Beaver News

There has been a lot of talk lately about the quality of information available online. The debate has centered around “content farms”, such as Demand Media and the current incarnation of AOL (oops, sorry, Aol.). Kicking off this round was Michael Arrington, who wrote in a post titled The End of Hand Crafted Content:

On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page….

On the other end you have Demand Media and companies like it. See Wired’s “Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model.” The company is paying bottom dollar to create “4,000 videos and articles” a day, based only on what’s hot on search engines. They push SEO juice to this content, which is made as quickly and cheaply as possible, and pray for traffic. It works like a charm, apparently.

These models create a race to the bottom situation, where anyone who spends time and effort on their content is pushed out of business.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis thinks that decrying the lowering of information standards online rather misses the point.

They may be right. But then again, the internet has always been filled with crap. So the challenge has always been how you find the cream. That’s where opportunities lie. That’s what Google saw. The new question is whether Google can keep ahead of the content farms and continually find new and better ways to find better stuff. I’ll bet on Google over crap-creators. But they better get cracking.

I see three rings of discovery today: search (Google); algorithms (see: Google News, Daylife); and humans (see: Twitter)…. As search becomes more personal and no longer universal, SEO as a dark art and as the fertilizer for content farms will diminish and the social graph — our own circles of authority — will become more important in search as well. So I have faith that there are solutions to stem any rising tide of crap.

The rise of hyper-local media taps directly into Jarvis’ third ring of discovery: humans.  In these systems, there are a couple of routes by which content (e.g. a blog post, podcast or video) might be generated. Either someone takes it upon themselves to produce something of interest to them, in which case they have a vested interest in its quality, or content is produced upon request and there is a visible relationship between the producer and consumer. In either scenario, high quality, individualized content can be the result and in a local community of readers, it can be easily discovered.

Doc Searls, in his brilliantly titled post, The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated (us oldsters get the reference), also suggests that we are not the slaves to media manipulation that some fear. He doubts that “fast food content” is going to shut down quality writing, any more than McDonald’s stifles serious chefs.

Nothing with real real value is dead, so long as it can be found on the Web and there are links to it. Humans are the ones with hands. Not intermediaries. Not AOL, or TechCrunch, or HuffPo, or Google or the New York Freaking Times. The Net is the means to our ends, not The Media, whether they be new disruptors or old disruptees. The Net and the Web liberate individuals. They welcome intermediators, but they do not require them. Even in cases were we start with intermediation — and get to use really good ones — what matters most is what each of us as individuals bring to the Net’s table. Not the freight system that helps us bring it there, no matter how established or disruptive that system is.

The intermediaries who hope to manipulate our online habits are smart, powerful and well funded. However at this point in time, they rely on massive amounts of generalized data (statistics) for their models to work. The smaller the group, the less well targeted it can be. So, by building personal networks and using sites that cater to our communities (either geographical or ideological), we strengthen the web and feed the demand for high quality, relevant and personal information.

Cross posted from gregfalken.com
Image by WickedSunshine.com (NSFW)

Susan Crawford is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, teaching communications law and internet law. She was a partner with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale) until the end of 2002, when she left to become a legal academic. Ms Crawford recently ended her term as a member of the Board of Directors of ICANN.

Ken Werbach is an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the organizer of the annual Supernova technology conference (http://www.supernova2009.com). His research explores the legal and business dynamics of information and communications technologies. Formerly, he served as Counsel for New Technology Policy at the FCC during the Clinton Administration. He has also edited Release 1.0, a renowned technology newsletter, and founded Supernova Group, a technology analysis and consulting firm.

In March, Ms. Crawford had this blunt response to the assertion made by Richard Russell, the White House’s associate director on science and technology policy, that the US rollout of broadband access was going well:

I think it’s magical thinking to imagine that we’re somehow doing fine here, and I just want to make sure that we recognize that even the [International Telecommunications Union] says that between 1999 and 2006 we skipped form third to 20th place in penetration.

At the annual Tech Policy Summit, a gathering of top officials in the world of tech policy, Ms. Crawford made the following observations about the current state of broadband in the US:

We’re not doing at all well for reasons that mostly have to do with the fact that we failed to have a US industrial policy pushing forward high-speed internet access penetration, and there’s been completely inadequate competition in this country for high speed internet access.

This is like water, electricity, sewage systems: Something that each and all Americans need to succeed in the modern era. We’re doing very badly, and we’re in a dismal state.

Since the first step in fixing a problem is the recognition that this is a problem, these choices bode well for increased broadband penetration, especially in under-served rural areas like ours.

You can listen to Susan Crawford discuss telecom policy here, and read Ken Werbach’s columns on tech policy at internet-infrastructure journal Circle-ID.

With over 150 access points and nearly 60,000 users, the project is a huge success, all the more so given that municipal wi-fi projects in other cities have failed to materialize. And yet, Mike questions the value of what’s been accomplished. The project’s goal was not merely to light up hotspots in downtown Montreal, but to enhance the “sociality” of the city and elicit more and better civic engagement. He doubts these goals have been achieved, and asks himself hard questions about how technology can be deployed to these ends.When I met Mike recently in Montreal, I said: “It amazes that you’re asking yourself these questions. He replied: “It amazes me that others don’t.”

Listen or download at http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3571.html

David Weinberger’s new book covers the breakdown of the established order of ordering. He explains how methods of categorization designed for physical objects fail when we can instead put things in multiple categories at once, and search them in many ways. This is no dry book on taxonomy, but has the insight and wit you’d expect from the author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and a former writer for Woody Allen.

Watch it here or go to Google to watch the video.

Teaching life-long computer skills in our schools offers further benefit in that it gives students insights that they’re unlikely to pick up on their own. In contrast, as software gets steadily easier to use, anyone will be able to figure out how to draw a pie chart. People will learn how to use features on their own, when they need them — and thus have the motivation to hunt for them. It’s the conceptual things that get endlessly deferred without the impetus of formal education.

Picking and choosing from the article’s list of course topics, almost every computer user that I know would benefit from a better understanding of:

• Search Strategies
• Information Credibility
• Information Overload
• Writing for Online Readers
• Computerized Presentation Skills
• Workspace Ergonomics

Notice that none of these topics are tied to any particular program or operating system. Rather, they teach strategies for working more easily and successfully with any computer, particularly one that is online. With a grounding in skills such as these, students can branch into more technical subjects such as debugging or user testing and usability issues.

To use military jargon, these skills are strategic, rather than tactical. Understanding them is a necessary step to being successful in today’s information economy. Again, Jakob Nilsen:

In their book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane highlight three key skills that are less likely to be offshored or automated in the future. Those skills are problem solving, understanding the relation between concepts, and interpersonal communication. The life-long computer skills I’ve outlined here can similarly prepare students for the type of careers that will be sustainable as globalization intensifies.

Read all of Life-Long Computer Skills.

I blather on about Cluetrainy stuff, plus how to explain Net neutrality to “Aunt Tilly.” And because there are German subtitles, you can have the illusion that you are now fluent in that language.

Note: the first minute or so of the video is in German but the interview itself is in English.

Steve Weinberger, at Joho the Blog says:

This video is a beautiful piece of work. It will be a classic statement. Don’t be the very last person to see it…