Did You Know That The Web Is A Plot By A Bunch Of California Cultists To Destroy Your Life? The Sunday Times Tells Me So...

from the uh-what-now? dept

It really is bizarre that nearly every handwaving critique of how "evil" the internet is, from the point of view of elitists who worry about the loss of the old gatekeepers, seems to make every single mistake it accuses the "internet generation" of making. For example, it's difficult to catalog just how many things Bryan Appleyard gets factually wrong in his Sunday Times piece all about how evil the internet is and how it was designed by a bunch of California cultists who are trying to destroy all that is good in the world. What's amazing, for such an elitist article that claims that professionals do news better and that the internet is destroying the ability for the press to do journalism properly, is that he would make a factual error in almost every sentence. It's really stunning, actually.

Late in the piece he notes that "this article -- it always happens -- will be sneered at all over the web by people who cannot think for themselves because they are blindly faithful to the idea that the web is the future, all of it." Ok, fine. Let's not sneer, and let's actually think for ourselves... and how about we correct some of Mr. Appleyard's errors -- just for the fun of it?

The web is in trouble. Last week craigslist, a vast classified-ads site, had to abandon its "erotic services" category because of claims that it was an "online brothel" being used by sexual predators.

Oops. Wrong. First of all, it didn't "have" to do anything. The law (section 230 of the CDA for Mr. Appleyard, and if he wants the relevant cases we can point those out too -- though, this is the sort of stuff we thought the professionals were supposed to look up themselves) is quite clear that Craigslist is protected and it didn't have to do anything. It chose to make a change to the way it handled such ads, but Mr. Appleyard even gets the facts wrong there, in claiming it "abandoned" the category. It did not. It simply moved it to a new area called "adult services," which now has its ads pre-monitored as opposed to post-monitored as before.

And in France L'Oreal discovered eBay could not be forced to stop selling cheap knock-offs of its products.

Oops. Wrong. A French court ruled that eBay was not liable for users selling counterfeit L'Oreal goods (the same way US and Belgian courts have ruled as well). It's not eBay selling the goods. eBay is just the tool and the platform. It's users who sell to each other. And they are still breaking the law. All the court case said was that L'Oreal should have to go after those individuals, rather than forcing eBay to do so. This is common sense, in the same way that we ticket the driver of a speeding car, rather than Ford for making a car that can speed.

After British villages rose up against the intrusion of Google's Street View, Greece has banned the mobile camera cars that put pictures of people's homes and streets on the internet

Oops. Wrong. While British villagers who didn't quite understand how Street View worked got quite upset about it -- that part is true -- their protest went nowhere. The UK's privacy watchdog actually took the time to understand what Google was doing (something Appleyard apparently did not) and said it was fine. As for Greece, it did not ban the camera cars. It simply put the project on hold while it gets more info. That seems like a rather pertinent detail. Oh, and the wonderful professional mainstream media that Appleyard is such a big fan of? It reposted all the embarrassing images that Google took down. So, Google was quick to remove those images, but it was the professional media that actually got them attention. Based on Appelyard's reasoning above, concerning both Craigslist and the L'Oreal/eBay case, the mainstream press is actually guilty of intruding on people's privacy.

Privacy campaigners fear the power of Google and the online ad company Phorm to gather and exploit personal information. They invade your computer, monitor your web-browsing and buying, check where you are and then bombard you with targeted hard sells.

Oops. Wrong. While there are some fears (some more reasonable than others) about Phorm and Google, to lump the two together is quite misleading. The two companies are amazingly different in how they work -- and it's a bit of a stretch to claim that either "gathers and exploits" personal info, though we'll grant that for the time being. The thing that neither of them do, however, is "bombard you with targeted hard sells." In fact, whether you like what either company is doing, the whole point of their targeted advertising is to offer up soft sells that are more likely to get attention, rather than hard sells.

Those are the first two paragraphs alone. From there, he charges that a group of Californians created Web 2.0 as a "cult," in partnership with Google, who somehow proactively monitors everything you do (ignoring, of course, the fact that you have to actually use Google's services for it to monitor anything). Then he complains that free stuff is available online, along with the standard complaints about how he doesn't like social networks and he hates the fact that many people use the web to shop? Why? That's not really explained. The best he can come up with is quoting some guy who insists the internet is a passing fad:

"The internet", says David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London and author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, "is rather passe . . . It's just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers."

The evidence for this? Well, that's shaky and non-existent. The evidence against it? Well, I'd say there's a ton. But we'll just start with the obvious one: television, radio and newspapers were all broadcast forms of communication -- one to many. The internet is many to many (and one to one, and one to many). To claim that it's basically the same is like claiming that automobiles are just faster horses.

One great promise of web 2.0 was that it would lead to a post-industrial world in which everything was dematerialised into a shimmer of electrons. But last year's oil price shock and this year's recession, not to mention every year's looming eco-catastrophe, show that we are still utterly dependent on the heavy things of the old economy.

This is just great. Appleyard claims what "the promise" of web 2.0 is, without any citation to back that up. I don't know anyone who ever claimed that the point of "web 2.0" was to "dematerialize" everything into electrons. In fact, many of us have focused on how physical things still matter quite a bit. But, if you're trying to set up the creators of modern web services as evil cultists, you may as well set up a total straw man about what they're trying to do. Because, we all know that the "professional press" never makes stuff up like all those crazy amateurs do.

So what, if not everything, will the web change? The key feature of web 2.0 that is currently driving change is its intense focus on the individual.

That's funny. I could have sworn we were just reading about how the backers of the web were trying to make everything "communal" with all this sharing and "amateur empowerment" and such. And now we're told that web 2.0 is about individualism? Wasn't Appleyard just sneering at all those community sites like Facebook and Twitter -- which are the very opposite of an intense focus on the individual?

Blogging, tweeting and Facebooking all give the individual the unprecedented opportunity to blather to the entire world.

Wait, so communicating with others is all about individualism? I'm confused...

The first objection to this is that it destroys institutions and structures that can do so much more than the individual.

What is this "it" that destroys institutions and structures that can do so much for the individual? Web 2.0? How is "it" destroying anything? "It" is not doing anything at all. However, managers of those institutions who failed to adapt to a new marketplace (and, in the case of newspapers bet the farm on raising way more money than they could ever pay back) certainly had a lot to do with destroying institutions. But, do we see any analysis of that? Of course not.

The Wall Street Journal carried an analysis that is still the best thing I have seen on the subject. But the story needed half a dozen qualified financial journalists to put it together, and masses of research that no lonely blogger could possibly do . . . This throws into relief the intractable fact that the liberty which the web offers to the individual voice is also a restriction on group effort.

Fair enough. Though, I'll say that by far the best analysis I got of the financial crisis came from a series of different blogs (mainly by economists) that understood the issue at a far deeper level than anything I read in the Wall Street Journal. And, the great thing was that many of them did work together. They used those awful "individualistic" tools like blogging, Twitter and Facebook to connect and talk and come out with a much more interesting analysis.

Institutions -- publishers, newspapers, museums, universities, schools -- exist precisely because they can do more than individuals. If web 2.0 flattens everything to the level of whim and self-actualisation, then it will have done more harm than good.

I'm still quite confused by this odd, and totally unsupported theory, that web 2.0 somehow breaks everything down to the individual. In fact, most of us have seen the opposite. The rise of useful communication tools actually make it much easier to create those sorts of necessary institutions on the fly, in a way that's a lot more flexible, meaningful, relevant and useful than the old stodgy organizational structures of the past.

A further objection to the cult's radical individualism is that it doesn't have the intended hyper-democratic consequences. Wikipedia, for example, has tackled inaccuracy and subversion by introducing forms of authority and control that would seem to be anathema to its founding ideals.

Note that Appleyard does not explain what those "founding ideals" are, or how the minor changes to the system over time go against them or somehow prove "radical individualism" (which is still something Appleyard seems to have made up whole cloth) to be wrong.

Bloggery is forming itself into big, institutionalised aggregators such as The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and remains utterly parasitic on the mainstream media it affects to despise.

Um... wait. Weren't we just being told a single paragraph ago that blogs were the antithesis of institutions? I mean... it was right there. And now, suddenly, blogs are evil because they're institutions? I'm confused again. And I'm curious how sending sites more traffic is "parasitic," but we've discussed this before.

Even Twitter is already coming to be dominated by conventional, non-web-based celebrity -- Oprah Winfrey in the US and Stephen Fry over here.

Dominated. Mr. Appleyard, you don't have to follow them. I follow neither Oprah nor Fry, and Twitter works just great. I see no domination.

The slightly more sinister aspect of this is that excessive individualism leads with astonishing rapidity to slavish conformity. The banking crisis may not have been caused by the internet but it was certainly fuelled by the way connectivity and speed created a market in which everybody was gripped by the hysteria of the herd.

Now there's a new one. This one comes just three paragraphs after Appleyard tells us that the WSJ had a great analysis of why the financial crisis happened -- though, it appears Appleyard didn't bother to read it. Nor has he apparently read any history of bubbles or mass hysteria. The market crash of 1929? Mass hysteria. Must have been caused by the internet. I'm sure the Dutch tulip craze was caused by the same. There couldn't have been any herd mentality-based bubbles prior to the internet, could there? I'm sure the Sunday Times has a big professional research department (you know, the sort of institutional resources that individualistic bloggers can't afford). Perhaps next time, Appleyard should try using it.

Or there is the weird phenomenon of flash mobs. People agree by text message or tweet to assemble in one place and, suddenly, do so. This was originally intended as a joke or art piece designed to demonstrate sheep-like conformity, but it rapidly became an aspect of cultish libertarianism. It doesn't work. Flash mobs in Russia are simply prevented by cutting off mobile-phone coverage. Old-world politics is more powerful than the web.

Wait, because Russian police cut off mobile phone coverage to stop a flash mob, the whole concept of flash mobs is dead? Again, I'm having trouble seeing how that makes any sense.

And, finally, the everything-free, massively deflationary effects of the web may be over. Rupert Murdoch, head of The Sunday Times's parent company, has said he is thinking of charging for online versions of his papers. The hard fact that somebody, somehow, has to pay for all this is breaking into web heaven.

I like how just the fact that Murdoch is thinking about charging for the news means that the "deflationary effects of the web may be over." Got any data to back that up? Or doesn't the professional press do that sort of thing? Finally, we've already dispensed with the myth that the news isn't paid for. You would think that such a professional would know that subscriptions have almost never paid for the news. Far be it from us, the mere individualistic, cultish amateurs, to actually look at the actual data and point out that subscriptions have almost never even covered the cost of printing and delivery. Journalism has always been paid for by advertising, and just because the content is free online, it doesn't mean that it hasn't been paid for.

I doubt Mr. Appleyard will read this. After all, the web is full of such dangers, and any attempt to correct his factual errors is obviously coming from just another individualistic cultist who cannot think for himself.

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Shocking News: Communication Tools Don't Discriminate

from the who-knew? dept

In response to an article about how "Web 2.0 gives new tools to hate groups" I was tempted to write an entire post, mimicking the original, except changing every instance of "hate" to something positive. Yes, blogs and social networks can and are being used by hate groups. But they're also being used to combat ignorance and hate. They're just communication tools, and the fact that hate groups use them (as well as anti-ignorance groups) is hardly surprising. But rather than creating some moral panic about hate groups using these tools, why not encourage more people to use such tools to combat ignorance and hate? Instead, we get a bunch of supposed "experts" talking about how these uses need to be shut down. That does nothing productive. It just makes the hate group members feel even more angry and persecuted, which just fuels the hate. The solution is to educate -- and (oh, look at that!) web 2.0 provides some pretty good tools for spreading knowledge and fighting ignorance.

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Web 2.0 Buzzword Bingo

from the say-what?!? dept

I'm going to remove the names of the two web 2.0 startups that apparently have just merged, according to a recent blog post from Jeff Nolan. I don't really care about the merger at all or either of the two companies. I'm merely posting a short excerpt from the press release announcing the merger with the names redacted (they don't deserve more publicity with a press release like this), because I don't think I've ever seen a paragraph filled with so many web 2.0 buzzwords that says absolutely nothing.

Company A, a universal profile service for the social web that engages communities and enables content discovery, today announced its acquisition of Company B, a provider of semantic intelligence solutions. The integration of Company B's proprietary semantic intelligence-based discovery engine will bring richer, context-based profile and reputation management capabilities to the Company A service. To be useful across different types of social media, profiles and reputation have to be localized and linked to the context of the conversation. In this way, thought leaders emerge within and across communities based on their specific expertise and contributions.

Seriously? From that paragraph, does anyone have the slightest idea what either of these companies do -- or what the merger is for? I've been known to point out stupid PR tricks, which focus mostly on the way they continue to bombard me with pointless and irrelevant press releases. But when the buzzword bingo gets this thick, it's hard to do anything but sit back and laugh. That, and get to work on my latest proprietary universal social widget-enabler intelligence-context-based profiler management integrator. Because, clearly, that's what the market demands.

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Does The Web 2.0 Crowd Care About Public Policy Issues?

from the perhaps-more-than-you-think dept

Sean Garrett has a thought-provoking post asking why there doesn't seem to be any "leadership 2.0" on policy issues. His complaint is that most of the folks involved in public policy issues that impact the tech industry are the same folks who were doing public policy issues 10 years ago -- and that it's all coming from the big companies, who mostly have set up offices in DC and keep policy questions away from Silicon Valley. It's an interesting question -- and I tend to agree with Garrett on a lot of things, but I don't see this as much of a worry.

First, Silicon Valley companies historically have never been interested in public policy questions until they reach a certain size. That's why you always hear stories about tech companies reacting late to policy issues and then having to ramp up their lobbying efforts. So this doesn't seem any different than it's been in the past. When companies are in high growth mode, there are only so many things they can worry about, and most of them are focused on growth, not government. If anything, while there are downsides to this, I tend to think this is one of the advantages of Silicon Valley. Once you have young companies looking at policy questions, inevitably, they start focusing on how policy can be twisted to their advantage -- and that's not helpful to anyone.

Second, I partially disagree with the premise. While it may be true that among the web 2.0 San Francisco party crowd you don't see much interest in public policy issues, from my standpoint, it seems like technology-interested folks are much more in tune with public policy issues than a decade ago. You hear more people today who understand various public policy issues than in the past, and there's been a rapid growth of policy-focused blogs, often from young technology-focused individuals. So, while it may be true that the latest generation of Y-Combinator founders are more interested in the next party or getting coverage on hot blogs, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of folks paying attention to what happens in DC -- and when things get troublesome, they have no problem raising the alarm in a way that gets noticed.

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Money Can Get In The Way Sometimes But It Doesn't 'Ruin Everything'

from the peer-production dept

Matthew Yglesias points to a paper by John Quiggin (of Crooked Timber fame) and Dan Hunter that looks at the growing importance of non-financial incentives for the production of information goods. They point out that efforts like Wikipedia, free software, and the blogosphere are organized in a way that's fundamentally different from traditional for-profit enterprises. Many contributors participate for reasons other than financial gain, and the overall project doesn't have a centralized decision-maker the way Microsoft and the Encyclopedia Britannica do. The authors advocate the reform of legal institutions, such as overly restrictive copyright laws, that implicitly assume that creative works are always produced for financial gain.

This all seems right to me, and indeed, Hunter wrote a Policy Analysis for the Cato Institute (for whom I'm an adjunct scholar) that made some of the same points. However, I think the authors overstate their case, as suggested by the title of their paper, "Money Ruins Everything." I assume they intended this to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but they nevertheless do seem overly hostile toward commercial efforts. It certainly is true that in many cases, adding money to a volunteer effort will create more problems than it solves. For example, I've argued in the past that Wikipedia should resist the temptation to accept advertising because arguing about what to do with the money could begin to overshadow Wikipedia's organic editing process. However, I think they go overboard when they denigrate the value of venture-backed startups. They suggest that the investments of the dot-com bubble "may have rewarded their promoters, but they produced little of lasting social value, at least by comparison to the vast sums that were invested." But I think that if anything, the exact opposite is true. As we've pointed out before, the dot-com bubble was great for the economy at large, because it allowed people to experiment with a lot of new technologies and business models on venture capitalists' dime. Investing in a bubble may be a bad investment strategy, but the results are often good for the broader society. So of course we shouldn't adopt policies that hinder the success of non-commercial projects like Linux and Wikipedia, but we should also ensure that the legal system remains hospitable to commercial development.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Much Ado About Nothing: The Rise And Fall Of HuddleChat

from the harping-on-huddlechat dept

If you've heard of HuddleChat at all, you already know about its demise. Put together by a few Google engineers in their spare time, the web chat application was used to showcase Google's newly-announced App Engine offering. There was just one problem: it was nearly identical to 37Signals' Campfire, a well-known SaaS web chat application. 37Signals gave some petulant quotes to ReadWriteWeb about the situation, and shortly thereafter Google pulled the app down.

As Om Malik has pointed out, this is all a bit ridiculous. AJAX/Comet chat is a fairly simple feature to implement. If my fellow participants in the Web 2.0 economy are counting on earning their keep via a collective conspiracy to make our jobs look harder than they are, we're all in deep, deep trouble. There's additional potential irony here, too, given that 37Signals has been accused of ripping off others' work to create Campfire in the first place.

But while this incident may prove portentous to the long-term prospects of the 37Signals business plan, it's hard to see how it could mean anything for Google. Breathless declarations that "many in the developer community [will] view Google App Engine as a Xerox machine for copycat product developers" are downright laughable. Google's decision to kill HuddleChat makes good PR sense, but it's inconceivable that many cost-conscious, Python-friendly startups would give up on App Engine over this minor blog imbroglio. As in many other respects, Amazon Web Services will likely provide the relevant template for these issues, and so far AWS has wisely avoided getting dragged into policing its users' apps.

Of course there's a lot of speculation that App Engine will include a free offering, and for that reason it may attract more troublesome users than EC2 currently does. But even if Google finds itself obligated to fight more griefers, phishers and spammers than Amazon does, it seems certain that they won't waste their time arbitrating squabbles over who called dibs on which trivial featureset. Sadly, that will remain for the courts to decide.

Tom Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Patent That Could Sue Web 2.0 Out Of Business Up For Auction

from the well-this-could-be-interesting dept

The Register has an article about one of the patents up for sale in the latest Ocean Tomo auction that could potentially be used to sue pretty much every web 2.0 company. The patent, for "a global sideband service distributed computing method" is described by its owner as being a core component in any kind of AJAX implementation, and lists out basically everyone as infringing. Any site that uses AJAX? Yup. Google, eBay, Yahoo? Yup. Amazon's S3 service? You bet. Whether or not this patent is valid or whether any of these companies actually infringe on it are two wide open questions, but given how much money is being bet on lawsuits of this nature, you can bet someone will take a shot at it. And how long will it be before one of the patent system defenders shows up to claim that these firms clearly "stole" the technology?

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Spying Goes All 2.0

from the pssst,-slip-me-some-ajax-in-the-dead-drop dept

While the US intelligence community has a long history of expensively botched computer systems, it does seem like they've suddenly became Web 2.0 believers. Last year we wrote about the internal Wikipedia-like offering called Intellipedia, that would let members from different agencies in the intelligence community share information more easily. It appears that things have progressed beyond that as well. They now have a social networking app just for the intelligence community, called A-Space, along with a del.icio.us clone and internal blogs. Of course, it seems like some in the intelligence arena (especially those who happen to be undercover) aren't entirely thrilled with the concept -- but it will be interesting to find out how it develops (as if we'll ever find out). What would be really nice to know is how much these efforts are costing compared to the $600 million that was thrown away on useless computer systems.

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