Crowd control
Posted: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 2:30 PM by Will Femia
High profile tech bloggers have been fretting about a new popularity list that has some people trying to -or feeling tempted to- game the system to move up the list. I don't find the matter very compelling and haven't talked about it much here but it has produced some good tangential threads of discussion. The question of what it means to be popular -is it number of readers, ability to drive traffic, quality of readers...- came up last week. This week I find the topic turning to the collective consensus necessary to make something popular. Inherent in that discussion is a revisit to the "wisdom of the crowds" idea.
Reading this entry I saw a highlight quote from Tim O'Reilly describing an aspect of "the crowd" that we don't often see and it's stuck with me for a couple of days:
"When a group of seemingly independent actors are making decisions based on the same limited pool of information, they become more highly correlated, and thus 'stupider.'"
When we talk about the wisdom of the crowds we usually focus on the product, the aggregate. Advice about harnessing crowds also keeps to the fore the final product or project or program that manages to gather people together. But now we see that what is equally, if not more important is the diversity of the crowd and particularly the diversity of the information it draws from. The mind reels with examples of consensus that proved false because even though a variety of people agreed, they were all basing their conclusions on the same limited information. AhemIraqahem.
Speaking of wrangling crowds, The making of the Muslim left - The writer uses his experience with the proselytizing of Southern Christians to understand the "Islamic right" and design a plan for the creation of a Muslim left. The suggestion seems to be that you can use the same propaganda techniques to build a loyal group of good guys the way fanatical bad guys are rallied. I think there's something inherent in the techniques that produce the kinds of groups that acquire members this way that ultimately defeats the goal but it's an interesting idea to think about. Good comments section too.
Still speaking of wielding crowds, I had planned to pair to this Rush Limbaugh item in connection with the Randi Rhodes story before that fell apart but it still has some value in the context of crowd control, whether you're talking about siccing a mob of loyalists on a journalist or hiring a team of reporters to investigate or "expose."
By the way, if you can't bear to click the words "Rush Limbaugh item," the thing he's railing against is a new site called ProPublica, "a non-profit, investigative news room" which is apparently financed by people Rush doesn't like.
Speaking of social networking ideas, Web 2.0 porn sites is a plain boring SFW page that links to some extremely unsafe for just about anything but the privacy of your own lap sites. From the Web trends perspective, it's worth noting that the idea of online community members making recommendations to each other has applications to online porn as much as it does to online news or anything else. That said, I'm not sure (or maybe I'm not expert enough in porn to notice) there's anything distinct about how the crowd selects porn versus professional pornographers.
Speaking of sex in the computer age, Will humans marry robots in 50 years? Draws from this longer story on MSNBC.com. Am I missing something or would marrying a robot require granting it some kind of person status? Otherwise, wouldn't a robot be property? Anyway, Adam put together a list of the most desirable female robots (Hey, why would it just be men who would marry robots? Women have sex with robots too.) but I'm thinking if you're going to include the Bionic Woman as a robot you have to include Seven of Nine as a robot.
Speaking of the business of sex, When is rape at gunpoint not rape? When it’s “theft of services.” This feminist blog highlights the story or a prostitute who was forced to have sex with men who didn't pay (and who she didn't agree to have sex with anyway) and the judge doesn't see the forced sex as rape but as a product stolen without payment.
From the mailbag Tracy informs us, "[These photographs] are shot from INSIDE the photographer's mouth with a pinhole camera. They are some of the most bizarre, yet interesting photos I have ever seen."
China out-Americas America - Which is to say, it appears that they've produced a better P2P Web product because companies there have greater freedom to pursue the technology. "It’s not unreasonable to consider that next year and into the future that much of what we do online may end up being based on Chinese designed technology and programming, and not good ol’ fashioned American know-how."
Speaking of chilling effects on research, Mail harmless bacteria, go to jail. Imagine if they'd put LEDs on it.
The top 35 Environmental blogs
13 Reasons your Facebook account will be disabled - Not only is this handy for Facebook users but it's pretty good insight into how Facebook polices itself.
Mini-pigs - I've heard good things about pigs as pets. They're smart and house-trainable. How long before this is the new vanity pet?
Real time salary calculator. Enter the amount of money you make and it shows you a clock that counts off in money so you can watch your salary accumulate by the penny. It reminds me of the math we used to see when Michael Jordan was at his peak and people would figure out that he was making ten thousand dollars a second or something crazy like that. It also works as an interesting perspective on your monthly rent.
Is there life on a moon of Saturn? - "Dark, organic-rich material is splattering the face of Iapetus as it orbits Saturn, like a car whose windscreen is sprayed with water from other cars on a rainy day." If there's organic material on the moon as a result it of passing through space, doesn't that mean there's organic material in the space it's passing through?
Speaking of space, Anatomy of a black hole
Speaking of cool Flash animations this is a map/timeline of religion spreading across the world. We've seen this before in a less polished format. This one's nice and clear.
Speaking of cool global maps, this one shows the number of doctors per person in countries around the world. What's up with Australia? (Never mind, I misread it.)
Also on maps, How Google maps the world
Since reading this story about the guy trying to mail fighter jets to Iran one piece at a time I can't get the Johnny Cash song out of my head.
Happy Birthday Olive. (108!)
