Category: Social Media

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.

Another weekend, and another carefully calculated self-love link fest where some A lister makes a bold and basically useless announcement, and others rush to support. If you want to increase your link count, writing self-centered, arrogant, and useless posts with bald titles filled with hyperbole works rather well.

What was particularly sad about this weekend’s lovefest, though, is that the subject was about Facebook but didn’t reflect the real story that was going around: the bias and bigotry in Facebook against older people.

I didn’t last on Facebook enough to see it’s ugly face. I found out about such through Ronnie Bennett, odd time signature, and Freydblog. What they found was an undercurrent of hatred against older people, manifested in groups like the following:

F*CK** OLD PEOPLE: 107 members
Asking old people for a quarter then throwing it in there face…..hahaha!: 143 members
I Beat up old people: 53 members
I like to beat the living crap out of old people. (sic): 15 members
Pill pushing nurses to the possessed elderly….: 32 members
Eradicating the elderly: 12 members
If this group reaches 2′000 people, i will push a old lady down the stiars: (sic) 164 members
OLD PEOPLE SHOULD JUST DIE: 19 members

Among the messages posted to the groups:

Let us unite and join for a common cause, abolish social security and legalize euthanasia.

Who is with me on this, who thinks old people in school should be taken into the quad and be tarred and feathered for their annoyance , stupidity, and outright wasting of time.

Maria also writes on this topic:

I must admit, when I first signed on to Facebook, I felt a bit like a teenager sneaking into the house late at night, hoping not to wake up the parents — or, in this case, catch the attention of the kids. Reading the quotes Ronni gathered from Facebook makes the blood run cold in my veins, as does the realization that you can’t delete your account on Facebook, only deactivate it. (In some strange way, this maybe a blessing for the old-hating young whose words may well come back to bite them in their eventually sagging asses…)

(Maria also links to other good posts and comments including one by Yule Heibel, who wrote this weekend that Climates of trust are built on response and responsiveness. Not related to the issue, but compelling, nonetheless.)

Of course, youth has always rejected the older, and resented our positions of both authority and influence. Pushing back at old farts is a social phenomena that many of us remember from the days of Vietnam war protests (anyone remember Don’t trust anyone over 30! placards?) It’s not surprising to see such groups or even messages. I think what is disquieting is the fact that Facebook, which promises to abolish ‘hate’ groups, does not see these as such.

This isn’t surprising really, nor is it surprising that the 23 year old founder of the application, Mark Zukerberg, wouldn’t be overly concerned. In our rush to a new social network we have idolized youth; made them the pampered pets of social networking. More importantly, we have both taught and celebrated the right of free expression without promoting an awareness that the best expression is accompanied by both empathy and respect.

The younger the person the more self-absorbed and that’s natural; after all, it takes experience to become empathetic. Over time, society and our interactions within it help most (not all) of us to see beyond just our own needs, our own wants. We become friends with people outside our age group, race, class, or country. We learn that being aware of others, their needs and feelings, isn’t the same as ‘selling out’; nor is it destructive of ‘self’.

However, what I’m seeing with some of the social networking sites (just some, not all), is that rather than expose people to different viewpoints, they can reinforce barriers against the the natural processes that abrade self-absorbed behavior. When challenged in one’s day to day life to give o’er our preconceptions or biases, rather than learn to adapt and grow socially, we can rush home and twitter, blog, and Facebook with others who have exactly our same point of view. We can safely ensconce ourselves behind a buffer of like-minded folks, postponing, perhaps indefinitely, the need to challenge our “world is me me me” view.

An example: another reason I lost interest in Facebook, other than my disinterest in the distraction, had to do with the recent story about Facebook and Zukerberg being sued because another company says he stole their code and concept. The suit is still ongoing and who is to say whether it has merit or not. But one thing I noticed among the Facebook fans is that they were less interested in the merits behind the suit–the possibility that the code and idea may have been stolen–and more concerned about losing their special place and that harm could come to their ‘hero’. They were completely apathetic about whether Zukerberg stole the code or not. If the courts ruled he did, as long as they still have their ‘special place’, they would be indifferent to the finding and Zukerberg would still be their ‘hero’.

The world ‘bankrupt’ was flipped around this weekend, and used incorrectly and badly at that. The real ‘bankruptcy’ I’m seeing with a site like Facebook, and perhaps even some forms of social networking in general, is an empathetic bankruptcy–perhaps even a moral bankruptcy, if that term hasn’t been permanently corrupted because of its overuse and abuse by the religious conservatives–as sites like these become the sugar tit of upcoming generations.

But then, I am over 30, and therefore my opinion and this writing are not to be trusted.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Through the encouragement of my advisers, I decided to publicly announce the beginning of a new super-secret stealth project: Bitchrs. As pitched in comments, the premise behind the service is that …you can pay people to be mean to others for you. That way you can say what you want, without having to be personally accountable. I mean, it doesn’t get more Web 2.0 than that, does it?

I was inspired to begin this effort by Guy Kawasaki, when he wrote on his Truemers effort:

In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

Ha! I can beat that. I can throw together a startup in five days, for $43.86 and a case of diet orange pop.

I’m already contemplating the spinoff once Bitchrs goes big–and we all know it will go big–inspired by Marc Andreessen’s post, Bubble? There ain’t no stinken bubbles!, and his sabre tooth tiger economics:

The human psyche seems to have a powerful underlying need to predict doom and gloom.

I suspect this need was evolved into us way back when.

If there is a nonzero chance that a giant man-eating saber-tooth tiger is going to come over the nearest hill and chomp you, then it’s in your evolutionary best interest to predict doom and gloom more frequently than it actually happens.

The cost of hiding from a nonexistent giant man-eating saber-tooth tiger is low, but the cost of not hiding from a real giant man-eating saber-tooth tiger is quite high.

So hiding more often than there are tigers makes a lot of sense, if you’re a caveman.

Cavemen, tigers, and dot-com bubbles. It fits. So much so that I’m not waiting for the inevitable success of Bitchrs and am introducing the new super-secret stealth project now: Doomrs, where you can hire people to supply all the criticism, caution, and skepticism that you, yourself, believe with all your heart, BUT are afraid to vocalize and still be invited to hang out with all the Kool Kids.

Ladies and Gentlemen, forget Flickr, forget del.iciou.us, forget Google. This is the face of Web 2.0:

Bitchrs. We bitch, so you don’t have to.

Doomrs. Reality hurts. Don’t be real.

For early subscribers, a bonus service: Gripelets for Twitter.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Like the rest of the world, I’ve been exploring the tutorial and examples for the new Google Gears. I was particularly caught by the addition of SQLite for offline storage–I never imagined a day installing a relational database on your client’s machine via the browser on the fly.

It’s remarkably easy to get up and running, and the API is quite simple, too. I copied the database example; now I just need to figure out what to do with it.

I also tried the download static pages example, mainly to check out how the data is stored locally. Interesting storage structure. Could get local disk space intensive if not used wisely.

Should be loads of fun playing in the future.

Melinda Casino points to this longish, well documented essay, Why are there so few women on Digg by Academic Pointillism. The author is a Digg subscriber who wonders at the lack of women participating in the site.

One of the possible reasons given for the lack of women is that many of the stories are male centric. I checked today, and found about half the stories interesting and only one really being male centric. The one I found most interesting is the site with the babies swimming and not because I’m into the maternal thing, but because I found the photography to be really excellent (the site has since been taken down–see below). There was also a fun Google images game that reminds me of a Flickr game that Scott Reynen created.

Other reasons the author gives have to do with sexism, racism, and homophobia in the comments, as well as objectification of women. She has a couple of suggestions, one of which–get more women involved in the development of the site and how it’s architected–I can get behind completely. By women, I mean women in technology–not marketing, not human resources.

What was said about Digg could be same about Slashdot, as well as the sites like Techmeme, Tailrank, and Megite: it’s rare for a female voice to be heard in any of these environments.

I can agree with some of the author’s opinions, but not all. Objectification of women is an issue, but I think the idea that women can’t go online and express a strong opinion without getting sexual and violent threats has been badly overplayed lately. Is it a problem? Yes, but not as pervasive as others. I think women’s biggest problem is we’re not heard, or when we are, not always given equal respect. There’s few things that will discourage a person more than feeling like we’re not heard, and I include getting dismissive and demeaning responses in the ‘not being heard’ category.

Then there is the question: are women as interested? I find sites like Digg and Slashdot to be occasionally interesting, I tip into Metafilter from time to time, I rarely read mailing lists, and only read the tech sheets once a day to see what the artificially inflated stories are. I just have better uses of my time. Now, I don’t know if I’m representative of women (or older techs) or not–all I can do is give anecdotal data.

Regardless, it’s a thoughtful, well researched, and objectively detailed writing and I’ll do my little bit to try and get this on to the tech sheets.