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January 6, 2012
Did I ever mention the really useful site Matt Phillips and Jeff Goldenson at the Library Innovation Lab put up a couple of weeks ago? If you are interested in libraries and tech, Library News is a community-supported news site where you’ll find a steady stream of interesting articles. Or, put differently, it’s the Hacker News code redirected at library tech articles.
I have it open all day. Try it. Contribute to it. Go library hacker nuts!
The Atlantic asked me five hard questions, to which I responded at some length. It’s nice not to have to compress!
Andrew Keen had me on TechCrunch TV, which was generous of him. Thanks, Andrew.
[A few minutes later] The always-fresh CBC radio program, Spark, just posted a 26 minute interview with me. (Nora Young is a wonderful. There, I said it.)
January 3, 2012
Because it’s book launch day, there’s more about me to post than usual or than I’m comfortable with. Nevertheless:
The Atlantic is running a substantial excerpt of the chapter on scientific knowledge.
And I had a really fun hour on Colin McEnroe’s show on WNPR in Connecticut this afternoon. They’ve already posted it. Colin’s a great interviewer, and I appreciate having the full hour with him.
Today is the official launch of Too Big to Know. Yay!
Marketplace Tech ran a 4 minute interview with me about it this morning. More interviews etc. are coming up, including on WNPR (Connecticut public radio) with Colin McEnroe at 1 pm today.
I will, alas, be noting media/marketing stuff on this blog over the next few weeks.
January 2, 2012
Jonah Lehrer has a terrific article at Wired about the limitations of the causality model as data scales up and becomes more complex. (I’m over-simplifying to the point of inaccuracy.)
January 1, 2012
Salon has just posted an interview with me, (edited) by Thomas Rogers. Tom steered the discussion in useful directions. Thanks, Tom!
I do need to disclaim the last answer, though. I’m sure I said it, but what I meant is that this is the greatest time in human history to be a knowledge seeker. I don’t think this is the greatest time in human history overall. Although it certainly is for dentistry.
Here’s my top ten list of top ten lists of top ten lists:
Come on, people! If just nine more of you compile top ten top ten top tens we can take it up a level!
Bonus: The media can’t get enough of top ten lists. When they run out, they write about why they write about top ten lists:
[Later that day:] I’ve removed one from the list so that there are actually ten, not eleven. Oops. (And again, later, because I am a @#$%ing moron.)
December 31, 2011
Click the image to see it full size.
December 23, 2011
Mathew Ingram has a provocative post at Gigaom defending HuffingtonPost and its ilk from the charge that they over-aggregate news to the point of thievery. I’m not completely convinced by Mathew’s argument, but that’s because I’m not completely convinced by any argument about this.
It’s a very confusing issue if you think of it from the point of view of who owns what. So, take the best of cases, in which HuffPo aggregates from several sources and attributes the reportage appropriately. It’s important to take a best case since we’ll all agree that if HuffPo lifts an article en toto without attribution, it’s simple plagiarism. But that doesn’t tell us if the best cases are also plagiarisms. To make it juicier, assume that in one of these best cases, HuffPo relies heavily on one particular source article. It’s still not a slam dunk case of theft because in this example HuffPo is doing what we teach every school child to do: If you use a source, attribute it.
But, HuffPo isn’t a schoolchild. It’s a business. It’s making money from those aggregations. Ok, but we are fine in general with people selling works that aggregate and attribute. Non-fiction publishing houses that routinely sell books that have lots of footnotes are not thieves. And, as Mathew points out, HuffPo (in its best cases) is adding value to the sources it aggregates.
But, HuffPo’s policy even in its best case can enable it to serve as a substitute for the newspapers it’s aggregating. It thus may be harming the sources its using.
And here we get to what I think is the most important question. If you think about the issue in terms of theft, you’re thrown into a moral morass where the metaphors don’t work reliably. Worse, you may well mix in legal considerations that are not only hard to apply, but that we may not want to apply given the new-ness (itself arguable) of the situation.
But, I find that I am somewhat less conflicted about this if I think about it terms of what direction we’d like to nudge our world. For example, when it comes to copyright I find it helpful to keep in mind that a world full of music and musicians is better than a world in which music is rationed. When it comes to news aggregation, many of us will agree that a world in which news is aggregated and linked widely through the ecosystem is better than one in which you—yes, you, since a rule against HuffPo aggregating sources wouldn’t apply just to HuffPo— have to refrain from citing a source for fear that you’ll cross some arbitrary limit. We are a healthier society if we are aggregating, re-aggregating, contextualizing, re-using, evaluating, and linking to as many sources as we want.
Now, beginning by thinking where we want the world to be —which, by the way, is what this country’s Founders did when they put copyright into the Constitution in the first place: “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”—is useful but limited, because to get the desired situation in which we can aggregate with abandon, we need the original journalistic sources to survive. If HuffPo and its ilk genuinely are substituting for newspapers economically, then it seems we can’t get to where we want without limiting the right to aggregate.
And that’s why I’m conflicted. I don’t believe that even if all rights to aggregate were removed (which no one is proposing), newspapers would bounce back. At this point, I’d guess that the Net generation is primarily interested in news mainly insofar as its woven together and woven into the larger fabric. Traditional reportage is becoming valued more as an ingredient than a finished product. It’s the aggregators—the HuffingtonPosts of the world, but also the millions of bloggers, tweeters and retweeters, Facebook likers and Google plus-ers, redditors and slashdotters, BoingBoings and Ars Technicas— who are spreading the news by adding value to it. News now only moves if we’re interested enough in it to pass it along. So, I don’t know how to solve journalism’s deep problems with its business models, but I can’t imagine that limiting the circulation of ideas will help, since in this case, the circulatory flow is what’s keeping the heart beating.
[A few minutes later] Mathew has also posted what reads like a companion piece, about how Amazon’s Kindle Singles are supporting journalism.
December 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews is one of the most important sources for the book trade, so I’m extra special glad they like Too Big to Know.
Razor-sharp analysis of the state of knowledge in the age of computer networking.
Weinberger (Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, 2007, etc.), a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Institute for Internet and Society, argues that the collaborative, hyperlinked, instant nature of the Internet has fundamentally altered the way humans relate with knowledge. In the Gutenberg age, because of the finite nature of the book, limited by both its number of pages and the number of copies that could be printed, knowledge was necessarily ordered and hierarchical. The author added pieces to the collective store of knowledge, while publishers, editors, librarians and the community of scholars decided for the common good what was and was not important to know. The Internet has radically upended that hierarchy and knocked down the walls of the knowledge store. In 1989, pundits worried that with 1,000 books published in the world every day, people were suffering from information overload. That was small potatoes, it turns out. In 2008, Weinberger writes, Americans consumed 3.6 zettabytes, “a number so large that we have to do research just to understand it.” The author suggests that we make peace with this overwhelming state of affairs, and it seems many of us already have. The democratizing of knowledge is not without its dangers. Bad information has equal access to the common well with good information, and is just as viral. But crowdsourced and refereed resources like Wikipedia give Weinberger hope. The difference between the old style of knowing and the new one is embodied in the differences between a set of encyclopedias and Google. One can fit on a shelf; the other is uncontainable, essentially “an infrastructure of connection.”
A witty and wise companion in this new age of information overload.
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