Blog

by Fred -

Information Overload, Facebook Fatigue, and Twitter’s Awesome Filter

I’ve been using less and less of Facebook recently, and I’ve started to wonder why. I primarily use it to organize events, keep track of contacts (once a month I need to reach someone whose e-mail I don’t have) and occasionally upload photos that I don’t want to put on Flickr and/or want to tag with people I know.

My loss of interest in Facebook is exemplified by my current infatuation with Twitter. I was deeply skeptical of Twitter when I first heard about it, but signed up and quickly forgot about it. After I stumbled across a couple of Twitter accounts and started following them, I decided to actually try it out.

Now I’m hopelessly addicted. As Mike Arrington said, I need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.

But I hadn’t given a lot of thought to moving on from Facebook until I came across Molly Schoemann’s post on “Why I left Facebook“:

Because every damn time I signed on to Facebook, my feed went like this:

[Girl you found distasteful in high school]: Has posted pictures from her wedding!

Click here to view her photos, while wondering if perhaps you misjudged her, back in the day.  Find photos distasteful, even for wedding photos.  Feel slightly depressed, if also vindicated.

You get the idea.  Molly has perfectly articulated my Facebook fatigue. I’ve found that I’ve had trouble separating the signal from the noise. In fact, most of Facebook has just become noise to me. The useful parts are specific ones. I either receive an e-mail telling me that is an event that I want to go to (though I rarely RSVP correctly — either over or under obligating myself for months) or I search for someone’s e-mail or phone number.

The feed now both scares and bores me.

Facebook is now suffering from information overload and we lack the resources to adequately deal with it. Sure, I can select “Less Information about [Guy I Barely Know]” but the problem seems to systemic to Facebook in general. I don’t think Facebook is objectionable because it publishes private or otherwise hard to find information, I think its objectionable merely because it publishes too much valueless information, period.

Creating adequate filters is the essential solution to this problem, and it is why Google was so successful. They created a filter to tame the info-glut of the late 90s on the web.

Google was solving a problem that was essentially an artificial intelligence once: how does a machine know what you are asking for? How can a machine understand what you want to find? Google’s solution was to leverage the collective intelligence of the web in order to infer meaning about its content.

Facebook has tried making stories more interesting by showing me stories involving more than one friend. The system is making an educated guess about what stories I’ll find most interesting. It picks the ones that implicate multiple friends, and to some extent this works as a good indicator as to whether I’ll find a particular item interesting.

But my interest is still waning.

Stop reading now if you hate Twitter, because you’re not going to enjoy this next part.

I think Twitter presents a better solution to taming the Signal-to-Noise Ratio of social networks. This is because Twitter’s inherent filter is better and more active. On Facebook We’ve been brainwashed to mindlessly accept most relationships of people we know in real life, (rejecting a friend request is serious business, most people just leave them queued up in), but we haven’t actually taken into consideration the fact that we’ll be inundated with trivia about their lives.

With Twitter, the filter is better for a number of reasons.

First, relationships are asymmetrical, which removes the friend hoarding incentive. In other words, that there is no reason for me to follow you unless I’m interested in what you have to say. The fact that I follow you means nothing about me. Compare this to the incentive of you and I being friends, symetrically, on Facebook. Even if we aren’t that close, there is little incentive for me to deny your request if I’m interested in showing how popular I am; what human doesn’t want to show how popular they are? Facebook’s architecture rewards friend hoarding, and consequently, information overload, in a way that Twitter’s doesn’t.

Second, if I begin to follow you on Twitter and you are posting boring, irellevant, or uninteresting items, then I will unfollow you. No hard feelings, I’m still probably friendly with you, we might even be good friends IRL, but what you are offering on this platform is not what I want from it. While unfollowing may sometimes precipitate unfriending, the former certainly does not necessitate the latter.

Thirdly, if I miss posts on Twitter, it seems less personal and less of an issue. No big deal, I’ll read your next post.

Fourth, the whole point of Twitter is to Keep it Simple Stupid. By limiting the amount of characters or content a person can post to 140, the emphasis is about conveying as much meaning and value with as litle content as possible. This dramatically increases the quality of the SNR since users feel compelled to not waste characters or posts.

In short, Twitter has avoided the information overload problem, or perhaps I have avoided information overload on Twitter, because its architecture naturally yields a better filter. This is A Good Thing.

Facebook can over come this, maybe, and I think it may still be useful as a friend-indexing-social network for organizing events and looking up phone numbers, but it will be a difficult challenge to get over the info-glut.

by Fred -

The WSJ Gets it Wrong Again and/or The RIAA Lies Once Again

The RIAA Logo.

It turns out the Wall Street Journal’s sloppy journalism cuts both ways. On Friday I blogged about how the WSJ was reporting that the RIAA had ceased filing lawsuits against individual file sharers. Stupidly, I didn’t really think about their source or attempt to verify the claims myself. Neither did the Associated Press.

Ray Beckerman (who had skeptically acknowledged these reports when the WSJ article first surfaced) has discovered that the RIAA filed another round of lawsuits against individuals just last week, a discovery that directly conflicts with the WSJ piece.

The WSJ’s article suffers from exactly the same flaws as its piece on network neutrality; high on conjecture, low on meaningful facts about the get of the article. The lead establishes that the RIAA is “set to drop its legal assault” but goes on to describe the negotiations the RIAA is establishing with the ISP industry. Noticeably missing from the rest of the article is any evidence demonstrating that the RIAA is actually stopping its legal assault.

So we only have ourselves to blame — we read what we wanted to read and without Ray Beckerman’s excellent sleuthing, we might still be giving the RIAA credit for coming to its senses.

Whether it was the RIAA lying to reporters (which Ray seems to believe is the case) or the WSJ trying to see a story where there wasn’t one, this was a case of not thinking critically enough about sources and evidence based reporting. Either way, if the network neutrality article didn’t give you enough reason to distrust the WSJ’s technology reporting, this incident should. This also leads me to believe that the WSJ has under-critical technology reporters rather than a malicious agenda to purposely misunderstand technology topics.

There’s a lot to be cleared up in this situation and there is probably some truth to the RIAA winding down their lawsuits, but I don’t think we should hold our collective breath or consider this the victory we initially did.

by Fred -

The RIAA’s Loss

The RIAA has announced that they have stopped suing individual file sharers for copyright infringement.

The suits were based on the questionable notion that making files available in directories through peer-to-peer software like KaZaa was a violation of the copyright of the owner of the works. The RIAA was not going after people downloading music, or even people who had sent a file to someone else, but rather the set of people who had shared directories with files that looked like music and were available for public perusal.

This was problematic because the copyright statute doesn’t actually say anything about “making available.” The right to control who distributes one’s work is one of the rights granted to authors by the statute, but the RIAA had no evidence that file sharers had actually distributed the files, just that they had made them available and that the files could potentially be distributed.

Consequently, the RIAA had to argue that “making available” was actually part of the copyright statute when it wasn’t. When the handful of suits (out of 35,000) made it to court, some Judges started to realize this, and through the selfless and amazing work of Ray Beckerman, the legal community slowly turned against the prosecution.

All in all, the RIAA’s campaign to sue their own customers was a disaster. CD sales continued to plummet and filesharing’s popularity only increased. This is not to mention the public relations catastrophe the industry now faces. Musicians hate being associated with large corporations that the public perceives as evil, and more substantively, musicians have not seen any of the settlement monies the RIAA has been collecting on their behalf.

THE RIAA TOOK MY MUSIC AWAY

The RIAA is claiming that the campaign “was successful in raising the public’s awareness that file-sharing is illegal” which is demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the law and technology.

So what is next? The RIAA claims that they will be making deals with ISPs to institute something roughly similar to a 3-strikes and you’re out policy against file sharers. The terms and details of these agreements are not flushed out (and will probably never be made available to the public), but on some level, this is a less vicious form of negotiation with the technical realities their industry is facing.

But there is already evidence of ISPs acting in haste to dismantle legal file sharing outfits. TorrentFreak has a story about an open source software tracker having their service revoked by their ISP because they were accused of hosting an illegal torrent of the game Command and Conquer. YouTube already engages in auto-take-downs of videos that are supposedly infringing.

I’m a huge fan of the site LegalTorrents.com and have used it for distributing the uncompressed (~1gb) versions of two Creative Commons videos, A Shared Culture and Media That Matters: A CC Case Study. Because everything on LegalTorrents is free to share (under an appropriate CC or similar public license), it is the perfect counterexample to the RIAA’s claim that file sharing is inherently illegal.

Put another way, file sharing in and of itself is not illegal (just as crowbars in and of themselves are not illegal) and sites like LegalTorrents demonstrate this. We should not let the RIAA use the fact that they’ve abandoned their campaign as a positive cover to privately intimidate ISPs into breaking the Internet.

More importantly, we should keep the pressure on ISPs about preserving network neutrality. When used on the public net and ISPs, deep packet inspection filtering and application layer filtering are violations of network neutrality and if the RIAA is successful in pushing these technologies as “solutions” to the file sharing problem, we are going to have a much larger problem on our hands than 35,000 dispersed lawsuits.

by Fred -

The WSJ Showing Its Cards

By now everyone knows about the Wall Street Journal’s shoddy net neutrality hit piece.

The article went to great lengths to conjure that Net Neutrality support was waning among its most ardent supporters — Google, Lessig, Obama and others had all said or done things “recently” that indicated they were no longer pushing as hard for the net to stay neutral.

In the last two days, virtually every individual mentioned in the piece has come out against the WSJ and argued that either their positions were misinterpreted or that their quotes were taken out of context.

The WSJ has claimed that their piece has “gotten a rise out of the blogosphere” and has not issued any retractions or corrections to the article.

Other bloggers are commenting on the particular misunderstandings and misinformation in the article, but I’m interested in analyzing the WSJ’s behavior as I believe it is symptomatic of a larger affliction of the newspaper.

Here are some things I think are noteworthy about the situation:

  • The WSJ initially discredited the blogosophere as a legitimate voice in this debate.
    Would they have said that they “got a rise out of the newspaper industry” if they had written an article that got the NYTimes, Washington Post and CNN complaining about inaccuracies? Rise probably isn’t the right word, as Jay Rosen said.
  • This seems to be an example of mainstream press trolling bloggers.
    Typically, bloggers are the ones accused of trolling the mainstream press.
  • Both the original article and the follow up posts are outside the WSJ’s paywall.
    Further evidence of the desire to troll the blog world.
  • The comment system for WSJ is plagued by spam.
    This indicates an immature and underdeveloped comment community. This is not to say that the WSJ should start heavily moderating their comments, just that they obviously don’t seem to care about them.
  • The general attitude of Us vs. The Internet of the article and responses indicates a deep misunderstanding of conversations on the net.
    The net is no longer a community in and of itself; it holds digital representations of an infinite amount of communities that exist in reality. Things used to be otherwise, but to still think so demonstrates a dated perspective.
  • WSJ’s technology writers are either vastly under-skilled for such reporting or are interested in remaining ignorant of the real issues.
    Even if one could make the specious argument that Edge caching does violate network neutrality (and I don’t think anyone believes it does) it wouldn’t be doing so in the same way the telecommunications companies are interested in violating network neutrality. Edge caching does not violate network neutrality in the same way the telecommunications companies are interested in violating network neutrality. More specifically, Google’s movements to place caches at ISP level is not as controversial as the WSJ would like it to be. Despite having many opportunities to get the story right, the WSJ has repeatedly ignored the technological subtlety of the details and has misquoted others who were trying to set it straight.

Network neutrality is one of the primary reasons why digital journalism is viable, and the reason why newspapers are threatened online, so there is no surprise the WSJ sees the principle as a threat: they think it is in their interest to do so.

As Gandhi put it:

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

by Fred -

Soulja Boy Now Officially Sending Takedown Notices

A story told in three videos:

1. “Original” Soulja Boy Video **

2. Students for Free Culture board member and friend Kevin Driscoll teaching ROLFcon nerds how to do SouljaBoy:

3. Kevin responding to his Soulja Boy takedown notice:

It seems that Kevin’s video has become the victim of YouTube’s auto-takedown robots. Good thing he posted it to Blip.tv as well. More info on the ROFLcon blog.

**Soulja Boy’s YouTube channel doesn’t allow me to embed his video into this blog, and despite my halfhearted attempts at circumventing this “feature” I wasn’t able to post it with the others. I can’t believe I’m arguing for the right to embed a video, or even that it would be possible to deny me the right to do so, but this is what happens when we rely on proprietary video codecs like Flash.

by Fred -

Google Street View’s Revealing Error

Google Streetmap Blurs Faces in Advertisements, Too.

After receiving criticism for the privacy-violating “feature” of Google Street View that enabled anyone to easily identify people who happened to be on the street as Google’s car drove by, the search giant started blurring faces.

What is interesting, and what Mako would consider a “Revealing Error“, is when the auto-blur algorithm can not distinguish between an advertisement’s face and a regular human’s face. For the ad, the model has been compensated to have his likeness (and privacy) commercially exploited for the brand being advertised. On the other hand, there is a legal grey-area as to whether Google can do the same for random people on the street, and rather than face more privacy criticism, Google chooses to blur their identities to avoid raising the issue of whether it is their right to do so, at least in America.

So who cares that the advertisement has been modified? The advertiser, probably. If a 2002 case was any indication, advertisers do not like it when their carefully placed and expensive Manhattan advertisements get digitally altered. While the advertisers lost a case against Sony for changing (and charging for) advertisements in the background of Spiderman scenes located in Times Square, its clear that they were expecting their ads to actually show up in whatever work happened to be created in that space. There are interesting copyright implications here, too, as it demonstrates an implicit desire by big media for work like advertising to be reappropriated and recontextualized because it serves the point of getting a name “out there.”

To put my undergraduate philosophy degree to use, I believe these cases bring up deep ethical and ontological questions about the right to control and exhibit realities (Google Street View being one reality, Spiderman’s Time Square being another) as they obtain to the real reality. Is it just the difference between a fiction and a non-fiction reality? I don’t think so, as no one uses Google maps expecting to retrieve information that is fictional. Regardless, expect these kinds of issues to come up more and more frequently as Google increases its resolution and virtual worlds merge closer to real worlds.

by Fred -

Remixing Political Speech

A lot of people have said nice things about John McCain’s concession speech. It was heart felt, and he appeared compelling for a brief moment, but this doesn’t mean we can forgive him for the campaign he and Sarah Palin ran.

Nonsense fear mongering, race baiting, and irresponsible partisan loyalty will forever define a poorly run campaign that ultimately brought itself down.

Never forget, as they say. Thus, here is a Cracked remix of John McCain’s concession speech of what he should have actually said, given the overall tone and strategy of his campaign over the last couple of months:

At the minimum, this demonstrates the exact reason why political video should not be constrained by copyright. There is the obvious argument that this is a fair use of the original copyrighted video since it is clearly a parody, but there’s also no compelling reason why the original video of the McCain speech should be restricted by copyright in the first place.

What is nice is that the McCain campaign actually agrees with me here.

by Fred -

Sights and Sounds of Obama’s Victory

I went out last night around 1 am to take photos of the celebrations happening in Union Square. At the last minute I downloaded a voice recorder app for my iPhone and hit record as soon as I stepped out the door. I recorded the entire next half hour of shooting photos and talking to people in and around Union Square and I think it does a pretty good job of capturing the mood. Think of it as a Manhattan field recording.

30 minutes, 320kbps 71.4mb file download or listen here:

by Fred -

Yes We Did.

I just wanted to thank everyone I know right now for helping Barack Obama win this presidency. Your effort in this campaign made the difference, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for making change happen this election.

As a way to move on, I’ve created a site with my friend Sorrel, called “Don’t Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out” where we are collecting farewell notes for Bush. Think of it as catharsis politics.

The basic idea is that you e-mail us your images, words, and ideas and we’ll compile them into a book that we’ll try and get into Bush’s hands before Obama is sworn in. All submitted works must be licensed under CC’s Attribution license. We want as much participation in this as possible, so please let everyone you know about this project.

by Fred -

MTVM and the Battle of Participatory and Passive Media

After my first gee-whiz-I-love-nostalgia post, I had some further thoughts on MTV’s new music video archive site.

First, these kind of sites are are a bittersweet evolution, and in a sense, a compromise. While it is fantastic to see MTV pushing the music industry forward to a point where they’re offering content openly and gratis, the features of MTVM are simply not robust enough to sustain the long term health of our media environment.

MTV will still remain the gatekeeper of culture as they did as a television station — there’s no ability to upload your own videos to their network and the most interaction users have with the community is to add comments. There’s no ability to download the videos for remix (they’re also encumbered by Adobe flash) and the site seems to be generally lacking in the read-write attitude embraced by YouTube and other video platforms.

The web is a conversation, and with the success of sites like Seesmic, its clear that video can be as well.

The massive popular acceptance of sites like MTVM and Hulu, is compromising the natural interactive nature of the web for the sake of ease and passive consumerism. Where I like to think of the projects I’m involved in as breaking down the definition between consumer and producer, there’s a very real chance that popular culture will not want to put out the effort to create their own culture and simply continue to passively consume the work of others.

We’ve seen participatory lose out to passive before. When public access television was initially conceived and implemented, a lot of media scholars spoke to potential of the cheap and easy nature of video to bring down the gatekeepers of traditional media conglomerates.

Almost 30 years later, Public Access Television is pretty much a farm league for amateurs looking to get a start in the traditional television market. It is, not, as its early advocates predicted, a utopia of participatory culture that competes and challenges mainstream media.

Now, however, participatory media has achieved a significant lead on the web. YouTube has massively popular stars that created their own fame and content from their bedroom, and Wikipedia has reached an extraordinary level of cultural significance. Indeed, most of the big sites on the web are participatory — eBay, Craigslist, Google, or any blog platform. But we risk abdicating this leadership position by not challenging MTVM and NBC to open their network and content even further. In other words, keep the pressure on. Ask why the MTVM videos aren’t available for download, and then, why aren’t they Creative Commons licensed?

To some extent we’ve asked for this problem. Throughout the decade old debate over file sharing, a popular proposed solution to the lawsuits was for the content owners to simply offer free (or cheap) useful versions of the content fans were already sharing. They could compete with free and unauthorized (p2p) simply by offering easy and authorized. AmazonMP3, iTunes, and now Hulu all demonstrate that this solution works to some extent.

But I don’t think we can be satisfied with simply watching TV on the web, and we should do all that we can to keep the tables tilted in favor of participatory media rather than passive.

Second, can someone please make a “Be Your Own VJ” drag n’ drop playlist app with MTV’s API that will allow me to create an 1 hour of non-stop awesomeness? I’d love to have a little standalone page that just recreates the heyday of MTV minus the VJs. Basically, just MuxTape for videos. I’m going to start hacking a version of OpenTape to work with MTV’s API, but I’d love it if someone could beat me to the punch.

Third, does anyone think that the title “MTV Music” is ridiculously redundant? Music Television Music. Riiight.