Month: August 2007

Categories
Social Media

Commenting on aggregated items

Philipp Lenssen posted on the new Google News commenting feature, where people can submit comments for news items that show up at news.google.com.

The folks of Google describe this procedure, as soliciting commentary from those people ‘involved’:

We’ll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we’ll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as “comments” so readers know it’s the individual’s perspective, rather than part of a journalist’s report.

This makes little sense, because Google News is an aggregator of news, not an originator of news. The appropriate place for comments would be at the origination of the material, not within an aggregation of such. Will we begin to see comments attached to items on Google search in the future? Perhaps at Google Reader?

This move follows through on the Google “vision” of Web 3.0 I mentioned, briefly, yesterday, where Google is beginning to see itself as a cloud–the intermediary between those who read and those who produce. Except rather than passing people on through, it now wants to trap people at its sites in a move that could alter how people perceive the original news once–if–they do click through.

Anything that makes Steve Rubel happy is bound to dissatisfy me, and this is no exception. He writes:

This is certainly a boon for PR professionals who have longed for a way to respond to what is largely an automated system. Wikipedia needs a similar mechanism. Google is also fairly liberal in the sources it aggregates. It includes lots of homegrown sites and blogs. This approach, while managed manually, certainly gives companies and subjects a voice on a critical site that is increasingly a big gateway for lots of news/blog content.

(Incidental to this story, my response to his comment on Wikipedia is, huh? Largely automated system? What?)

Rubel’s only discontent is that the site doesn’t allow comments from everyone, everyone in this case, we presume to be the aforementioned PR people.

Philipp writes that the process of providing comments on news items at Google news will allow missing perspectives to be attached to a story, but it doesn’t, really. If the person arrives at the story outside of Google News they won’t see the writing. If they come in from Yahoo they won’t see the commentary. If they come in from link from one of us, they won’t see the commentary.

Any commentary should either be added as comment to the original story, or via a separate web site and linked in, which means that anyone can access this information at a later time regardless of how they found the story, and which search engine or news aggregator they use.

More importantly, to repeat what I wrote earlier, attaching a comment to the link to the story could influence perception of the story and that gives Google a dangerous level of power. We may attach commentary to links ourselves, but none of us bill ourselves as the source of information on the web.

Update

Citizen Media wrote on this:

The fact that Google is trying this is, in one sense, testament to an abject failure on the part of traditional news operations. With the Net, they could have given people the chance to comment in this way — above and beyond the standard comment published as part of a story or a letter to the editor. They didn’t, and left this opening.

Actually, this isn’t necessarily all that true nowadays. All but some of the larger publications now allows comments, or some form of feedback. The St. Louis Today site provides both a forum and Talkback.

This isn’t the little guy triumphing over the Big Media Companies–this is one very large, rather controlling, and not necessarily always ethical business working to keep you in their pages that much longer.

Google is larger and has more control over the flow of information than many of the so-called Big Media companies. Do not treat this company like it is one of us.

Another danger in all this? I found the Citizen Media link in Techmeme, a site that filters based on some form of ‘worth’, a type of worth that almost invariably eliminates most of the more unique viewpoints (including those of women). We do not need another gatekeeper applying its own Silicon Valley, white, affluent male view on who is or is not a ‘credible’ commenter.

Right now, anyone can get a space online and link to a story and comment on the story and all search bots can find such and include in their search archives. Searching for links to a story returns all the commentary, and the comments persist as long as you want. You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, and it does not require a gatekeeper. This way to comment certainly doesn’t require Google. This is the ‘little guy’ (or in most cases, little woman) having their say.

Categories
Just Shelley

Going South

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

It’s almost 8pm, the air conditioner has been on for seven hours solid, and it’s still close to 85 in my room. You can feel the heat pulse through the wall, which is a little unnerving. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for people without air conditioning.

I’ve also had some plans go somewhat south, which has forced me to look at my day to day activities and decide that I need some time offline instead of on. I don’t have a lot of patience lately, and sometimes weblogging really pushes the little I have. I also want to see if I can get the book finished sooner rather than later. Knock on wood.

Categories
Diversity Technology

Caltech: Glimmer and Glomming

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Susan Kitchens points out that the number of women in the freshmen class at Caltech has increased from 28.5 last year to 37 percent this year. That’s a significant rise, even though it doesn’t match other tech colleges (42 to 47 percent), or colleges in general (with 57 percent women).

Interesting how Caltech increased the enrollment of women:

Caltech officials said the school did not lower its admission standards, but did more actively and shrewdly recruit women this year.

For example, Caltech made its female applicants more aware that they could be physics majors but also study music and literature, said Rick Bischoff, director of undergraduate admissions.

“That’s not to say men are not interested in those issues,” but those seem to resonate more with women, Bischoff said.

In other words, Caltech made a specific decision to increase women’s participation, pursued such actively and was successful. In some circles hereabouts, the feelings seem to be that actively recruiting women as participants is equivalent to ‘lowering’ the overall quality of the participants.

Susan, and the article, both mention the concept of ‘glomming’, where groups of young men at Caltech will follow a young woman around, lie in wait for her, and sit staring at her.

Personally, everyone participating in this should be expelled from school. Such juvenile behavior belongs in Kindergarten, not college. Perhaps if these boys would be encouraged to take literature and music, they might act like well-rounded and healthy men.

The only issue I have with all of this is that I hope that bringing more women into Caltech isn’t seen as a way of making the educational experience better for the men–you know, more dates for the poor geeks. We do not exist to keep you guys from feeling lonely.

We don’t exist for you guys at all.

Categories
Healthcare

Healthcare: Presidential comparisons

Susan Blumenthal provided one of the best in-depth analysis of Presidential candidates health care plans, in objective, side-by-side comparison of all the candidates: Republican and Democrat.

In explaining the charts, she wrote:

With our current sick care system, Americans cannot afford — socially, politically, economically, or otherwise — to remain on the sidelines. We have a window of opportunity to establish a real health care system with the upcoming 2008 presidential election. It is up to the presidential candidates and the American public to bring health care concerns to the forefront, and engage in meaningful dialogue about various proposals to provide quality health care to all Americans. And then it is up to us to vote.

I’m not writing with either bias or bigotry when I describe the Republican plans as being almost completely non-existent. Most of the candidates vaguely mention something about working with the health care industry to ‘make it better’. Few see the need for universal care for all. Many emphasize how people need to take care of themselves. If a Republican is elected president, it is very doubtful that we’ll see any change–either moderate or meaningful–in health care or coverage.

Of the Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton has done the poorest job of addressing this issue, and I’ve reluctantly have had to drop support for her candidacy because of this. I’ve had to also re-think some of my ideas of a general single-payer universal health care plan, as supported by Dodd and Kucinich. Both provide no effective way to implement such, other than taxing the rich more.

Barak Obama and John Edwards really have done the best job of providing a fairly detailed description of what they would do, how they would do it, and how much it would cost. I respect what both have done in this regard, and their innovative plans.

However, I believe that John Edwards has the most effective plan. His concept of a state and federal Health Market to provide coverage for those who may not have it, or for those who do and believe such is better, is an effective way to begin easing this country into a true universal health care, single-payer system. It doesn’t eliminate all of the problems, true. For instance, doctors and hospitals have to maintain staff just to be able to figure out how each health care provider does their paperwork, and understanding what is, or isn’t, covered. In addition, there will be providers who integrate profit into their business model, and all profit that goes into the concept of providing insurance rather than care is ultimately not beneficial to the American people.

Still, the people of this country will not vote to federalize any private industry, even one most hold in disdain like the Health Insurance industry. We’ve been too deeply ingrained against such. By providing a competitive system where the need for profits for shareholders is removed from the business model, such plans should end up being ‘better’ than anything provided by anyone else. Allowing employers, employees, the self-employed, virtually anyone, access to Health Markets either will force the for-profit organizations into doing better, or eventually, gradually, ease them out of business.

As for the cost, what Edwards quotes does seem reasonable. Considering that we’re spending 120 billion a year in Iraq, once we pull out of that country, we could effectively transfer those funds over to health care and see few tax increases for the middle class, or loss of services in other areas of the government. Even the wealthier won’t have to give up their third homes, or fourth cars.

Susan J. Blumenthal, M.D., Jessica B. Rubin, Michelle E. Treseler, Jefferson Lin, and David Mattos. U.S. Presidential Candidates’ Prescriptions for a Healthier Future: A Side-by-Side Comparison. Huffington Post 9 July 2007.