infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

I watched a special on CNN earlier tonight that purported to give a behind-the-scenes look at the “Man of the Year” selection process at Time magazine. As a former magazine editor, I found the representations of story meetings fairly interesting, but what caught my attention was the use of one of my least favorite phrases “user-generated content.” The editors were mulling over naming content-generating users “persons of the year,” and the end of the show revealed Time’s Person of the Year is You.

I’ll probably pick up a dead-tree copy of the magazine, but I read the lead story online, and it somehow manages to elevate Web 2.0 to a even greater level of hype. One graf states “Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.” A later graf hedges its bets a bit and reminds the reader “Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary,” but the article maintains that Web 2.0 sites like YouTube are leading to new social formations.

I guess the timing of my Web 2.0 paper was perfect; hopefully more than a handful of people at the Cultural Studies Association conference will have heard of the Web 2.0 concept, thanks to the Time story. I learned this week that my panel is at 9am on the last day of the conference, so I imagine attendance will be light. Maybe the hype will roust people out of bed to hear me talk about Web 2.0.

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At lunch yesterday, I told one of my technically-minded colleagues that my paper “Web 2.0 is People!” was accepted into the Cultural Studies Association conference in April, and my colleague asked me, “What do they mean by Web 2.0, anyway?”
I responded by asking, “Have you read ‘Tim O’Reilly’s ‘What is Web 2.0?‘”
My colleague chuckled and said no, but asked if it was a set of technologies. I replied that it’s more of a design issue.

Today I remembered to forward my colleague a link to the O’Reilly article. Rather than dig through my del.icio.us, I thought the fastest way to find the article would be to query Google for “What is Web 2.0?” To my surprise, the article I wanted did not appear at the top of the page. Instead, it had a link that read “Web definitions for Web 2.0″ and an excerpt from the Wikipedia article. O’Reilly’s essay was the first search result. I wondered if Google was supporting natural language queries or simply returning Wikipedia extracts with the keywords “What is.”

Unsure if I really knew what is meant by “natural language query,” I typed in “What are natural language queries?”, which returned a similar page of Web definitions, and an abstract from a page at the University of Kansas. I tried a few more “what is” queries, like “What is deconstruction?” which returned a literary definition from the US Department of State. (Oddly, the definition doesn’t appear in the page Google links to.) And to make a cheap allusion to Plato’s Symposium, I decided to ask Google “What is Love?” This referred me to Princeton’s WordNet site.

Of course, Google could just be using “what is” as a particular kind of keyword, so I thought I would try few other queries. Although I quit smoking years ago, I decided to ask “How do I quit smoking?” which didn’t do anything special. Then I decided to try a “Who is” query, so I asked “Who is Ingmar Bergman?” Google answered, “Ingmar Bergman is a Swedish film director according to [the URI for the Wikipedia article on Bergman.]” Other “who is” queries were less exciting. “Who is Chris McConnell” just returned the usual results for my name, and “Who is Mike Jones?” led to information about the album by the Houston Chopped & Screwed artist.

It does seem like Google is just using word combinations like “what is” and “who is” as keywords, rather than trying to implement a comprehensive system of natural language queries. Using queries like this, however, does remind me that using labels and titles like, “How do I quit smoking” may improve the ranking of informational pages in Google and other search engines.

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Techdirt has a post ridiculing a service that adds a social-networking component to taking a cab to the airport. I agree that this service is probably “niche within niche” – it’s unlikely to find someone with similar interests who’s going from your neighborhood to the airport at around the same time. While TechDirt takes a dim view of adding social networking to everything, I do think there are some services that could benefit from a little Web 2.0 mojo.

The UT library system – like many other university libraries – gives graduate students and faculty semester loans for books. Grad students can hang onto books a semester or longer (with online renewals) until another student recalls the book. Then the borrower has two weeks to return the book. I’m sure my department is not atypical when our grad student listserv propogates “who recalled my book” messages, where students try to coordinate sharing the book. It’s unfortunate the library doesn’t acknowledge this fact of grad student life, but I think this is an opportunity for a Web 2.0 startup. Here’s the pitch:

Forget Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut, Recallr will match people on what really matters, the books you want from the library. When you recall a book, the borrower gets a link to your Recallr profile and the option to contact you in hopes of learning, levity, and love. How else will you meet that special someone that shares your obsession with post-Marxist analyses of 80s console games or psychoanalytic readings of gender roles on “The Greatest American Hero”?

Obviously, I’m being a bit silly, but it would be nice if the general libraries could integrate some social networking features and perhaps tagging in the library catalog. I suspect many universities would be reluctant to develop a formal relationship with Facebook, but they seem to be the outfit that could develop this kind of service for schools.

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The MacAppADay project will be giving away 5000 copies of OS X software each day in December. I’m not sure what the motive is behind the project, except perhaps to raise the profile of various shareware projects, but it can’t hurt to try out some new software. I imagine they users will hit the 5K limit early, so they’re offering bloggers to learn what software will be offered 12 hours before the unwashed masses if bloggers write a post about the project. I’m doing just that.

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I generally make it a rule not to blog items that have already appeared on bOINGbOING. In fact, it seems like the main reason I check that blog these days is to know what not to blog, since I assume both of my readers read the site. But a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and I’ll make an exception for what bOINGbOING calls a “feature on the history of calculator watches.”

Although this blog post does a great job of digging some images of old and obscure calculator watches, I’m not sure if it quite qualifies as a feature or a history. I wonder if the Hewlett-Packard HP-01 watch used Reverse-Polish Notation¹ and I wonder about the number of units shipped and the adoption rate of calculator watches once they became mainstream in the 1980s. I’m sure my graduate studies in the history of technology² has raised my expectations of what a history should be. Like many histories of technology, the post ignores the downside of an adoption curve, when a technology falls out of vogue, so it doesn’t answer the question of when calculator watches became an ironic fashion statement, rather than a functional technology. Of course, maybe I’m largely alone in thinking calculator watches are ironic; perhaps only a Radio-TV-Film student could rock this sweet wristwatch.

1. Back in high school, when I was having a crazy love affair with my HP 48SX, I thought “Reverse-Polish Notation” was an ethnic slur, but Wikipedia informs me that there is actually something called “Polish Notation” and RPN systems like the ones used on HP calculators reverse the order of the operands and operators. Thank you Wikipedia!

2. I’ll remind skeptical readers that communication media like radio, television, and film are indeed technologies, and much of my coursework has dealt with their technological histories.

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I’ve seen a few blogs point to this TV clip of President Bush relating how he likes to use “The Google.” It’s followed by a snarky remark suggesting the search engine is on “the Internets.” While I think it’s pretty funny, I also tend to agree with the theory that the president’s malaprop endears him to his base. Stuffy East Coast Texas interlectuals like me laughing at his abuse of the English language only polarizes them more.

However, I found another interesting bit about the clip I haven’t seen anyone comment on. Bush tells CNBC that he likes to use Google Earth or Google Maps to scan over Crawford, saying, “I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.” I’m a little surprised to learn that the Western White House would appear in one of these applications. Considering the security that surrounds the ranch – Cindy Sheehan’s Camp Casey was actually miles from the ranch entrance – I’m surprised it isn’t blacked out like Area 51
or other security sensitive sites.

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Wow, Google Transit would have been really, really helpful when I lived carless in Philadelphia. It’s interesting to note the absence of New York or, for that matter, Philadelphia, Boston, and DC. Is it because these systems are too complex or does Google have to do some intellectual-property wrangling before they can add in the data for these systems? Seattle is the only one of the cities on Google Transit I’ve spent any time in, and I hardly know it well enough to see how good its recommendations are. Hopefully SEPTA and MTA will get in the system soon.

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The blogosphere has been abuzz about Google Image Labeler, which uses data generated by users to categorize and label images. Like the ESP Game, users try to guess what another anonymous online user uses to describe the image. When the users’ labels match, the label is used to categorize the image. Tim O’Reilly discusses the potential of using games to get humans to label unstructured data like images. Citing a video by Carnegie-Mellon professor Luis von Ahn he notes, “In 2003, 9 billion hours were spent playing solitaire. By comparison, it took only 7 million human hours (6.8 hours of solitaire) to build the Empire State Building, and only 20 million human hours (less than a day of solitaire) to build the Panama Canal.” Clearly, if humans have the spare “processor cycles” to play a repetive game like solitaire, Google can benefit by getting people to do its categorization work for free.

Although no one’s forcing people to label images, I do wonder about the social implications of a profitable company taking advantage of all of this free labor. In “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” Tiziana Terranova discusses how companies like AOL take advantage of free labor to manage their operations and create content. For example, AOL uses “volunteer” community leaders to manage discussions on the online service, duties that are essential for keeping the for-profit company’s content family-friendly and civil. I’m simplifying her argument substantially, but she takes issue with the abilty of capital to generate profit off of work done for free. Moreover, this labor is gendered – the masculine work of open-source developers is regarded as a surprising contribution to society, while the feminized work of managing people in the case of the AOL community leaders is taken for granted.

I wonder if a similar thing is going on. Neither von Ahn nor O’Reilly make gender claims about solitaire, but I suspect it’s a game largely played by receptionists, call center employees, and other pink-collar workers to pass time at work. Can we read Google Image Labeler as a situation where Google does the masculine heavy-lifting of writing code for money while users do the feminized work of classification for free?

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Tim O’Reilly’s post on Chumby piqued my interest in the cute little device, but, even after reading the vendor’s page, I still wasn’t sure what the gizmo does. My next step, of course, was to consult Wikipedia, hoping that someone from Chumby or a FOO camp attendee created an article explaining what it does and how it works. (”Web-enabled wifi clock radio” doesn’t do much for me: I mean, will it be Web 2.0 compliant?) At the time, there was a Wikipedia article about Chumby, but the article was already nominated for deletion. It seems a little over-zealous to nominate an article for deletion when the product was introduced over the weekend.

Of course, I added a vote to keep the Chumby article, but its future on Wikipedia doesn’t seem bright. The discussion on the Articles for Deletion page are pretty revealing of what Wikipedia users regard as legitimate sources for articles. Apparently personal blogs – even Tim O’Reilly’s – don’t qualify as legitmate sources, and neither do manufacturers’ sites. The Chumby skeptics are waiting for stories about the gizmo to filter out to the mainstream or, at least, computer trade press before they’ll vote to keep the article.

Althought I’m still not sure what Chumby does, it does seems like it could be a useful device. (Hopefully a FOO Camp attendee will bring his to the next Austin Bloggers Stammtisch.) I don’t use Tiger’s Dashboard much, but offloading some of the widgets like weather, Flickr feeds, and terror alert levels to a little device that plays mp3s could be nice. However, how many devices to I want to carry around? I don’t use a smartphone, but integrating these features to a phone would probably make more sense than embedding them in a cute fuzzy package.

The real opportunity of Chumby, as O’Reilly points out, is hackability. Telcos, including the wireless carriers are notorious for wanting retain control over everything on their network. (My students are always surprised when I tell them that before the 1984 consent decree Americans were forbidden from owning their own telephones.) I doubt we’ll ever see a mobile handset as hackable as the Chumby, and technologies like J2ME which could enable end-user software development seems to be dead in the water. Chumby may never take off, but it seems like a great step in the direction of hackable personal gadgets.

Update: Here’s some inside info on the Chumby from one of it’s developers. Also, after I posted this, I made a perhaps idiosyncratic connection between Chumby and an earlier cute information appliance, 3com’s ill-fated Audrey.

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According to an Ars Technica story, the German-language version of Wikipedia has implemented a reputation system where edits made by ordinary users don’t go live until approved by users who have gained certain reputation level. This seems like an inevitable and welcome change for the English version, based on what I’ve seen on sites like Slashdot, it could also introduce new problems.

One potential problem I forsee is that adding another layer of adminstration to the encyclopedia could create the perception that Wikipedia privileges the points-of-view of the established user base – and to get this reputation level, users need to conform to the tacit expectations of existing adminstrators. On Slashdot, this is borne out in discussions about how comments that confirm the worldview of Slashdot’s adminstrators and moderators are modded up, while comments they disagree with are modded down. While Jimmy Wales has said that he wants to avoid a formal reputation system like Slashdot’s, which is based on moderation points, the issue of how regular users attain the status to approve edits remains. The article simply describes this status as a “registered user with a certain level of time and experience.” It’s not clear if it’s based on quantifiable characteristics, but Wikipedia’s current system for creating adminstrators relies on a nomination and consensus process.

I don’t have the time to dig through and try to translate the policies on the German version, but I wonder how these users assigned this privilege and how the reputation is contstructed. Moreover, I wonder about how these privileges intersect with other Wikipedia policies, like the vaunted Neutral Point of View policy. Does a user with approval privileges have the obligation to approve edits that he or she disagrees with? NPOV debates already rage across the encyclopedia. If edits are approved in a non-neutral way – or the perception exists that they’re approved in a non-neutral way – implementing this internal reputation system might harm the reputation of Wikipedia with the general public.

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