Memex 1.1

Don Dodge has a nice post on an incurable disease which afflicts both mainstream media and the blogosphere…

There is a severe case of MacroMyopia spreading across the blogosphere. Today it is The Death of Email. Yesterday it was Inbox 2.0 - Email meets Social Networks. Macro-Myopia is the tendency to overestimate the short term impact of a new product or technology, and underestimate its long term implications on the marketplace, and how competitors will react.

Straight up and to the right - It is human nature to extrapolate the early success of a “new thing” to world domination, and to the death of the “old thing”. Insert any variable for “new thing” like; Facebook, Twitter, Text Messaging, Open Source, Linux, YouTube…and you can finish the sentence with the death of the “old thing”.

The best of both worlds - In most cases the early innovator of a product or technology wins some early success in a narrow market segment. The big winners come in later by incorporating the new technology into an existing product or service and creating a best of both worlds solution that appeals to a much broader market. I call this the “Innovate or Imitate - Fame or Fortune” scenario…

Lots more where that came from. Good stuff.

The man who turned Forbes into a great read, is dead. Nice obit in the Economist, which refers to his greatest scoop: he witnessed the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Here’s his report:

‘Bapu (father) is finished’

New Delhi, January 30, 1948: Mohandas K. Gandhi was assassinated today by a Hindu extremist whose act plunged India into sorrow and fear.

Rioting broke out immediately in Bombay.

The seventy-eight-year-old leader whose people had christened him the Great Soul of India died at 5:45 p.m. (7:15 a.m. EST) with his head cradled in the lap of his sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Mani.

Just half an hour before, a Hindu fanatic, Ram Naturam, had pumped three bullets from a revolver into Gandhi’s frail body, emaciated by years of fasting and asceticism.

Gandhi was shot in the luxurious gardens of Birla House in the presence of one thousand of his followers, whom he was leading to the little summer pagoda where it was his habit to make his evening devotions.

Dressed as always in his homespun sacklike dhoti, and leaning heavily on a staff of stout wood, Gandhi was only a few feet from the pagoda when the shots were fired.

Gandhi crumpled instantly, putting his hand to his forehead in the Hindu gesture of forgiveness to his assassin. Three bullets penetrated his body at close range, one in the upper right thigh, one in the abdomen, and one in the chest.

He spoke no word before he died. A moment before he was shot he said–some witnesses believed he was speaking to the assassin–”You are late.”

The assassin had been standing beside the garden path, his hands folded, palms together, before him in the Hindu gesture of greeting. But between his palms he had concealed a small-caliber revolver. After pumping three bullets into Gandhi at a range of a few feet, he fired a fourth shot in an attempt at suicide, but the bullet merely creased his scalp.

From A treasury of great reporting: literature under pressure from the sixteenth century to our own time, edited by Louis L. Snyder, Simon & Schuster, 1949.

This is really interesting — a summary by the Pew Research Center of a survey conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people?

If a new crop of user-news sites — and measures of user activity on mainstream news sites — are any indication, the news agenda will be more diverse, more transitory, and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources, according to a new study. The report, released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compares the news agenda of the mainstream media for one week with the news agenda found on a host of user-news sites for the same period.

In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites — Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us — were more focused on stories like the release of Apple’s new iphone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth. The report also found subtle differences in three other forms of user-driven content within one site: Yahoo News’ Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed…

The full report is available here.

This is useful in redressing the balance in the debate about the relationship of user-driven media to mainstream journalism. There’s an assumption that almost anything would be better than the skewed news agendas of mainstream media — that the Jeffersonian ‘marketplace in ideas’ will lead, inevitably, to closer approximations to the truth. This survey, sketchy and inadequate though it is, and Cass Sunstein’s new book, Infotopia: how many minds produce knowledge, (which I’ve been reading) cast some doubts on that comfortable assumption.

Which is a bit distressing, to say the least. It’s always uncomfortable having one’s cherished illusions undermined.

Nick Carr is not in the least distressed by all this, btw. Itr probably confirms what he’s suspected all along.

Rory Cellan-Jones’s report on the survey is here.

Ian Yorston has an interesting rant about the technophilia of the mass media when covering stories about ICT and education.

Well according to this report he has, anyway.

Rupert Murdoch has succeeded with his $5bn (£2.5bn) bid for Dow Jones, owners of the Wall Street Journal, according to a report in The Business.

Negotiations are finished and the board is confident the terms of the deal will be accepted by the Bancroft family, which controls a majority of voting shares in Dow Jones, the Business reported, citing people close to the Dow Jones board.

A formal announcement of the deal is expected next week, The Business reported.

Murdoch’s News Corporation will take over America’s most prestigious financial publisher at the price he originally offered on April 17, when he proposed $60 a share, the magazine said.

He has, apparently, given guarantees of ‘editorial independence’. Ho, ho!

You lose a tenth of your readers every paragraph. So if you have an 11-para story, you’ve lost them all.

Bob Satchwell, Director of the UK Society of Editors and a former newspaper editor.

Bob says this is received wisdom in the print business. Wonder if it also applies online? Jakob Neilsen thinks it does — he maintains that, for the most part, Web readers won’t scroll down.

Later… Quentin comments: “If you lose a tenth of your readers every paragraph, then perhaps at
the end of 10 paragraphs you still have a third of your readers left, because 0.9 ^ 10 = 0.35. Of course, if it’s a tenth of your initial readers, then you’re in trouble…”

Lovely rant by Jon Crowcroft.

Someone had left a copy of yesterday’s Daily Mail on the train open to an article by their “Science Correspondent”, Fiona Macrae, about the “possible health risk for pupils” of WiFi in the class room.

The article quoted several pressure groups, and some unnamed “scientists”, and asserted that sitting in a room with a WiFi station could be like being in the direct beam of a GSM Cellular tower at 300meters. This, it was claimed, could lead to ADHD, Cancer and premature senility.

Firstly, the guilt by association simply by being “radio” annoyed me - WiFi uses the ISM (Medical and Scientific Instrument band) around 2.4GHz, not the GSM Cellular bands which means even the vaguest idea that it might resonate with certain common energy levels in certain molecular links common in biological systems (one of the pet theories about how GSM might be a problem) is wrong, because its a completely different frequency/wavelength. Secondly, its a completely different power level that the user is exposed to:
you don’t hold the laptop to your head, and the laptop’s WiFi card and the WiFi Access Point (AP) are roughly symmetric in power terms, whereas a GSM cell tower is much more powerful than a handset.

Thirdly, there are on the order of 100M such systems in the world, and if there was a significant problem it would have shown up (the article points to increasing levels of ADHD - this predates WiFi in any case, and is strongly associated with people using computers whether they have wireless nets or not, and is far more likely to be a symptom of the type of kids that use computers too much,
not of the idea that the computer (or the network) directly cause attention deficit disorders.

I get very annoyed by this sort of article, particularly because the author has failed to seek any balancing view from an actual, named scientist which simply smacks of lazy journalism, especially when a few seconds with Google and Wikipedia would find plenty of information rather than hearsay and superstition, and might elicit a quote from a neutral person who has a clue.

By all means, have a further investigation (although there have, contrary to the article’s assertion, been checks on the problems with 802.11/ISM band health risks)….but unsupported allegations are not really “science” journalism.

Sometimes, I get the impression that people who write these columns in those types of newspapers are like the PE teachers who used to (in the bad old days) end up being landed with taking the geography O-level class.

Peter Preston thinks so, and quotes some findings from Ipsos Mori’s quarterly technology tracking poll.

This time last year, 60 per cent of British adults had online access. Now it’s 62 per cent, a relatively tiny shift. Three in four people over 65 have no access at all. Only one in 11 pensioners in the DE category - those most dependent on state support - can log on. Meanwhile, at the other end of the age and education range - ABs between 18 and 34 - internet penetration is actually falling back a little. Park Associates’ latest US survey may show two thirds of all adults online there, but, of those not hooked up, 44 per cent are just not interested in surfing their lives away.

We are not either on the internet or in print, but somewhere in between, and likely to stay there for years. We must commit millions to the digital future, but still cut down forests and drive distribution lorries along motorways at midnight. We must watch one pot of gold empty, but another fill up somewhat more slowly than we’d hoped…

Ed Felten’s having second thoughts about his reactions to the famed New Yorker article about Wikipedia…

It turns out that EssJay, one of the Wikipedia users described in The New Yorker article, is not the “tenured professor of religion at a private university” that he claimed he was, and that The New Yorker reported him to be. He’s actually a 24-year-old, sans doctorate, named Ryan Jordan.

It’s a long and typically thoughtful post. In the end, Prof. Felten reaches this conclusion:

In the wake of this episode The New Yorker looks very bad (and Wikipedia only moderately so) because people regard an error in The New Yorker to be exceptional in a way the exact same error in Wikipedia is not. This expectations gap tells me that The New Yorker, warts and all, still gives people something they cannot find at Wikipedia: a greater, though conspicuously not total, degree of confidence in what they read.

Peter Wayner gave an interesting talk at Google pointing out the downsides of the decline in print journalism and suggesting some things that might be done about it. Here’s one of his ideas:

Let me say that I’m a big believer in fair use. I think it’s very important for people to be able to quote frequently and liberally. But some blogs take this to an extreme. It’s easy to find blogs that are 80, 90, even 95 percent borrowed text. Some frequently cut huge chunks of an article and then wrap it with the thinnest amount of comment. Not surprisingly, some of these folks are big believers in “fair use”. I can think of one blog where the writers spend more time agitating for fair use than they do writing their thin, snarky wrapper around huge blocks of borrowed text.

I don’t think these sites are necessarily bad, but I think they end up taking an unfair amount of the return on the content. Many sell ads and some even support nice lifestyles without consuming too much shoe leather in gathering the content.

So why not add another term to the exponentially growing PageRank equation. Declan McCullagh suggested this during dinner last night. Why not compute the fraction of the text that’s original and the fraction that’s borrowed? This is possible to do because most bloggers are kind enough to include a link to the original text. If they don’t, it’s usually possible for a few searches of complete sentences to find the original.

Let’s call this LeechRank. If 20% of the text is borrowed, let’s do nothing to the PageRank. If 50% is borrowed, we bump them down a few notches. If 80% is borrowed, let’s send them down 20 to 30 notches. And if 100% is borrowed, as some pirates do, well, let’s just knock them straight out to the bottom of the listings, sort of a way station on their trip to the circle in hell reserved for people who steal and destroy a person’s livelihood.

This is a very thoughtful speech. It highlights the fact that while the Web and the blogosphere can easily provide much of the crap (celeb gossip, lifestyle journalism, infotainment) that takes up so much space in today’s newspapers, there’s no indication yet that it could replace the expensive investigating and reporting that responsible newspapers (and broadcasters) do. In the UK, for example, Jonathan Aitken would have gone unpunished if the Guardian hadn’t taken a very risky legal stand and contested his libel action against the paper. The same thing happened recently when Alan Rusbridger challenged a gagging injunction that the Government had clapped against reporting a development in the “cash for honours” investigation.

Who in the emerging ecosystem will do things — take risks — like that? Google? Perish the thought.

I like the idea of a LeechRank!

Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for pointing me to the piece.