Hunting The Muse

I read a lot

I read a lot about blogging being the next big form of media. You know, down with big centralized corporate-controlled media, up with distributed democratically-controlled grass-roots media. This army of ants that finds out interesting facts and zings them around to each other through the backchannels, with readers just sorta ending up being informed.

The folks that weren't bloggers but were paying attention to it really noticed it on 9/11. CNN.com was down, msnbc.com was down, abcnews.com was down. Meanwhile, blogs were sending around eyewitness accounts, holding vigils on the blogs of bloggers killed in the attacks, and aggregating news that others had heard from various sites. They could do it because it was distributed with lots of redundancy. As something that both feels like it should and shouldn't be a counterpoint, there were also videos being passed around of people jumping and landing. You didn't see that on network tv. You also didn't want to. I sure didn't watch any of those videos. But it is at the least a testament to the ability to pass around NEWS that can break through the gauntlet of those who might want to control it.

But there are times when you need the editorial control. Before I found blogging, I found indymedia.org . The overall feel of the content hosted on indymedia.org was a bit too liberal for me (I'm liberal but I don't break Starbuck's windows to protest the fascist state) so it wasn't a real fit for me, but I liked that rather than them being a bunch of complainers, they were trying to set up a new network and a way to distribute their media.

But, the reason I lost interest was because it got bogged down. Despite the anarchists desire for a lack of hierarchy, their organization was essentially hierarchical. They had local indymedias, and then the biggest news would somehow get posted on the overall indymedia site. Since they wanted to be flat organizationally, and since the whole point was to bring publishing and news-spreading to the masses, they had no official editorial control and huge resistance to any concerted effort to exercise editorial control beyond this.

So what usually happened is that articles would be posted that would be full of venting, rage, and opinions spoken as fact. There was a guilt-driven motivation to not control them. It would get ridiculous - some folks would post essays that first seemed to be simply supportive of some Palestinian causes, but would then subtly switch gears until, by the end, would turn into anti-jewish holocaust revisionism. Some folks would scream to take it down, others would resist saying overused crap like "I do not agree with what they say but will defend to the death their right to say it" (an attitude that is great when it is relevant but infuriating when used as rote).

So anyway - interesting battles, lots of people learning about their emotional standards and what "picking your battles" means, but ultimately I gave up - the politics didn't speak strongly enough for me to stay and fight. I just like distributed media, I don't feel a motivating passion to attend WTO demonstrations and dare cops to beat me by pointing a videocamera at them while they are in riot gear.

So back to the point. How to distribute media in a way that separates wheat from chaff, without relinquishing editorial control to a group that might have an agenda you don't agree with?

My answer: trust metrics. They exist. What I haven't seen yet though, are distributed trust metrics. Or user-defined trust metrics. What the hell do I mean?

Well, here's the thing. I've got my favorite blogs over there on the left sidebar. Those guys have their favorites on their sidebar. We check our favorites. But you know, we'll miss something, or we won't have the patience to check our friends' friends.

And there are blog indexing sites. What links are being passed around the most? What are folks talking about? Again, that's a media flaw. The news isn't necessarily what the most people are talking about. That's Lowest Common Denominator, that's snowball, that's everyone in the US knowing everything about Condit and Levy, while my friend hanging out in Ireland for eight months (in a city with newspapers and tv) didn't hear one tiny little thing about it.

So, if each person could choose three or four news sources - distinct, flavored news sources with their own slant on current affairs, with identifiable feels of what they thought were relevant and what weren't, then these news sources could be the "seeds" of that person's trust matrix. And I wouldn't necessarily have a news *source* in my matrix, I might have news *aggregators* in them. And maybe the news that would have a higher chance of being reported to me would only be one, two, or three links away from those news aggregators.

And then I would be my own aggregation service. I'd mention the ones I liked the most, and the people that for some reason really wanted to follow what *I*, Curt Siffert, thought was important would subsribe to my aggregation service.

So, the chance of people being cut off from reality? Not very high - we're all subscribed to each other and cross-pollenated. The chance of everything getting redundant and circular? Not very high, if you have a large enough group of folks it is pretty impossible for that group to not be connected to the rest of the world's population within six or seven degrees. Any one person can report news and if it's newsworthy, it will be picked up and passed along.

Does this service already sorta exist? Yes, just from us manually going around and checking each other's blogs. Stuff we like, we link. Other people like it, they link. But it could be better. I could set up a second blog through blogger, yet still hosted on this same page, that would simply be my choices of news to pass on. It could be available through RSS, for other bloggers to subscribe to. They'd have an RSS reader, and an easy ability to republish on their RSS feed. It just needs to be tinkered with a little, and then we'll have it. Yes, it will need a centralized server, but the *news* wouldn't be centralized, only the information of what each member's trust matrix is.

I don't know if I have the passion to implement it, but I've written about it. That's a start. Posted by Curt at May 26, 2002 12:41 AM