Powerset has developed a tool that allows users to search Wikipedia with "conversational phrasing instead of keywords." I tried this out by searching "Who is the current president of Russia?", and didn't really get my answer. The first link told me it was Vladimir Putin, but Dmitry Medvedev was inaugurated on May 7. How do I know this? I Googled "president russia" and eventually got my answer. The first link of the Google search gave me Putin as well, but the second and third links gave me Medvedev.

And this is what I don't get. Who is it that is having such a hard time searching the Web using keywords? I'm not arguing that this is the best way to search, but I do think it's currently doing the job. Much like the QWERTY keyboard (which was designed to slow down typists who were jamming typewriters), it seems we've settled on keyword search for any number of random (and not so random) reasons.

I have been a Weezer fan since the first time I heard "Undone" in 1994. With the exception of their most recent album called Make Believe, I think Weezer's stuff still has something to offer. (Make Believe struck me as an attempt to reach a younger demographic. If so, then maybe it wasn't "bad." Maybe it just that it wasn't "my" Weezer.)

The new album will be self-titled but it will be called The Red Album (in the tradition of The Blue Album and The Green Album), and it will be released in June. The first single is called "Pork and Beans" and sounds promising. But in the meantime, front man Rivers Cuomo has been using YouTube to pull together his minions in a collaborative song-writing effort. I've included the video for steps 1 and 2 below, but you can watch all the steps of the compositional process at Rivers' YouTube page.

Last week, a number of friends emailed me Chris Wilson’s story in Slate, The Wisdom of the Chaperones. I’m glad I’m finally getting a chance to respond to it.

When stories like this are published, I always come back to the same observation: a number of journalistic accounts of Wikipedia are really lazy. I mention one example of this in a dissertation chapter I just finished. When a Wikipedia editor named Essjay was found to be lying about his credentials, Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen argued that, like the communists, Wikipedia had found a way to make Essjay disappear: “Jimmy Wales fired loyal Jordan/Essjay and, all of a sudden, the kid/theologian is history. One minute he's everywhere and then he's nowhere...Now Wikipedia just says: RETIRED: This user is no longer active on Wikipedia.” Yet, had Keen taken a few minutes to do some research, he would have found that Wikipedians were obsessively discussing the Essjay controversy on a request for comments page and in a Wikipedia article about the controversy. This controversy didn’t disappear on Wikipedia – it multiplied. Journalists and critics seem to be so blinded by disgust or annoyance that they fail to do their job - they fail to investigate. There are problems with Wikipedia, and if these folks would take the time to make careful, researched arguments about those problems they might gain some credibility. As it stands, Keen comes off as the exact thing he rails against in his book: an amateur.

Wilson seems also to have stopped short in the area of research. As I read through the article a first time, I was completely on board with Wilson’s comment that "social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy" while in reality "a small number of people are running the show." Yep. This is a big problem, and people should continue to debunk any notion that Wikipedia is utopian or democratic. However, that remark was followed with this citation: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits." This piqued my interest. After reading Aaron Swartz’s study, I’m skeptical of blanket statements that Wikipedia is run by a few elites. Certainly, administrators wield power, but Swartz makes a convincing case that it all depends on what you count. If you count the number of edits a Wikipedian makes, you’ll get the “1 percent” story. However, if you count the amount of text changed by Wikipedians, you’ll get a much murkier story. According to Swartz’s study, it turns out that casual Wikipedians contribute a great deal of content.

But Wilson was citing a much newer study as he made his argument that Wikipedia represents the "wisdom of chaperones" rather than the wisdom of crowds. Maybe this Palo Alto study provided a different account? So, I went to the PARC study, and now I wonder if Wilson even read it. It turns out that when you actually read the study, these researchers found something similar to Swartz:

“Although the population and content of Wikipedia appear to be in continued exponential growth, a closer look revealed a major shift in the distribution of work in the system. We discovered an initial rise and subsequent decline in the influence of ‘elite’ users. This result held true whether elite users were defined by peer-selected groups (administrators) or data-driven groups (high-edit users). We demonstrated that this decline was not due to a decrease in elite user activity or to shifts in user group editing patterns, but instead was driven by marked growth in the population of low-edit users – the rise of the bourgeoisie. These results were consistent whether the data were analyzed by edit count or by the actual change in content.” (Kittur et. al.)

In other words, elites are actually making a smaller proportion of Wikipedia edits as more and more "low-edit users" contribute to the project. These researchers cite Swartz’s study and they cite Jimmy Wales' claims that Wikipedia is essentially written by a very small number of people. Then, they conclude that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: "we show that the story is more complex than explanations offered before." Wilson takes one piece of information from a complex and complicated argument and completely perverts the meaning of the study. He makes it sound as if these researchers argue that Wikipedia is written by a relatively small number of "chaperones." The quotation I provide above should be evidence enough that the study found things to be a lot more complex than this. But I’m not sure that Wilson actually read the study.

Wilson’s "chaperones" argument raises necessary questions, but it does so by cutting corners. Critics of Web 2.0 utopianism often worry that we are lauding amateurs and that the work of professionals is getting shuffled aside. But stories like Wilson’s are evidence that the professionals are not always doing their homework. The argument he makes needs to be made, but why can’t it be made more responsibly? Why can’t Wilson include in his argument that Wikipedia, while not utopian, is the result of a complex composition process that involves both "elites" and "low-edit" Wikipedians? This wouldn’t stop him from discussing that the Wikipedia inner circle wields a good bit of power, and it would allow him to show readers that the issue is complicated.

Wikipedia is not utopian, but it’s not dystopian either. Journalists like Wilson can better serve their readers by slowing down a bit and explaining the complexities of phenomena like Wikipedia.

This is a term I learned recently: Pajamahadeen. Wikipedia gives a cursory explanation, and they have some good links. Apparently the American Dialect Society voted it the most creative word of 2004 - I am way behind on this.

This word is going to play into a chapter I'm beginning to write on how Wikipedia (or, maybe, any electronic text) deals with agency and responsibility. Terms like pajamahadeen attempt to provide an image of the blogger/Wikipedian/internet troll under one neat umbrella. As former CBS News executive vice president put it:

"You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances (at CBS), and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

Bloggers (mockingly, of course) took this and ran with it, creating the term pajamahadeen. Still, it is this circulating image of "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing" that I'm most interested in. Wal-Mart employees have edited the Wal-Mart Wikipedia article, and their not the only ones. Wikiscanner - a tool that traces IP addresses on Wikipedia edits - has shown us that it's not just the pajamahadeen editing Wikipedia (or blogging). This should be evidence enough that the blogosphere and Wikipedia are not controlled by the pajamahadeen.

Slashdot reports that Google is developing a tool called "Knoll" that will provide some of the same functionality as Wikipedia - with some important differences. From the Google Blog:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

This sounds like an interesting answer to Larry Sanger's Citizendium project. The fact that it's Google-backed is not good news for Sanger.

Slashdot reports that Radiohead did okay with their stunt to let customers set their own price for their In Rainbows album (quote from Comscore):

"During the first 29 days of October, 1.2 million people worldwide visited the 'In Rainbows' site, with a significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album. The study showed that 38 percent of global downloaders of the album willingly paid to do so, with the remaining 62 percent choosing to pay nothing... Of those who were willing to pay, the largest percentage (17 percent) paid less than $4. However, a significant percentage (12 percent) were willing to pay between $8-$12, or approximately the cost to download a typical album via iTunes, and these consumers accounted for more than half (52 percent) of all sales in dollars."

Here's an interesting take on wikipedia: Was it just a fad?

The article says that Wikipedia action is declining: fewer accounts being established, fewer edits happening, etc. Maybe this is a plateau of sorts? The thing has to top out at some point, right? Though, I don't think this means it qualifies as a "fad." Here's another possibility:

"The problems with Wikipedia could also come down to an increasingly large schism in the site's community, with two groups at odds over what information should and should not be included.

Those known as the "deletionists" seem quick with the delete key and have high standards for "notability." However "inclusionists" disagree, saying that articles shouldn't be deleted quickly because they may be expanded later, pointing out many articles are written over several edits."

This debate seems to define Wikipedia. That is, it's not a problem to be gotten over - it's the thing (aporia?) that creates the text. It's the source of all that is interesting on Wikipedia.

Red Herring's Tomio Geron explores semantic technology as the "next thing" and a challenge to Google:

Developers of next generation search engines say their technology will “understand” the language within those queries—much more precisely than Internet giant Google’s technology.

These next generation search engines will, apparently, interpret your search question. This will mean searching the Web in a new way, and people developing these technologies are hoping to retrain Web users:

Barney Pell, CEO of PowerSet, conceded that semantic search engines must convince people to change their search behavior. But web surfers have been trained to use keywords on Google, even though that is not the way people think. So that behavior can change, he argued.

I'm extremely skeptical of technologies that attempt to shape behavior. It seems to me that the best technologies are those that adapt to user behavior. Yes, designers shape an environment (much like an architect does), but they do not (and cannot) dictate behavior. Users use stuff in weird ways. This is called innovation. I'm reminded of Lawrence Lessig's discussions of "dumb networks." He uses the U.S. constitution and the Internet as two examples of dumb networks that allow for flexibility. The minute you start building intelligence into the network, you introduce bottlenecks. This is what Net Neutrality is all about. Currently, Web servers treat all packets of information the same, and this means that all of the innovation happens at the end points of the network. If you change this, you limit what people can do on the Web.

As I spoke to my roommate about semantic technologies, he told me that Central Park was originally developed to in the 19th Century as a way to save the "depraved" working class. So, what did the working class do? They started playing baseball in the park, and this pissed off the park's designers to no end. My roommate explain this example and then described such philosophies of design as "hubris."

This is what I think we've got with semantic technologies: hubris. You can't make people use your design exactly the way you envisioned it. And even if you could, you'd be cutting out all of the myriad ways in which a technology/design could appropriated and reappropriated.

NBC recently severed ties with Apple and pulled their content from the iTunes store. Now, they're offering their content for "free." That is, they're offering it on their website for no charge, but commercials will be embedded (and apparently you won't be able to skip them.) So, I guess they've cornered the market on NBC watchers who don't have Tivo.

I just finished Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur, a book that Lawrence Lessig claims is a great work of "self parody":

"what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. It tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won't know what's true and what's false. But the book itself is riddled with falsity -- from simple errors of fact, to gross misreadings of arguments, to the most basic errors of economics."

Lessig's blog entry goes on to pick apart the book - I'm glad someone did.

Personally, I found myself actually YELLING at the book. There are any number of irresponsible arguments in this book, and listing them would take forever. Here's one example as Keen explains the problem with blogs:

"Blogs on both the left and the right have perfected the art of political extremism. Unlike professionally edited newspapers and magazines where the political slant of the paper is restricted to the op-ed page" (53).

I myself have argued that blogs do little more than carve out enclaves of agreement, but does anyone actually think that the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal confine their "political slant...to the op-ed page"? Ask Rush Limbaugh or any number of other "liberal media" conspiracy theorists what they think about "expert editors" and their ability to weed out ideology and bias.

But that's just one example...there are so many more. In a later post, I'll take on Keen's notion that netizens are "monkeys" that are incapable of finding ways to filter information.

For now, I'll confine myself to an argument that most intersects with my own project. That argument is one about ethics. Here is now Keen talks about YouTube:

"On a Web site with no filters, no ethical codes, no accountability or disciplinary consequences, one has no way of knowing how many of these films were doctored" (emphasis added, 82).

And then a couple of pages later, when Keen compares the Web to Borges' "The Total Library" (a text that Keen describes as predicting "the horrors of the infinite library, one that has no center, no logic"):

"Borges' 'The Total Library' is today's Internet - anonymous, incorrect, chaotic, and overpowering. it is a place where there is no concrete reality, no right and wrong, no governing moral code." (emphasis added, 84)

The argument that the web has "no ethical codes" is used by both the utopians and the dystopians. That is, they both begin from the assumption that the Web is a space where anything goes and this "anything goes" atmosphere means there are no codes, no rules, no constitutions. Here is where Lessig's work is useful. For Lessig, the aim should not be an Internet without rules. Instead, scholars and citizens should pay close attention the rules, the

"'constitution,' the code that lies beneath:
We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental. Or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear. There is no middle ground. There is no choice that does not include some kind of building." (Code Version 2.0,6)

Lessig allows us a way to talk about the codes and constitutions that underlie the Web. For Keen, there is "no ethical code" on the Web, and I suspect this is because the ethical code of the Web is not HIS ethical code. However, the utopian crowd (people like Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, another book I read this week - and a book that Keen has particular distaste for) makes the same argument. They argue that anything goes on the Web and that this is a good thing.

Lessig's view seems to be most useful and most realistic. There is no space without a code/constitution. I would take this one step further to argue that the Web's ethical code is based on hospitality. That hospitality is along the lines of what Derrida describes in a number of places:

"Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own as foreigners, ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality. But for this very reason, and because being at home with oneself (l’être-soi chez soi—l’ipséité même—the other within oneself) supposes a reception or inclusion of the other which one seeks to appropriate, control and master according to different modalities of violence, there is a history of hospitality, an always possible perversion of the law of hospitality (which can appear unconditional), and of the laws which come to limit and condition it in its inscription as a law." (Of Hospitality, 16-17)

This hospitality should not be confused with niceness. In fact, this hospitality isn't always a good thing. Derrida notes that hospitality can often result in a hostage situation. However, if the constitution of the Web is one of hospitality - one which welcomes many voices with fewer filters - it becomes our task to reframe discussions about literacy, intellectual property, identity, and community. Rather than arguing that the Web has "no ethics," we might choose to recognize the ethics of hospitality built in to the Web and then begin our discussion from there. That discussion would have to involve rhetoric, since a broad range of arguments (a lot of noise) is allowed into the conversation. Keen's answer to this noise is "turn back the clock" move - one which asks us to trust traditional institutions (newspapers, magazines, book publishers). My suggestion would be to enable citizens to filter information - and this ability to filter can be enabled through a rhetorical education.

But my discussion of a rhetorical education acknowledges the difficulties of a hospitable web and hospitable texts. It doesn't claim that the Web is inherently democratic (far from it). Instead, I would claim that we are all response-able for figuring out how to deal with the situation of hospitality.