Regarding the author’s remarks made in the first few paragraphs of the article about comments and commenters, it seems to me that the number of people who post comments to online articles is (perhaps to a lesser extent here on ArsTechnica) usually much larger than the number of people whose education — formal or not — allows them to understand the article well, let alone make meaningful comments.

This is, I think, but one manifestation of many people’s tendency to express themselves in many more situations than when they have something to express. Turned into habit, this leads to confusions like the one discussed by the article, which are IMO a natural outcome of situations in which people who barely passed their high school math and physics tests develop their own opinions (or parrot those of their peers) about topics like dynamic systems. Moreover, put this together with the openness of an online “debate” — which lures people into feeling welcome to discussions where they’re utterly out of their depth yet don’t realize it — and another interesting specimen appears: the person who’s opinionated without really having an opinion.

On soccer fields, we hear these people blowing in vuvuzelas; in the comment sections of online articles though, that option is unavailable, so they’re only left with (ab)using the “Leave a comment” option. Could we, perhaps, eliminate most meaningless comments by adding a button labeled “Blow a vuvuzela” next to the one that says “Leave a comment”?…

In that sense, the highly disturbing “like” and “retweet” buttons one can find on so many sites now may actually have the boon to prevent some people from posting a comment. Not the sophistication of Slashdot’s karma based moderation system but potentially effective…

Together with Alex Beaugrand, a student of mine, I have built (a couple of month ago) another little search mashup / interface that allows users to switch between a tag cloud view and a list / cluster mode. contextDigger uses the delicious and Bing APIs to widen the search space using associated searches / terms and then Yahoo BOSS to download a thousand results that can be filtered through the interface. It uses the principle of faceted navigation to shorten the list : if you click on two terms, only the results associated with both of them will appear…

If service providers can close APIs at will, developers might hesitate when deciding whether to put in the necessary coding hours to built the latest mashup. But it is mashups that over the last years have really explored many of the directions left blank by “pure” applications. This creative force should be cherished and I wonder if there may be a need for something similar to creative commons for APIs – a legal construct that gives at least some basic rights to mashup developers…

My job in the project was to build a Web application that allows people to interact with and make sense of the data produced by the watches. Despite the help from several brilliant students from our professional Masters program, this proved to be a daunting task and I spent *at lot* of time programming. The result is quite OK I believe; the application allows users to explore the data (which is organized in localized “experiments”) in different ways, either in real-time or afterward. With a little more time (we had only about three month for the whole project and we got the hardware only days before the first public showcase) we could have done more but I’m still quite content with the result. Especially the heatmap (see image) algorithm was fun to program, I’ve never done a lot of visual stuff so this was new territory and a steep learning curve.

Unfortunately, the strong emphasis on the technological side and the various problems we had (the agile methods one needs for experimental projects are still not understood by many companies) cut down the time for reflection to a minimum and did not allow us to come up with a deeper analysis of the social and political dimensions of what could be called “distributed urban intelligence”. The whole project is embedded in a somewhat naive rhetoric of citizen participation and the idea that technological innovation can solve social problems, in this case matters of urban planning and local governance. A lesson I have learned from this is that the current emphasis in funding on short-term projects that bring together universities and the industry makes it very difficult to carve out an actual space for scientific practice between all the deadlines and the heavy technical demands. And by scientific practice, I mean a *critical* practice that does not only try to base specifications and prototyping on “scientifically valid” approaches to building tools and objects but which includes a reflection on social utility that takes a wider view than just immediate usefulness. In the context of this project, this would have implied a close look at how urban development is currently configured in respect to environmental concerns in order to identify structures of governance and chains of decision-making. This way, the whole project could have targeted issues more clearly and consciously, fine-tuning both the tools and the accompanying discourse to the social dimension it aimed at.

I think my point is that we (at least I) have to learn how to better include a humanities-based research agenda into very high-tech projects. We have known for a long time now that every technical project is in fact a socio-technical enterprise but research funding and the project proposals that it generates are still pretending that the “socio-” part is some fluffy coating that decorates the manly material core where cogs and wire produce tangible effects. As I programmer I know how difficult and time-consuming technical work can be but if there is to be a conscious socio-technical perspective in R&D we have to accept that the fluffy stuff takes even more time – if it is done right. And to do it right means not only reading every book and paper relevant to a subject matter but to take the time to reflect on methodology, to evaluate every step critically, to go back to the drawing board, and to include and to produce theory every step of the way. There is a cost to the scientific method and if that cost is not figured in, the result may still be useful, interesting, thought-provoking, etc. but it will not be truly scientific. I believe that we should defend these costs and show why they are necessary; if we cannot do so, we risk confining the humanities to liberal armchair commentary and the social sciences to ex-post usage analysis.

PS: termCloud Search was recently a “mashup of the day” at programmeableweb.com…

1. Usefulness to constituents for watching over and communicating with their members of Congress
2. Potential impact of ethical standards on Congress

The design goal is accountability and that indeed is a perfect case for society oriented design. While people in Europa love to scold the US for their lack of data protection and privacy laws, just looking at the APIs the contest proposes to use makes me salivate for something similar in France. If you look at the Capitol Words API for example, just imagine the kind of discourse analysis one could build on that. Representations of what is said in Congress that make the data digestable and bring at least some of the debate potentially closer to citizens. The whole thing is just a really great idea…

One of the vectors of making search more productive in the framework of liberal democracy is to think about search not merely as the fasted way to get from a query to a Web page, but to think about how modern technologies might help in providing an overview on the complex landscape of a topic. I have always thought that clusty – a metasearcher that takes results from Live, Ask, DMOZ, and other sources and organizes them in thematic clusters – does a really good job in that respect. If you search for “globalisation”, the first ten clusters are: Economic, Research, Resources, Anti-globalisation, Definition, Democracy, Management, Impact, Economist-Economics, Human. Clicking on a cluster will bring you the results that clusty’s algorithms judge as pertinent for the term in question. Very often, just looking on the clusters gives you a really good idea of what the topic is about and instead of just homing in on the first result, the search process itself might have taught you something.

I’ve been playing around with Yahoo BOSS for one of the programming classes I teach and I’ve come up with a simple application that follows a similar principle. TermCloud Search (edit: I really would like to work on this some more and the name SearchCloud was already taken, so I changed it…) is a small browser-based app that uses the “keyterms” (a list of keywords the system provides you with for every URL found) feature of Yahoo BOSS to generate a tagcloud for every search you make. It takes 250 results and lets the user navigate these results by clicking on a keyword. The whole thing is really just a quick hack but it shows how easy it is to add such “overview” features to Web search. Just try querying “globalisation” and look at the cloud – although it’s just extracted keywords, a representation of the topic and its complexity does emerge at least somewhat.

I’ll certainly explore this line of experimentation over the next months, jQuery is making the whole API thing really fun, so stay tuned. For the moment I’m kind of fascinated by the possibilities and by imagining search as a pedagogical process, not just a somewhat inconvenient stage in accessing content that has to be speeded up by personalization and such. Search can become in itself a knowledge producing (not just knowledge finding) activity by which we may explore a subject on a more general level.

And now I’ve got an article to finish…

So what’s our straightforward definition of the ideal search engine? Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know. That search engine could tailor answers to you based on your preferences, your existing knowledge and the best available information; it could ask for clarification and present the answers in whatever setting or media worked best.

It’s from Google’s official blog so everybody and the Denver Broncos (keyword used solely to scramble the document vector of this post) has already commented on it but here’s my 50 centimes.

The first thing that strikes me about Mayer’s definition of the ideal search engine is the “your best friend” thing. Why would I want to be friends with a search engine? This goes very much in the direction of “don’t be evil”, Google’s famous corporate motto, which is, in my view, based on the (erroneous) believe that questions of power can be reduced to questions of morals. “Your best friend” could mean that the search engine will know a lot about you but it will not tell your boss that you search for pr0n on a daily basis. If you live in China it might tell the authorities where you’re at but a friend would too, given the right incentive. The idea is that you can confide in your best friend, spill your dirty little secrets without having to fear that they will pop up somewhere on the blogosphere. So there’s the privacy issue and Mayer is suggesting that you can trust Google with the growing pool of data you leave in their (floating!) datacenters.

The second matter is more subtle and kind of revitalizes all the critique that has been written concerning Nicholas Negroponte’s idea of the “daily me”, most notably the concept of the “echo chamber” which holds that personalization results in people getting exposed only to the views that they already agree with. I am not sure whether such a situation is imminent, in fact, I agree with much of what David Weinberger says in this article, but given the fact that search has become such a pervasive practice, one cannot easily dismiss it. My real problem though is that personalization has become the dominant direction of search engine evolution when there are so many different paths to go down. Mayer actually talks about one:

Yet our presentation is still very linear (the results are just a list) and even (no one result is more important or larger than the next). What if the results page began to transform radically to really harness these different types of results into something that felt much more like an answer rather than just 10 independent guesses?

I find the idea of making the results page smarter very intriguing but not the conclusion of making it more “like an answer”. Why not add semantic clustering along the lines of Clusty, why not add the possibility to easily weight search terms or to better interact with the search results? I find the idea of rendering everything always more convenient and less of an effort quite troubling indeed. Why is there no button to the really useful cheat sheet on the main page? Has the idea of educating users become so completely unthinkable? I’d prefer to have more control over ranking and better means to refine my search and organize my results than a new best friend. Google has all the ingredients for delivering potentially great semantic mapping that would not give definite answers but a better overview of the heterogeneity of search results. Unfortunately, the idea of personalization seems to completely overshadow the more enlightened concept of augmentation.

Instead of trying to mechanize equality, we should obligate search engine companies to perform a much less ambiguous public service by demanding that they grant access to their indexes and server farms. If users have no choice but to place confidence in search engines, why not ask these corporations to return the trust by allowing users to create their own search mechanisms? This would give the public the possibility to develop search algorithms that do not focus on commercial interest: search techniques that build on criteria that render commercial hijacking very difficult. Lately we have seen some action to promote more user participation and control, but the measures undertaken are not going very far. From a technical point of view, it would be easy for the big players to propose programming frameworks that allow writing safe code for execution in their server environment; the conceptual layers already are modules and replacing one search (or representation) module with another should not be a problem. The open source movement as part of the civil society has already proven it’s capabilities in various fields and where control is impossible, choice might be the only answer. To counter complete fragmentation and provide orientation, we could imagine that respected civic organizations like the FSF endorse specific proposals from the chaotic field of search algorithms that would emerge. In France, television networks have to invest a percentage of their revenue in cinema, why not make search engine companies dedicate a percentage of their computer power to algorithms written by the public? This would provide the necessary processing capabilities to civil society without endangering the business model of those companies; they could still place advertising and even keep their own search algorithms a secret. But there would be alternatives – alternative (noncommercial) viewpoints and hierarchies – to choose from.

I believe that the Google App Engine could be the technical basis for what could be called the Google Search Sandbox, a hosting platform equipped with either an API to the company’s vast indexes or even something as simple as a means to change weights for parameters in the existing set of algorithms. A simple JSON input like {“shop”:”-1″, “checkout”:”-1″,”price”:”-1″,”cart”:”-1″,”bestseller”:”-1″} could be enough to e.g. eliminate amazon pages from the result list. SEOing for these scripts would be difficult because there would be many different varieties (one of the first would be bernosworld.google.com – we aim to displease! no useful results guaranteed!). It is of course not in Google’s best interest to implement something like this because many scripts might direct users away from commercial pages using AdSense, the foundation of the company’s revenue stream. But this is why we have governments. Hoping for or even legislating more transparency and “inclusive” search might be less effective than people wish. I demand access to the index!

Boiled down, it goes like this: Humans get their information from two places — from mainstream media or some other centralized organization such as a church, and from their network of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. We’ve already digitized the first. Almost every news organization has a website now. What Zuckerberg is trying to do with Facebook is digitize the second.

This quote very much reminds me of some of the issues discussed in the “Digital Formations” volume edited by Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen in 2005. In their introduction (available online) they coin the (unpronounceable and therefore probably doomed) term “sociodigitization” by distinguishing it from “digitization”:

The qualifier “socio” is added to distinguish from the process of content conversion, the broader process whereby activities and their histories in a social domain are drawn up into the digital codes, databases, images, and text that constitute the substance of a digital formation. As the various chapters below show, such drawing up can be a function of deliberate planning and reflexive ordering or of contingent and discrete interactions and activities. In this respect as well, sociodigitization differs from digitization: what is rendered in digital form is not only information and artifacts but also logics of social organization, interaction, and space as discussed above.

Facebook, then, is quite plainly an example for the explicit (socio-)digitization of social relations that were mediated quite differently in the past. The “network of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues” that is now recreated inside of the system has of course been relying on technical (and digital) means of communication and interaction for quite a while, and these media did play a role in shaping the relations they helped sustain. There is no need to cite McLuhan to understand that relating to distant friends and family by mail or telephone will influence the way these relations are lived and how they evolve. Being rather stable dispositifs, the specific logics of individual media (their affordances) were largely covered up by habitualization (cf. Berger & Luckmann1967, p.53); it is the high speed of software development on the Web that makes the “rendering of logics of social organization, interaction, and space” so much more visible. In that sense, what started out as media theory is quickly becoming software theory or the theory of ICT. There is, of course, a strong affiliation with Lawrence Lessig’s thoughts about computer code (now in v. 2.0) and its ability to function as both constraint and incentive, shaping human behavior in a fashion comparable to law, morals, and the market.

The important matter seems to be the understanding of how sociodigitization proceeds in the context of the current explosion of Web-based software applications that is set to (re)mediate a great number of everyday practices. While media theory in the tradition of McLuhan has strived to identify the invariant core, the ontological essence of individual media, such an endeavor seems futile when it comes to software, whose prime caracteristic is malleability. This forces us to concentrate the analysis of “system properties” (i.e. the specific and local logic of sociodigitization) on individual platforms or, at best, categories of applications. When looking at Facebook, this means analyzing the actual forms the process of digitization leads to as well as the technical and cultural methods involved. How do I build and grow my network? What are the forms of interaction the system proposes? Who controls data structure, visibility, and perpetuity? What are the possibilities for building associations and what types of public do they give rise to?

In the context of my own work, I ask myself how we can formulate the cultural, ethical, and political dimension of systems like Facebook as matters of design, and not only on a descriptive level, but on the level of design methodology and guidelines. The critical analysis of social network sites and the cultural phenomena that emerge around them is, of course, essential but shouldn’t there be more debate of how such systems should work? What would a social network look like that is explicitly build on the grounds of a political theory of democracy? Is such a think even thinkable?