks at a problem that is not just technical - Trust.

When it comes to computer agents answering questions for me, trust is an essential problem, not a technical one.  Whenever I ask a question and get an answer, I’m outsourcing trust.  I’m believing in the answer and in the source of that answer.  If I’m asking a computer, I’m trusting the computer and the results that it will return.

What’s Good to Eat Around Here?
If I’m asking a simple question like “where’s the nearest stop for the 17 bus”, there’s not much room for mistrust, but if the question is any more complex, trust becomes a serious issue.  Let’s say I’m asking the question - “Where is the nearest place I can get a good sandwich at a decent price?”  Of course there are issues of ontology, markup, and reasoning involved here (What’s qualifies as a sandwich?  Am I talking about food or construction supplies?  How does one determine ‘decent price’?  How does one define ‘nearest’?)  But let’s look at the one word which begs the trust question - good.

Nowadays, to find out if a restaurant has a good sandwich, I can hit a whole bunch of websites looking for reviews.  For each piece of information I see, I make a judgment about whether to trust that piece of information.  I’ll use all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle clues to decide to trust or not.  I look at what site it’s on, what else the person there has posted, how they express themselves, whether it’s balanced, whether it uses criterion I value - ultimately, there’s an element of intuition to it.  When I ask my computer the question and the computer comes back with an answer, the decisions of trust are left to the computer. 

Is there a Doctor Nearby?
The word “good” begs the trust question directly, but the question comes up even in less opinion-oriented questions.   The computer’s entire concept of reality is taught to it by people.  Who do you trust to teach your computer about what exists?  To teach it what is consequential and what is not, what is worthy of mention and what is not, what is part of reality and what is not?    

Let’s keep it simple.  If I own a restaurant that serves wraps, and I know that most of the world searches for “sandwiches”, not “wraps”.  I’ll publish an ontology that says “A wrap is a sandwich (a really valuable sandwich)”. My competitor down the street, a standard deli, will publish an ontology that says “Wraps aren’t sandwiches, people looking for sandwiches don’t want wraps, and wraps aren’t worth anything.”  Which one does the computer trust?  Similar questions will come up in all domains - politics, economics, news, medicine, nutrition, etc.

If businesses know that I am searching through semantic agents, they’ll do everything they can to optimize their business to be discovered by semantic agents.  This includes, of course, declaring themselves as fit in as many ways as they possibly can. With computer agents returning information, we can expect this to be standard practice by any business looking to attract customers.

As soon as we farm off our question answering to an outside agent, we can’t avoid this problem.  The definitions of everything will still be up for great debate - only we will have abdicated our right to answer the question and entrusted it to our computers. 

Who do you Trust?
There may be a first light of a solution to this question in the social network. The social network provides an explicit declaration of who I trust.  The computer can tell me “You can believe this review, because someone you trust (or someone who they trust) posted it.” 

The current networks are far too limited to cover the broad range of issues that will come up.  I may be interested in something that none of my friends know anything about.  To broaden the footprint of trust, we may see the formation of societies of mutual trust.  They will collectively form a vision of reality and self police to insure the lack of misleading information.  There would have to be many of these, as my conception of reality may not jive with yours.  The same question will have different answers depending on the differing underlying assumptions and network of trust.

In Summary
So that’s a capsule of my thoughts on the Semantic Web.  We’re making slow progress on each of these questions, but the questions are big and the progress is incremental.  The “Semantic Web” is growing organically - don’t buy it when the next start-up tells you they are delivering it to your door.  

Social Media, The Developing Future Semantic Web

A good friend of mine works as a social media editor.  We periodically get together for long lunches where the free wheeling conversation hits all the topics of note in the current communication scene.  I was surprised today when he brought up the question of the Semantic Web.  After a half-decade stint in the business of semantic technologies, I’ve basically written off the Semantic Web.  After ten years of failed promise, I’m always a bit surprised to hear another rumor of it’s pending existence.

In short - the Semantic Web promises to turn all of the text found on the web into machine readable facts, and to provide programs that can use those facts to answer questions for you.  So, for example, a restaurant website may say “We’re located at 518 Chestnut Street, have a wide variety of sandwiches, and are open on Saturday.”  The website may give a full menu, driving directions, a list of daily specials, etc.  To a computer this looks like just a bunch of text - blah blah blah blah.  A semantically marked up document would put a formal representation of this information in place along with the text.  Very loosely speaking, it would look something like this:

<Organization type=”Restaurant” name=”Bob’s Restaurant” id=”1″/><isLocatedAt/><Address text=”518 Chestnut Street”/>

<Organization id=”1″/><sellsGoods/><Food type=”sandwiches”/>

<Organization id=”1″/><isOpen/><recurringDay=”7″/>

Once beautiful documents like this are in place, you can ask your computer a question like “Where can I get a sandwich on Saturday”, and the computer would come back with my restaurant.  You could even give your computer quite complex tasks and have it come back with good answers -  “I have to pick up toothpaste, a watermelon, and a large camelhair coat, meet with the mayor, my fiancee, and my lawyer, and I want to get a good sandwich around lunchtime.  Please plan out a course of travel and schedule that takes into account expected traffic and the hours of the shops I have to visit. Also, let me know if I’m passing any place that’s having a going-out-of-business sale.”  The computer would hit tens of websites, communicate with other agents, and put together the schedule and information for you.

That’s the dream.  None less than Tim Berners Lee, the father of the web, has been championing this for years.  The seminal article on the topic was published in 2001.

There are a few major roadblocks.  Teaching computers about common sense is hard - that’s the ontology problem.  Creating those beatiful documents above is hard - that’s the markup problem.  Teaching computers to reason through all those facts is hard - that’s the reasoning problem.  The one I’d like to really focus on, though, is the trust problem.  I’ll post on that one in the coming days.

Social Media, The Developing Future Semantic Web

There’s been a firestorm of late about the amount of repetitive stories on RSS, particularly in the technical blogs. Michael Arrington declared open war on embargoes, which touched off an insightful article from Louis Gray. (Thanks to this article from Smoothspan for sending me over.)

Louis writes:

While I look forward to banging through my Google Reader feeds every day, I can pretty much bank on seeing the same story, spun a different way, a good dozen or two dozen times by every single tech blog - even if it’s clear that they are just reporting that someone else reported the news. If you see a story has been covered already and you have nothing to add - leave it alone.

What is most interesting to me here is the personal and societal. We’re the guinea pigs in a new media reality. I would really love to hear a voice as incisive as Marshall McLuhan’s to help me understand what that is doing to my brain. We have here a media that can be treated either as hot or as cold. It is neither entirely overwhelming or intensively participatory. Neither is is somewhere in between - it’s something other than the media we’ve seen up until now. Its character is entirely dependent on the reader.

This media calls to the forefront each person’s ability to choose, and it’s likely for this reason that it’s becoming the arena for a brilliant hashing out of interpersonal ethics - When do I speak and when am I silent? What obligations do I have to the people who listen to me? What obligations do I have to myself when I participate in this? How much responsibility do I bear for the overall state of the media?

Still cooking these ideas…any insight welcome.

Social Media, The Developing Future McLuhan, RSS

Alex Margolin sourced me in his article on social media that appeared in last Friday’s Jerusalem Post. In the article I say brilliant things like:

“What Facebook and other tools that use similar principles are doing is implementing word-of-mouth marketing on a large scale, and word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective form of marketing because it uses trusted connections, those connections that actually cause people to do things.”

Social Media