Edward C. Zimmermann's blog

Google is broken and all the King's horses and all the King's men...

Edward C. Zimmermann — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:00:32 +0100

Google search (and not just Google's) have more and more become less about quest (finding something one does not know) or inquiry but trend watching. The Web is more and more invisible and replaced by metrics of popularism and politics of a volksempfanger.

Searching for the phrase (pulled from a current news article)
kebab and pie kiosk
(no quotes or + etc. so the query runs as it was typed)

the query went to:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=l0a&num=100&q=kebab+and+pie+kiosk&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

And the top slots are all flooded with BBC and blogs:

#
'Body sold' to Russia kebab shop - Dark Lord Potter Forums
6 posts - 6 authors - Last post: 25 minutes ago
Part of it was eaten and part was also sold to a kebab and pie kiosk," their
statement said. It was not immediately clear if any customers had been served. ...
forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?p=331481 - 25 minutes ago -
#
BBC NEWS | Europe | 'Body sold' to Russia kebab shop
14 Nov 2009 ... Part of it was eaten and part was also sold to a kebab and pie
kiosk," their statement said. It was not immediately clear if any customers ...
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8360569.stm - 16 hours ago -
#
Bigredkev: Murdered Dead Mans Body Sold To Russia Kebab Shop and ...
- 12:29am
Part of it was eaten and part was also sold to a kebab and pie kiosk," their
statement said. It is not yet clear if any customers have been served the body ...
www.bigredkev.com/.../police-in-russia-have-arrested-three.html - 8 hours ago -

Semantics are clear.. Anyone looking for info on kebab and pie kiosks should
quickly loose their appetite for kebab/doner/shawarma.

But also
pie kiosk

They too are not doing well:

Bigredkev: Murdered Dead Mans Body Sold To Russia Kebab Shop and ...
- 12:29am
Part of it was eaten and part was also sold to a kebab and pie kiosk," their
statement said. It is not yet clear if any customers have been served the body ...
www.bigredkev.com/.../police-in-russia-have-arrested-three.html - 8 hours ago -

is in the second slot..

Not even the single term kebab fares well:

With 2 BBC stories sharing the second hit slot:

'Body sold' to Russia kebab shop 14 Nov 2009 ... Police in Russia hold three men suspected of killing a man, eating part of the body and selling other part to a kebab shop.
How unhealthy is a doner kebab? 21 Jan 2009 ... The doner is a post-pub favourite - grease and salt being the main food groups craved by the squiffy. Yet it also offers protein, ...

The "feature" to blend in (using something equivalent to our Newsrank) the top news and blog stories into the top hits (real time blah blah search
I think they called it to counter BING blongs) creates even more information blindness. Search becomes really nothing more than a trend instrument..

Compare now to BING:

kebab and pie kiosk

http://www.bing.com/search?q=kebab+and+pie+kiosk&go=&form=QBLH&filt=all

all biased to tech blog/slog sites

Yahoo? Looks like Google

http://de.search.yahoo.com/search?p=kebab+pie+kiosk&fr=yfp-t-501&ei=UTF-8&rd=r1

How Google directly charges for inclusion: PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising and ranking.

Edward C. Zimmermann — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:36:58 +0200

PPC schemes (such as Google Adwords) do build link popularity and are counted in the so-called "organic" Google index. Its counted in two ways:

Google is crawling JavaScript links on Web sites. These outbound links are, it seems, handled by Google just like any other outbound link. Google's Ad-Words uses JavaScript for links.
In the cached pages: The Google robot does store pages with their own PPC ad-campaigns on them. The outbound ad links at the moment of being gathered are used by Google in their link analysis. The in-bound text in the advertisement which produced the ad with the link on a page will, in turn, effect the ranking of the link. The selection of costly words (and inclusion on highly ranked sites) will drive (and this can be shown) up ranking and visibility.

Intentional?
See: "Are PPC Ads Now Counting in Google Organic Backlinks?" (SearchEngineWatch.com)

The social tagging game: tail wagging dog.

Edward C. Zimmermann — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:30:25 +0200

A critique of social tagging and Web 2.0 semiology

These days there is hardly a "Web 2.0" application that does not feature "tags" and does not display (somewhere) a variation of "tag cloud" visualizations.

"It is a saying among Divines, that Hell is full of good Intentions, and Meanings.
— R. Whitlock (1654)

Social tagging sets out to recast the whole "problem" of information discovery, search and retrieval into visibility driven not by relevance (whatever that may mean) but social network. Social tagging is not just a special form of meta-information but a strategic game. On the one hand it claims to allow a complete and fully conscious unstructured "cooperative" means to attach well intentioned extra-corporal meaning and their implicit social interconnections to information (including also non-textual multimedia objects) but its also in many ways a voting system. Those that tag by using common words set out to influence its visibility and potential influence. This is not a product of some systematic disruptive behavior— and I'll exclude for now a consideration of spamming or other exploits (which are not necessarily part of the system)— or aboration but precisely the function of tags: associating the commonality of the use of tags with a relevance of those objects so tagged. The rest are disassociated and effectively excluded. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public to see less of the whole and be driven to a few more concentrated contributions chosen by "public opinion". What remains and discovered via the sphere of tags is de-contextualized and re-purposed.

What are tags?

Keywords/descriptors to describe (digital) objects
Applied by users of the content
Keyword or category label used as a index to find something
Freely chosen (key)words used instead of controlled vocabulary.
Created by users and not (information or library) professionals
They are de rigueur for Web 2.0

An "uncooperative" game of visibility versus honesty.

The set of tags builds what is commonly called a Folksonomy. It represents a kind of social network connecting objects via their common tags. These tags or words, however, don't mean the same thing to everyone nor do people intend them to have common meaning. Words derive their commonality in meaning from those that associate with one another. In the social-tagging game people use common words to associate with one another rather than associate with one another and then choose a common vocabulary. Lacking an apriori social context there is no means to communicate shared background information and thus expect common semantics to emerge. What emerges is a social network about personal visibility rather than meaning.

Self-interest in social tagging means that people will tend to select terms not because they necessarily think that they are the most appropriate to describe something but words (tags) that increase their social standing or visibility. Choosing a popular tag, for example, will immediately bring one into the "club" of all those who also use the same popular tag. The larger the "club" the larger also its representation in tag clouds and thus the more visible they become. Should this "cloud" be very large, however, one is again lost in the sea. A strategy would be to select the least popular tag among those tags with the highest visibility: a small fish in a smaller pond. To support this strategy (willingly or not) most tagging systems happily provide visualizations of the most popular tags.

Collections of social tags: Folksonomy or Folksodomy?

Taxonomy (from Greek taxis meaning arrangement or division and nomos meaning law) is the science of classification according to a pre-determined system. Folksonomy (Folk from Germanic) means "the law of the people" or, in this context, more precisely a voice or words, sans context, of the people: "Vox populi“. This will to participate attests more to the will to belong to a social network and increase the visibility of the tagged object (not much unlike the concept of "friends" in some of the "people 2.0 networks") than the urge to voice an opinion. The content is almost irrelevant. A tag spread over a collection of objects is not a shared voice expressing the "belief" or "want" that the word describes how they feel about something but the collectiveness of those that express the tag. Meaning and communication is estranged to the fringes and replaced with a false feeling of belonging. One speaks to belong rather than to say something. Words lose their power to create a focus and are replaced by membership.

The consequences for Society 2.0

By eroding the significance of the word and shifting significance to membership, visibility by "vote" and consensus by mob (Wikipedia) the role of the word and clout of the intellectual falls. While the Internet and Web 2.0 technology might have laid a claim to a democratization of information it has concentrated information not only more in the hands of a few, reduced the diversity of voices and increased the barriers to be be heard [see also: Ten years ago (information still stranded on a deserted island) ]. Ultimately the separation between individual and society inherited from the Enlightenment is being eroded and cast off and with it the logocentricity of human thought and, perhaps eventually, the fundamental perception of autonomy and freedom of the individual. Folksonomy and "Wikipedia" may claim economic reasons for their adoption but these costs to the "public sphere" are high. Aberations such as "Cash for comments", "instant message ads" and even "tag spams" are just parasites on the body of its festering corpse.

In Progress......

ExoDus Presentation. Opens 25 July 2008. ISEA 2008. National Museum of Singapore.

Edward C. Zimmermann — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:32:41 +0200

ExoDus Challenge

I long (very long) hesitated about developing concepts for general search. Lets face it the static Web page paradigm that underlies the models of most engines has been more or less obsolete for years and the kind of search, it seems, demanded ("Give me something about") was more than questionable but I'm also no longer certain that these are the constraints but rather the "ist" state. People are increasingly, as they get more savvy of Internet sociology, less satisfied with the Volksempfänger offered by Google and Co. Exodus sets to re-cast the the whole "problem" as one of information discovery, search and retrieval of information dialogs rather than specific documents. Exodus does not set out to "re-draw" the borders of Internet page visibility but recast them as obsolete.

The imperative

The internet makes censorship really work since it can become transparent as air. No need to burn books when there are none. All you have to do is see to it that the books are invisible. While technically, unless it blocked explicitly (and in many parts of the world technology is coming into place to block content while in other countries just being caught with the intent to post content that has not "approved" one can and will land in prison or worse), technically something might be accessible BUT if one does not know where it is--- if its not visible--- it does not exist. This is Internet Metaphysics 2008 (and has been the case for some years now) and part of the Raison d'être of ExoDus: Changing the visibility.

Post-1984 its not not: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever." but Prozac.

The optimistic view of the Internet follows a naive consideration of Mander's thesis on television and power. Back in the late 1960s/early 1970s there was that romantic vision of guerilla media through technology. This was born in the belief that bringing technology into other people's hands breaks down the ownership of media. Mander's view was that the control of TV was implicitly defined by its restricted channel space and costly technology. In the Internet, by contrast, nearly anyone can "broadcast" and theoretically be heard. The original optimism of many to the Internet was that one is finally liberated from the control of few towards a seemingly endless number of channels. That's why I wrote in the early 1990s in Focus (a major German news weekly similar to U.S. News) that the central glue of the future internet is search and retrieval. The new controllers, so the view of the Internet optimists, are the masses and not the TV bosses. This has shown itself not to be true. Media power is more concentrated today than even during the "golden eras" of radio or TV. There used to be laws in the US to restrict media control. A TV station in a city meant that you could not own a newspaper. Today? And its no longer networks built by a system of associates but ownership. And behind the new names are hidden incestious cross-ownerships.. hyping their own funded ventures and selling them in trade for stock amongst others in their own stalls to assure the market of the airs of "innovation" and "growth" as long as the card house stays tall.

Mainstream services such as Google, Microsoft Live or Yahoo can but only deploy this strategy since their financial models of advertising are built among a model of exclusion and "the will through payments" to become included. Any conscious differences between the historical "pay to be listed" model of Yahoo, AltaVista's model of "pay for higher ranking" or the "ad-words" model of Google is technology, smoke and mirrors.

Visibility

What you see of the Internet is from where you are standing. Its like looking at Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry. You see the skyline from the perspective of where you are standing. Current search engines force everyone to stand in the same place.

"Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web"

New Paradigm

We have a new, remarkably powerful yet simple, model. I've called it "semantic revelation".

The basic idea is that clusters of associations define their own implicit semantics for terms.

Folksonomies (the current fashion of social tagging) assume everyone is speaking the same language with the same shared background. They don't. Everything is NOT Miscellaneous (as David Weinberger suggests).

Words derive their commonality in meaning from those that associate with one another. We don't know what the words mean but might assume that if people are talking to one another that they have shared semantics. That's the basics of normative communication.

John Searle introduced the notion of an 'indirect speech act' as a kind of indirect 'illocutionary' act: "In indirect speech acts the speaker communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general powers of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer."

Our model goes backwards.. It first asks.. "Who is talking to each other". And "who do I want to talk with". Its guilt by association.

The point is: We don't care what a word or sentence means. We just "assume" that when people talk they understand, more or less, each other but neither is everyone talking with each another nor do they even want to..

When there is no dialogue between listeners, the same words and phrases as spoken by a speaker can mean different things.

Search is also searching for dialogue. Its all, of course, not de-coupled from ranking..

See also: the collaborative works on Multipolar Search: EXODVS

Google Gag?

Edward C. Zimmermann — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:19:12 +0200

The "public rights" group Privacy International has rated Google as "hostile" to privacy in a report ranking web firms by how they handle personal data. The response from Google? Smear campaign, disinformation and more abuse of their market power..

http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-553961

EXCERPT:

Why Google?

We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google's approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations. While a number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy. This is in part due to the diversity and specificity of Google's product range and the ability of the company to share extracted data between these tools, and in part it is due to Google's market dominance and the sheer size of its user base. Google's status in the ranking is also due to its aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies and techniques.

The view that Google "opens up" information through a range of attractive and advanced tools does not exempt the company from demonstrating responsible leadership in privacy. Google's increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user's life and lifestyle choices must in our view be coupled with well defined and mature user controls and an equally mature privacy outlook. Neither of these elements has been demonstrated. Rather, we have witnessed an attitude to privacy within Google that at its most blatant is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent. These dynamics do not pervade other major players such as Microsoft or eBay, both of which have made notable improvements to the corporate ethos on privacy issues.

http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-553960

Google accused of conducting smear campaign against Privacy International

09/06/2007

As Privacy International prepares to publish the first privacy ranking of major Internet companies, Google has embarked on a smear campaign within the media to discredit both PI and the report. The report ranks the privacy performance of the top Internet service companies. Privacy International will then publish a detailed open letter to Google and a demand for an apology.

More soon...

http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-553964

June 10, 2007

Eric Schmidt,

CEO, Google Inc. 

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway 

Mountain View, CA 94043

USA

Dear Mr. Schmidt,

You may be aware that Privacy International yesterday published its first privacy ranking of leading companies operating on the Internet. Google Inc performed very poorly, scoring lowest among the other major companies that we surveyed.

I am writing to express my concern not just at this unfortunate result, but also at communications between Google Inc and members of the media during the period immediately prior to publication of our report. Two European journalists have independently told us that Google representatives have contacted them with the claim that "Privacy International has a conflict of interest regarding Microsoft". I presume this was motivated because Microsoft scored an overall better result than Google in the rankings.

Let me state here on the record that in the seventeen years of our existence, no company has ever made such a claim. Privacy International is a fiercely independent organization that has never shown fear nor favour. Again for the record, we have been fierce and relentless critics of Microsoft since our inception as a watchdog. You will see for example we that publicly supported the EU Commission investigation into Microsoft, that we nominated Microsoft for the US Big Brother Award in 2003, that we awarded Microsoft the "Worst Corporate Invader" award at the 1999 US Big Brother Awards, that we publicly accused Microsoft of subverting its software security , that we co-authored a critical submission to the US Federal Trade Commission against Microsoft, and that in 2001 we filed a joint complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission against Microsoft, alleging unfair and deceptive trade practices.

According to our sources, your representative or representatives made particular reference to one member of our 70-member international Advisory Board. This man is a current employee of Microsoft. I can confirm that he joined our Advisory Board well before he was headhunted by Microsoft. At the time he was the director of a leading UK non-governmental organization and had more than six years extensive involvement in the work of Privacy International. He is a decent, skilled and honorable man who upon his appointment with Microsoft offered us his resignation. We refused to accept it, and he continues to serve on the Board in a private capacity. As an exceptionally skilled IT and security expert he is a superb resource in our day-to-day work across many fields of privacy. To infer that he in any way influences our decisions with regard to Microsoft is not just inaccurate but it is also insulting.

Privacy International is and has always fought hard for its independence, often to our own great expense. With the very rare exception of expenses sponsorship for important public events we receive no corporate money, and certainly at no point have we received any from Microsoft.

Can I be so bold as to suggest that your company's actions stem from sour grapes that you achieved the lowest ranking amongst the Internet giants? We have no specific axe to grind with Google. It is one of many companies demonstrating a poor privacy performance, and in assessing that performance we are acting solely with the intention of raising public awareness. And while it is true that we have in the past taken legal action against Google's Gmail service, it is equally the case that we have campaigned against Amazon and eBay, both of which, regardless of this history, scored higher than Google in the rankings.

So do we have a vested interest in attacking Google? No. Some of the people we work with have Microsoft connections, but we work with many thousands of people as partners, collaborators and managers. One of our trustees, for example, works for a law firm that has Microsoft as one of its many clients. We agreed with this person that a legal document should be drawn up expressly fire-walling his professional from his private involvement with Privacy International. We socialise with Microsoft employees, but then again we socialise with employees of the UK Home Office, which in a recent celebrated chapter attempted to destroy our reputation following critical work on the UK ID card proposals. We are happy to reach out to anyone, regardless of their affiliation.

I believe an apology from you is in order, but if you cannot deliver this then I think you should reflect carefully on the actions of your representatives before embarking on what I believe amounts to a smear campaign. As with Microsoft, eBay and any other organization we are more than happy to work with you to help resolve the many privacy challenges for Google that our report has highlighted.

Yours sincerely

Simon Davies,

Director

Privacy International

Dogs's clothing..

Edward C. Zimmermann — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:21:28 +0200

From The Sun newspaper http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2007190295,00.html

"THOUSANDS of rich women were conned by a firm into believing LAMBS were valuable miniature POODLES.

Entire flocks were imported to Japan from the UK and Australia then sold by the internet company as the latest “must have” pet.

The bizarre scam was rumbled when Japanese movie star Maiko Kawakami complained on a talk show that her new poodle refused to bark or eat dog food.

She showed photos of the animal and was devastated when told that it was a lamb."

This story of the actress and the dog, er lamb is like a whole genre of poodle stories--- many tend to include misuse of microwave ovens. Its clearly just reporting a (bad) joke as news. Its been widely reported in the media like the telephone game. In our analysis of the stories and the use of language the source seems to be exclusively "The Sun". All the news that's ill-fit to print.. 'Cause good journalism is "extremely rare" with "many people having little idea" what a properly researched and written story is like..

This is not just a malaise of the "news" but typical in most areas including even science and technology. Most managers, including those presiding over information technology investments at many of the largest companies in the world (including even those making and selling information technology products), it seems can't--- lacking great experience with the interna of IT projects--- distinguish between a "code kiddie" and an elite systems developer. Most often its just the most shallow level of what ones sees in a interface that matters, ignoring the difference details make.

To paraphrase the story: Quality is "extremely rare" with "many people having little idea what they look like".

Its the recognition of this fundamental human trait with the twist of the well known excessiveness of Japanese trends, love of exotic and imported and wacky fashion consciousness as high culture that makes the story work.

Op/Ed: Popularity Metrics and Corruption

Edward C. Zimmermann — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 14:49:24 +0200

Due to the paradigm failings of popularity metrics a whole collection of parasitic "Web 2.0" vote spikers have entered the field. For example (from the now defunct FriendlyVote.com):

Others are http://www.usersubmitter.com/, Spike-The-Vote, PayPerPost and a host of other public cheating clubs and a perhaps even larger number of hidden puppet masters tied into criminal syndicates.

There is nothing that any of these sites can do about the spamming since its endemic to their model of ranking. Popularity is fundamentally flawed. It encourages vote rigging and buying "friends" and, worse still, in contrast to "link spamming" there is no way to distinguish the sincere from the puppets, free thinkers from bought voters and individual voters from ballot box stuffers. In an era of large scale computer hijacking into "Botnets" these heavily hyped "Web 2.0" sites are welcome playing grounds alongside email spamming. Not only are the top sites manipulated but also the hit and access counts skewed to make it look like they are getting many more readers than they really are--- sites profiting, I guess, from the cheats.

Since starting IBU News I'm become quite appalled by the scale of spammers. This site is not even announced yet (and still in development) and yet we are seeing high traffic of spammers trying to post or (aimlessly) manipulate our ranking. The traffic from them is greater than any of the "normal" users accessing the site at this time. They are quite automated. One modus is to target sites using popular "Blog"/CMS packages (like Drupal). Not only do they seem to use hijacked domains for account registration but even generate fake news feeds to distribute spam through the back door of content.

A lot of mainstream content too is little more than embedded marketing. Some years ago I was asked to write an article for a special supplement on mobile computing to be bundled with one of Germany's most serious "establishment" newspapers. I was told by the editor "you have complete freedom but should not write anything negative in the article about the products as the companies are paying for the ad copy".

Op/Ed: Personalized news, nothing personal

Edward C. Zimmermann — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 21:10:21 +0200

Findory's own Greg Lindin wrote--- commenting on an article entitled "Personalized News: A Market Overview" by Emre Sokullu and Richard MacManus published at the Read/WriteWeb.--- in his BLOG Geeking with Greg: Reddit, Digg, and personalized news:

"Oversimplifying a little, Findory works a bit like Digg except that rather than seeing a front page of the generally most popular articles, you see a front page of the articles that are most popular for readers like you. As Emre said, different lists for different people reduces the incentive to game the system by eliminating the winner-takes-all effect."

Popularity is not and should never be a guide to the news. Being popular has no relevance to data quality, trust or even importance. It just says that according to some model its "popular". So what? Segmenting into smaller groups is a favorite technique of market research but what does it mean to be "popular" to a reader like me? What's a "reader like" me? Is not the segmentation of readers into categories just another take on guilt by association? I'm in a group as long as my opinions or consumption patterns put me into a group. Change my patterns and I'm in a another group. Its a feedback control. I am part of a community since I am deemed to have such-and-such interests. Its the same paradigm of popularity rules in sheep's clothing.

Market research--- once upon a time I was a project director at Intratest/Burke, a leading international opinion and market research organization--- is in its well meaning heart about trying to grap the influence of media on people's decisions.

On the one hand its about trying to predict what people will consume and maybe to develop tools to get people to consume or purchase specific products and services but its about influence.

The company I once worked for actually started in 1947 as the „Instituts zur Erforschung der Wirkung publizistischer Mittel“ (Institute for Research into the effects of publications) at the University of Munich. I recall conversations with the early founders and it was indeed the will to democracy that provided the imperative to try to understand how to pro-actively combat the kinds of totalitarian media structures what were so effective at driving Germany into dictatorship and self-destruction. Hitler, one needs to recall, was quite popular--- indeed the most popular leader in the history of Germany.

Knowing what is popular is only part of the answer to the question "What is popular".

Over 100 years ago V.I.Lenin wrote (from just around the corner from where I am now sitting) "A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organizer."

Popularity just says who is right now ahead in what was called during the Viet Nam war the "War over the Hearts and Minds" as summed up by Marshall McLuhan (1975) when he wrote "Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America-not on the battlefields of Vietnam.".

Worse still.. the popularity metrics are (relatively) easy to influence. Tail wagging the dog?

Looking closer at the offerings of "personalized" news it appears that indeed most are based upon the logic of
- Popularity
- Volume (he who screems loudist)
- Reduction

People link to top ranked sites. This has demonstrably lead, in the Web arena, to an overrepresentation of some marginal positions. Worse still computer programs can't distinguish between positive links ("this site is good") and negative ones (look at the lies). The old Hollywood addage "Bad press is better than no press" comes to mind. It does not, it seems, matter what they are saying as long as they are saying something about you.

Link counts and other "popularity metrics" are widely used because they work well to help find anything about something and are computationaly very cheap. They let one pre-sort results which saves a lot of effort and processing power. They also let one use simpler search algorithms. Claiming to be a "social web", their social costs, however, are high. Its rule by mob.

The model not only misrepresents relevance but also appears to have a significant impact on content and available information. Since most people are directed to the few highly linked, popular and known sites, the rest remain invisible and unsustainable. The impact of the reliance on links in popular search ranking has been to limit dicussion and concentrate media control in the hands of a few. The information is maybe still there but its hidden since their voices are drowned out by the squawk of the popular sites. The model defines the semantics for influenential as a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than as a revelation.

Most of these news sites aim to reduce the quantity of views by trying to clump "similar" together. While most (many) news articles seem to be based upon a newwire publication there are subtile differences, views and content can be different. 10 people telling the "same" story need not tell the same story. Agendas are different. Sometimes these agendas are also driven by the want or need for "homologization"--- a word used by these countries to mask the biter taste of the word censorship--- with some totalitarian governments to turn the Internet into a modern day "Volksempfanger".

Op/Ed: Selling Google Ads is the path to freedom and democracy in China.

Edward C. Zimmermann — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 21:09:08 +0200

The (Athens) Internet Governance Forum is at half-time...

Transcripts are now available here.

On the question of censorship and openness... the corporate chorus sings in a nutshell "We bring business to totalitarian governments and business is good and pure. The more wealthy one is the more democratic and free one will become"..

VINT CERF (Speaking for Google):
"I think that it is probably not consistent with our view that we would use or even feel that we have marketing power to force change. I rather like the comment of engagement. I like the idea that you bring information to people, you bring opportunities to produce revenues that wouldn't be available. In the case of Google, we've split revenues from advertising with parties that have information on Web pages that draw people to it. So I would rather think that the company can bring persuasion in the form of economic development rather than trying to use some form of market power in order to negotiate."

Selling Ads as the ultimate liberation force?

The same view too was sung by Fred Tipson speaking for Microsoft "The economic value in the internet is driving growth and development in educational opportunities [in China],".

And the Chinese government position voiced at the conference?

What censorship?

"In China we don't have software blocking internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them but that is a different problem.,"..."We do not have restrictions at all.".."Some people say journalists in China have been arrested. We have hundreds of journalists in China and few have been arrested. This has nothing to do with freedom of expression.".."We have criminals in our society. There are criminals in all society."

10 Years Ago

Edward C. Zimmermann — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 21:08:10 +0200

Stumbling around the network looking for "global TV" I cross my own words once again. 10 years later.
http://old.thing.net/wwwboard1/messages/423.html

Nothing has changed. Not even since the emergence القاعدة and "The War on Terrorism" on evening TV.

(information still stranded on a deserted island)

Posted by Zimmerman on September 03, 1997 at 11:21:20:

Either I've been so long abroad that I've lost my grasp
and/or command of the English language or I'm increasingly
being confronted by the general trend in the decline of
language.

Perhaps this too is symptomatic of the collapse of the
Internet into mass culture presenting its own history and
concept that wedges itself from the impulse of knowledge
discovery (the initial impulse) to entertainment. From
information technology its "infotainment", really just another
word for idle leisure activity, for academics, a break with
thought as a meditation with the deeper significance of
Gilligan's exploits or "will the professor ever get to sleep
with the movie star".."

Push content, mapping "the Internet" (original wording) to
television sub-carrier signals (German Television has now
lauched this service, as perhaps, so they claim, the first
broadcaster), the reciever, too is not just symptom but the
transformation into a branch of mass media and, most
significantly, under the same economic controls. At the
IFA, international "radio" showcase, in Berlin (the largest
radio and television trade show in the world), this week,
nearly all the companies have been showing their integration of
"Internet" (original wording) with home entertainment systems.
Its not a question of "room for" but the transformation.

In this list it was said that Daniel Bell "predicted" the
development of the Internet 10 years ago. I would hope that
Dan did not make this assertion. As a reasonably talented
social scientist (be it that "he changed sides") the Internet
needed no prediction. Since the establishment of the Internet
from the ARPAnet in the early 80s one explicitly had fear of
precisely the current developments. The AUPs ("Acceptable Use
Policies") were long a point of debatte.. Once the AUPs got
lifted (one should really keep in mind that the AUPs on the
NSF backbone got lifted only a few years ago and its transfer
into the private sector, not the development of the Web, was
the motor for the current development) the rest was inevitable.

At the Frankfurt InfoBase '95 I attended for the German
Magazine "Business Computing" a conference on the Internet
organized from BTX (interactive teletext) publishers, yet
another from book publishers, and one from librarians.. All
carried the same message: "we need to bring order into the
Internet".. An messanic image of themselves as the saviour
of the net. The "Net" existed through their existance, without
"them" there was no net-- similar in some ways to that hacker
that claimed that computers did not communicate in the late
70s (computers only communicate when his computers talk).

As an ISP with an inter-regional network (one of our bussiness
units) the message is "cost effectiveness" and "advertising
budget", the language is "publishing". For access the language
is, generally, entertainment: "Surfing". It many ways there is
little difference between a tabloid publication and the service
we offer, except perhaps that while the European tabloids have
"tit pictures" on page 3, our customers have 1000s of "nudies"
representing the many additional pages.

The early impulse of "the boom" was like the image of "Global
Village Television" in the late 60s and early 70s with the
availability of the PortaPac, a liberation of ideas, a shift
of control. Despite the vision, a wide spread use of video did
not liberate (while one might argue the case of "Rodney King"
I don't see the relevance) but merely help strengthen the hand
of companies such as Time-Warner. Today is less diversity in the
control of television media than in the 60s and video has played
a significant role, alongside legislation, for the consolidation.

Turning back to the "Diana saga".. The press photographers have been
arrested and the DA is pressing for charges of man-slaughter. This
is a substantial attack on the freedom of the press under the guise
of "public anger". A free press or an Internet with the free exchange
of ideas is "a thorn in their side". A few bits of child pornography
and "public anger".. A hysteria that the "Internet is a boom for
child pornography". Throw in the attacks on political writing: The DA in
Munich and the Chinese share the same viewpoint. Mix in civil law:
The courts have already started to rule that private email constitues
"publication" and thus can be the subject of libel.

Public anger? A convenience to dismantle freedom?

Public Anger is convienient: Images of the "Kristalnacht" come to
mind, that too was orchestrated as a mass responce of "public anger". The
French supported slaughter in Rhuanda as "public anger".... Tamils being
struck down "in public anger"... The end of asylum (de-facto) in Germany due
to "public anger".. The reinstatement of the death penalty and the
rebirth of the chain gang in America due to "public anger"....

Who needs freedom when one has "Giligan's Island"?