Archives for July 2009

Many thanks for all the thoughtful comments over the last weeks which are provoking much debate in the production office and will help enrich the series.

I was particularly drawn to TaiwanChallenges' point about Nicholas Taleb and the winner-takes-almost-all nature of the web. And wondered whether we should build this up into one of the big themes of the series.

It is compelling that the web, despite being so fluid, porous, open, an apparent free-for-all, is dominated in effect by a handful of monopoly brands. Let's face it, there's only one search engine that matters, one bookshop, one encyclopaedia, one micro-blogging portal (I don't even have to name these do I?) and, if current take-up numbers are to be believed and the trajectory continues, in a few years Facebook will be the social network with clout.

In part these brands rose to dominance because they formulated the right strategy at the right time to blaze a trail into - to borrow Taleb's phrasing - the web's unknown unknown commercial territory. Google 'got' how to monetise search before anyone else. Twitter created a whole new utility. But is that the whole story?

I'd argue there's another dimension to this. These big brands surely get to tipping point so quickly and so completely because they go viral - because users stampede en masse in a certain direction.

When I think about online crowds, I can't help imagining thousands of startled wildebeest twisting and turning away from lions on the veldt. I know the 'crowd' is in reality lots of fragmented individuals individually interacting with their machines. But aggregated they behave, it seems to me, like a frightened, faddish, conformist herd.

That's a problem no doubt for creative competition on the web. It may also be a problem for users - for us members of the herd. It begs the question whether people live life authentically on the web as they default with Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook. It also makes me question whether the viral passing round of derivative home-spun sketches as 'internet gold' on YouTube aren't just a function of users going unthinkingly through the motions rather than tuning into the little boy in them quietly questioning the whereabouts of the emperors' clothes. And then you hear about Tweeters and Facebook members who force themselves to pass on banal details of their everyday lives to strangers only next to complain of 'status update anxiety' to shrinks. 

One of the great attributes of humans, surely, is their ability to separate themselves from the group and 'groupthink'. But the web doesn't encourage that... rather promotes the opposite.

OK, so this post may not be so relevant to readers here who are a savvy bunch, and no doubt seek out new forms of creative expression and trawl the web's niches each and every day. Right? But am I wrong about the big majority of users out there?

Is it a theme worth developing? Please give us feedback.

• Are you a deletionist or an inclusionist? We would be interested in your experiences, your methods and motivation

• Do you have a visualisation of Wikipedia's hierarchy? Its structure and variety of users? We'd be interested to see it.

(Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for founding Wikipedia.org, as well as other wiki-related organizations, including the charitable organization Wikimedia Foundation, and the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. The following post is published with kind permission and represents Jimmy's views; this does not necessarily reflect the views of the BBC or the Digital Revolution production.)

Aleks Krotoski repeats many of the popular myths about my goals for Wikipedia. I am transparent, she says, in my goal to "challenge the academic Ivory Tower." Wikipedia, she says, is "an extraordinary experiment in crowdsourcing an objective truth from the wisdom of crowds". But unfortunately, the story goes, and as Kevin Kelley has written, Wikipedia has drifted over time from "digital utopia" to something "more structured, more elitist, a little more bourgeoisie."

This is a common pattern - to posit that yes, in the early days, Wikipedia was an anarchist dream, a hippie commune, a little bit of socialism or communism that actually worked - but over time, it had to grow up, to institute controls. Some may actually sigh in relief:
see, we always knew the old ways were best.

Unfortunately this rough storyline is not particularly in line with the facts.

To illustrate how, it is only necessary to recount the history - and media reaction - of our "protection" features which allow the community to lock down articles temporarily in case of a problem. In the old days, we could only "fully protect" an article - meaning that no one, other than administrators, could edit that entry for the duration of the protection.

This tightly controlled, top down system led to a number of problems that we didn't like. So we developed a new tool, semi-protection, that allowed us to remain more open. Now, when an article is semi- protected, it can be edited by anyone who has had an account for a certain amount of time, not just administrators.

When we introduced semi-protection, the reaction in the media was predictable - and wrong. Wikipedia, it was reported, was in the process of closing off editing. The storyline was just too tempting: open democratic participation is genuinely impossible, see, and so every change has to be interpreted under a filter of becoming more structured and more elitist.

Soon we are introducing into English Wikipedia a new feature ("flagged
revisions") which will allow us, I hope, to open the front page of Wikipedia to open public editing for the first time in years. This radical new opening up of Wikipedia is certain to be interpreted as Wikipedia finally becoming more controlled, more elitist, more top- down. The story line is just too tempting.

But it simply isn't that simple.

In fact, I am quite elitist (in the relevant sense), and always have been. The core of the community is as well. We are firmly convinced - and have the daily evidence to prove it - that some people simply have no business writing an encylopedia. Our openness is not a function of believing in some "hippie" or "communist" ideal of absolute egalitarianism. Rather, it is simply a practical reflection of the fact that open dialogue and debate, undertaken in a thoughtful and respectful environment, is the best way to get at the truth.

I don't know of anyone serious who disagrees - particularly in the Ivory Tower.

Jimmy Wales

Digital Revolution wants to reflect stories of the web that you think are important from across the world.

Following on from Erik Hersman's guest blog post describing the international blogging experience in Africa, we'd like to find some similar stories from Asia, for example Ohmynews International in South Korea; what stories can you tell us about human innovation and endeavour on the web in Korea, China and India?

Please provide as much information as possible, links to sites or articles if appropriate.

All suggestions greatly appreciated as comments to the blog.

Dan

(Erik Hersman is a web technology professional; he is creator of Ushahidi, AfriGadget; Erik blogs at whiteafrican.com and may be found as @WhiteAfrican on Twitter. The following post is published with kind permission and represents Erik's views; this does not necessarily reflect the views of the BBC or the Digital Revolution production.)

Blogging evolves, just like any other citizen-based communication channel. Our definitions change on what it is, the tools themselves and how it is perceived within our own culture. Where once we thought of blogs as being the domain of individuals locked away inside their homes, madly typing away on their own, we now see blogging conglomerates coalescing around themes. This is particularly true in the US and Europe, where mega-blogs have emerged, epitomized by blogs like TechCrunch for technology, Gawker or AOL's Weblogs Inc blogging networks, BoingBoing for eclectic news and the Huffington Post for US politics.

The question is, "has blogging lost its feeling of freedom, untethered and raw that once defined it?" Not at all, for a couple of reasons.

Mega-blogs as Filter
First, though we've seen a growth in mega-blogs and multi-author blog networks that fill the role between traditional media and unfettered citizen journalism, this doesn't discount the massive number of single bloggers still writing on the ground-level by themselves. Though these big blogs are targeted by PR firms and companies for early scoops and information, many times these mega-blogs act a lot like filters where they comb a certain niche category of smaller blogs for interesting information, and then repost and add their analysis of the information.

Microblogs, Status Updates and Mobile Phones
Second, while we myopically focus on what we define as blogging and the use of citizen reporting (and the homogenization of the same) in the West, we lose focus of the impact, growth and use of citizen media channels and their use in the rest of the world. For instance, let's look at Africa. Blogging levels in Africa range on a country-by-country basis; we see large and vibrant communities of bloggers in South Africa, Kenya, Cameroon and Tunisia, where there is generally a decent penetration level for both connectivity and computers, but much lower usage in places like Malawi or Liberia. This doesn't mean that citizen voices aren't on the rise across the continent, because they are.

Equally important to take note are upcoming tools in the space that allow all of us to communicate in shorter and more direct ways. That raw and unfiltered feeling that we got from blogs years ago is still well represented in emerging conduits like Twitter and microblogging platforms like Tumblr, or even within status updates on Facebook. This isn't unique to the West, as in Africa alone there are at least five active, country-focused microblogging platforms that allow for open discussion by anyone with access to a phone or internet connected PC.

A Rising Tide
In fact, this same methodology has been taken to a new level, and you see the new form rear its head more each week. It is most apparent when there is a major event in a country, whether it is a politically taut Iran or Honduras, an earthquake in China, a pop star's passing in the US or the Confederations Cup in South Africa. When these events happen, affecting millions of people, there is a growing number of individuals reaching for mobile phones and the PC to start broadcasting news and information directly to the world. It is no longer a one-to-many mass broadcast, it's now a mass-broadcast to mass-broadcast environment.

We are all part of this sea change in news, information flow and transparency - where the barriers are finally so low that anyone in the world can tell their story, and the whole world can see it. There is no stopping this change in information dynamics, there is only harnessing it in ways that add more value.

I witnessed this first-hand in Kenya's post-election meltdown last year, where we launched a tool called Ushahidi that allowed anyone with a simple mobile phone to text in a report of what was going on around them. It meant that even if no traditional journalist, or even a blogger, could get to some out of the way area where violence was happening, that the citizens themselves had an outlet that was free and open to use. We had lowered the barrier even further.

So, in answering my question at the beginning, we see not a loss in the freedom and raw power of citizen-based communication, but a burgeoning growth in it that threatens to overwhelm us all. In fact, the wave is coming on so strong and big that the most important question we need to ask is not how to get more citizen blogs, updates and voices, but how to filter it so that it remains useful.

"The web is a basic human right; like clean water."

So said the creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in answer to a question posted online and relayed at The Web At 20 launch event for Digital Revolution.

As part of the ambition of the Digital Revolution project to start a conversation about the web to collaboratively create a documentary about the web, Sir Tim joined Baroness Susan Greenfield, Digital Planet'sBill Thompson, Wired magazine's Chris Anderson (live linked from San Francisco) and presenter Aleks Krotoski to present their ideas about (as Bill Thompson put it 'one of the most important things we have managed to do as a species' - the World Wide Web.

We filmed the event and, while we will post a slicker, more complete and cohesive version featuring all of the speakers and questions from the afternoon in a subsequent blog post, we thought you'd like to see a quick edit of Sir Tim's speech and the first part of the Q&A asap.

Unsurprisingly, considering there were more than a couple of BBC TV content producers in the room, there were several questions around the web's new models for content, audiovisual and beyond. If there were gasps of horror at Sir Tim's line: "The concept of a [TV] channel is going to be obsolete on the internet - it's not relevant." they can't be heard on the recordings...

And if this leaves you hungry for more and you can't wait for the longer video to arrive, as is the wont of the web, you can find other reports of The Web At 20 from the web itself; from Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC Technology blog; or audio snippets via Bill Thompson's Audioboo:

Or from those that were present (and those that weren't but were watching the tweets and responding). You can read the tweets we sent out from @BBCDigRev and search the wider twittersphere under tags such as Tim Berners-Lee, #webat20 and more as your imagination and search-fancy takes you.

Enjoy. And, as ever, your comments are greatly appreciated.

To free data or not to free data: that is quite a big question. The cases for opening up data are revolutionary: data freedom would utterly transform what we could do for ourselves, for each other, for the world. The cases against are usually wrapped up in the context of commercial ownership, intellectual property and national security.

Personally, I am cautiously, respectfully sceptical. As a social psychologist who studies the human interactions that criss-cross the Internet, I see a whole lot of community phenomena that challenge my faith in the liberated digital culture that the data freedom contingent describes, but I don't believe it should be owned either. Nicely on the fence, then. The problem as I see it is that technologically, an open data system would be remarkable; socially, it simply wouldn't last.

We are wonderfully fallible creatures with extraordinary dreams and the capacity to follow them. The founders of the Web came to this new communication platform with liberal, libertarian ideas, dreaming of a utopia where information would be shared freely and equally amongst its inhabitants. They were idealists, and the tools they built reflected this. As the Web rolled out, people with similar mindsets tuned in to their passions and realised the possibilities, and set about establishing the first borderless communities in a Wild West digital frontier.

Everything was good for a while. People talked about the levelling ground of the web, where class, gender, race and physical ability didn't matter, where everyone could be self-actualised, where society could transcend the physical, graduating into the cerebral. We didn't need to be constrained by our corporeal inequalities anymore: society would advance online in a whole new and wonderful way. All our needs would be met through this technology. The kernel of revolution was born, as it had been many timesbefore.

Now, with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, we know these crazy dreams belonged to the digital utopians. They were impossible. Almost immediately, people started establishing boundaries, putting flags in the virtual sand, declaring ownership of thoughts, ideas, concepts. Hierarchies started to form, at first based on the technological prowess of the so-called Wizards of online communities, who had access to and could amend the back-end servers and databases that ran the consensual hallucinations people were operating in, and later on the lines of social acceptability that people drew in the sand: the conceptual boundaries started to morph the egalitarian ideals into clusters of Us versus Them, rights versus wrongs. Virtual things started to develop value, little digital pieces of ephemera that had no relative value offline, but meant the world to people inside the communities. And then people started claiming ownership to this stuff, getting defensive about it, wanting it only for themselves.

And then the pragmatists arrived: commerce sniffed out the Internet and things really changed. Since then, our consumption of the content on the Internet has transformed completely, as we engage with a layer on top of the technology that is almost entirely owned by commercial interests.

I think the reason we're so passionate, so fascinated by the Web today is because it taps into something inside us that really, desperately wants the world to be free, open and level, but it continues to reflect us so beautifully, so perfectly, that it magnifies our bizarre foibles that make us human. We stare, mouths agape, at stories about how we aggregate under virtual governments and policing forces, how we create brands and gatekeepers to help identify what information we should and shouldn't trust, how we draw lines in the sand and claim ownership over 1s and 0s. The Web is a reflection of our isms, and even in the most libertarian spaces, order and hierarchy re-assert themselves.

This is the theme I'd like to explore in the first episode of Digital Revolution, and in a series of four posts over the next few weeks, I will look at some of these issues: the hierarchies that have evolved from the 'flat' Wikipedia; the transformation from the blogosphere's new media idealism into old media institutionalisation; the power brokers of the Internet; and just how far we can be pushed before we claim ownership of our intellectual property.

These are issues I'm trying on for size. They are not fully formed manifestos, but the beginnings of a process that I hope will inform my understanding of the bigger issues of the Web, and will help us shape the programme that we will produce.

(How you can get involved)