IBU News (Germany) Edition 0.9.9

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".