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Friday, May 16, 2003
More on Printwash 
| | In the past I've appended replies to the ends of the posts they reply to (if that makes any sense). This time I'm putting them up here, where they can be more easily found, all relatively fresh and new. A tip of the hat goes to Michael Hall for bringing up the problem (it's not just mine) and suggesting solutions. Not sure what I'm doing in this case is a solution, but at least it's a differerent approach. |
| | Anyway, various responses are coming in from Larry (whose Memo to the Few is of high importance, and the subject of an upcoming piece I'll have in Linux Journal) Dave (also in DaveNet), Bill, Bruce, Eric, Fernando (interesting points in the postscript), Dan, Scott, Robert, Josh, Third Superpower, Dave, David (further proving the Dave Conspiracy), Tuttle SVC, The Happy Tutor, Team Murder and Jim Moore, who brings us back to the larger phenomenon his Second Superpower essay describes "as we attempt to establish new forms of activism and empowerment in a globalizing world." |
Live Ends
Printwash
| | In other words, if you choose not to participate on the public, freely linkable, not for pay Web, don¹t complain when others who do participate by the rules of the game are easier to find. |
| | Anyway, Doc Searls, the happy blogger (always!) finds a glass-half-full solution. The print journalists should walk down the hall to their publishers' office and request that they make their archive publicly available so it can be indexed by the search engines. Google is just indexing what's on the Web. If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web. It's pretty simple. |
| | If you want a better picture of what's going on, and why the Full Archive Exposure (let's call it FAE) solution is so simple, look in two places: 1) The Breaking News story list in the left column of Technorati; and 2) your local Library. |
| | Right now Technorati's Breaking News lists 20 top stories. The sources: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, BBC. Washington Post, Washington Times, ABC News, Fox News, Time Magazine. This is where blogs are pointing, even though there isn't a blog among them. (Technorati only lists professional news sources here.) |
| | On Technorati's Current Events Page, we see the ecology of News & Commentary at work. All 100 are news stories from newspapers, magazines and other professional news organizations (again, Technorati only lists the professionals here). All the commentaries below each numbered headings are from bloggers. |
| | Now here's the problem: Most of these newspaper stories (the majority on the Breaking News list) are going to dissappear after seven or thirty days, relegated to for-pay archives. I am told, though I don't know (maybe some of you can tell me) that even the current and exposed archives of many print news stories are out-of-bounds for search engine bots, so they never get crawled and hence don't show up in Google and other search engine listings. Recent stories from newspapers do seem curiously absent from Google listings. (Let's gang up and do some research.) |
| | In the ecology of News & Commentary, the News side is largely unchanged. The Commentary side has changed enormously. The major hard news sources number in the hundreds, at best. More like the dozens. The blogs followed by Technorati (those which syndicate with RSS) number in the thousands, or perhaps the hundreds of thousands (at the moment Technorati follows just over 307,000, but it's unclear how many write about hard news). |
| | Blogs are one big fat op-ed section for the news organizations out there. Thanks to the ethics of linkage (crediting sources — a polite grace learned from orthodox journalism and years of compiling footnotes and bibliographies for term papers in high school and college) and of Google's PageRank algorithms, the blogosphere is a vast watershed of credit-giving: an authority-granting system of a high order. |
| | It is vastly dumb, given this situation, for the newspapers to continue hiding their stories and archives from search engines. The cost in lost authority far outweighs the benefits in selling those archives for $2.95 (or whatever) per story. |
| | They almost get it, but not quite. |
| | Now here's the important bit. Look what the phrase "Second Superpower" produces on Google now. Try it!. Moore's essay is right there at the top. And not just first, but it already occupies all but three of the first thirty spots. |
| | Sometimes, though, the deliberations of the collective mind seem to come up short. Take Mr. Moore's use of "second superpower" to refer to the Internet community. Not long ago, an article on the British technology site The Register (theregister.com) accused Mr. Moore of "googlewashing" that expression — in effect, hijacking the the expression and giving it a new meaning. |
| | It had actually originated in a Feb. 17 article by Patrick E. Tyler in The New York Times that referred to the United States and world public opinion as the "two superpowers on the planet." Shortly after that, the phrase "second superpower" was adopted by organizations like Greenpeace and was used by Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, to refer to antiwar opinion. But Mr. Moore's article was linked to by a number of bloggers sympathetic to his ideas, and quickly became the first hit returned when someone searches Google for "second superpower." |
| | There was nothing underhanded in Mr. Moore's ability to co-opt ownership of the phrase in the rankings; it follows from the way Google works. Its algorithms rank results both by looking at how prominently the search terms figure in the pages that include them and by taking advantage of what Google calls "the uniquely democratic nature of the Web" to estimate the popularity of a site. It gives a higher rank to pages that are linked to by a number of other pages, particularly if the referring pages themselves are frequently linked to. (The other major search engines have adopted similar techniques.) |
| | Notice how uncritically Nunberg takes Orlowski's biases, which are about as anti-blog bias as you'll find on the Web today. |
| | But given the "uniquely democratic" nature of the Web, it shouldn't be surprising that the votes reported by the search engines have many of the deficiencies of plebiscites in the democracies on the other side of the screen. On topics of general interest, the rankings tend to favor the major sites and marginalize the smaller or newer ones; here, as elsewhere, money and power talk. |
| | And when it comes to more specialized topics, the rankings give disproportionate weight to opinions of the activists and enthusiasts that may be at odds with the views of the larger public. It's as if the United Nations General Assembly made all its decisions by referring the question to whichever nation cares most about the issue: the Swiss get to rule on watchmaking, the Japanese on whaling. |
| | THE outcomes of Google's popularity contests can be useful to know, but it's a mistake to believe they reflect the consensus of the "Internet community," whatever that might be, or to think of the Web as a single vast colloquy — the picture that's implicit in all the talk of the Internet as a "digital commons" or "collective mind." |
| | Seen from a Google's eye view, in fact, the Web is less like a piazza than a souk — a jumble of separate spaces, each with its own isolated chatter. The search engines cruise the alleyways to listen in on all of these conversations, locate the people who are talking about the subject we're interested in, and tell us which of them has earned the most nods from the other confabulators in the room. But just because someone is regarded as a savant in the barbershop doesn't mean he'll pass for wise with the people in the other stalls. |
| | Both Orlowski and Nunberg miss what should be an obvious fact: Tyler's original piece can't be found by Google. The New York Times' archives are unexposed. They are not, to borrow a bit from Nunberg's analogy to a piazzas and souks, in the marketplace. The "googlewashing" Orlowski talks about was done by the New York Times, not by Google, and not by bloggers. |
| | You won't find a single one of Tyler's stories, in their original form, in a New York Times archive site. In other words, Tyler's presence on the Web is all one degree removed from the New York Times. As for his Second Superpower story, it takes a distant back seat to Orlowski's Googlewash tar-job on Moore, Google and blogs. |
| | Okay, now consider your local library. Look at the periodicals section, the periodicals stacks, all those nearly unsearchable microfiches, and all those Readers Guides to Periodical Literature. You're looking at a system that deeply respects not only the printed word, but the requirement that everything be both sourced, and find-able. |
| | On the whole, blogs are highly compliant with the ethics of the periodicals section, the ethics of the stacks, the ethics of sourcing and archiving, the ethics of giving credit where due. |
| | The bottom line: In the age of the Web, the practice of charging for access to digital archives is a collossal anachronism. It's time for The New York Times and the other papers to step forward, join the real world and correct the problem. Expose the archives. Give them permanent URLs. Let in the bots. Let their writers, and their reputations, accept the credit they are constantly given and truly deserve. |
| | In other words, stop the printwash. |
There are responses to this message:Re: Friday, May 16, 2003, Christopher Coulter, 5/19/03; 1:33:31 AM Re: Friday, May 16, 2003, Doc Searls, 5/19/03; 9:28:36 AM Re: Friday, May 16, 2003, Christopher Coulter, 5/19/03; 3:02:23 PM Re: Friday, May 16, 2003, Jim McGee, 5/19/03; 12:45:39 PM Re: Friday, May 16, 2003, John Wunderlich, 5/19/03; 10:56:57 AM
Re: Friday, May 16, 2003, Joshua Koenig, 5/18/03; 2:21:59 PM
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