Jason Calcanis claims that Wikipedia’s complex markup language is designed to limit participation. I agree that Wikipedia markup functions to limit participation, but I do not agree that it is consciously designed to do so. Rather it is an unfortunate consequence of a markup language completely unconstrained by standards, which makes it very powerful and flexible for “insiders” but discourages the development of tools and systems which might make it easier to use for “outsiders.” The lack of standardization in wiki markup also means that users can’t transfer what they’ve learned from other wiki systems, such as the ones they might have running on their company intranets.

In response to Jason’s critique, some people have floated the idea of creating a WYSIWYG Wikipedia editor. This is a good idea in theory, but in practice it would be quite difficult to keep such a tool up-to-date, as Wikipedia markup is a moving target. Much of the complexity Calcanis cites is due to complex macros that various people have added to handle things like citations. These macros are constantly under revision, and new ones are always being added. Tracking these changes in a editing tool would be a serious pain in the ass.

Radical techno-fundamentalist Kevin Kelly has posted another manifesto that is quite remarkable (even in the context of Kelly’s mindbogglingly uncritical body of work) for its steadfast refusal to acknowledge that a research program might somehow be misguided. Kelly never ceases flogging the idea that if a computer scientist is working on something, then it is our future: not a possible future, but the future. The research program in this case is the continuous archiving and retrieval of personal experience, which Kelly refers to as “lifelogging.” (This terminology is presumably in accordance with the Wired magazine style manual, which requires that any technology or practice deemed to be “inevitable” be given a catchy name of the form [noun + verb + ing], see e.g. crowdsourcing.)

Kelly begins by extolling the glorious benefits lifelogging will bring. Then he gives example after example of lifelogging failing to be useful or usable. But no matter! For true believers like Kelly, failures are just speedbumps on the road to guaranteed success. One is reminded of our president’s similar blindness to failure or mistakes of any kind as he stares into the bright shining light of his desired future. The strong evidence that lifelogging isn’t needed, isn’t wanted, and doesn’t solve the problems it claims to solve is irrelevant, because lifelogging is “inevitable” and will soon be “pervasive.” “Skeptics” might complain, and might even try to prohibit lifelogging, but these naysayers should be ignored. Kelly’s message is that resistance is futile, so we might as well begin adapting our laws, culture and norms now.

But resistance is not futile, and CARPE technologies are not inevitable. People can and, I expect, will reject lifelogging, for the very reasons that Kelly cites in his article. The central flaw in Kelly’s reasoning (other than his rampant technical determinism) is a belief in “information” as some phlogiston-like magical substance that will, if gathered in sufficient quantities, empower us to live better lives. But as Daniel Yankelovich argues in Coming to Public Judgment, what people lack is not information, but the realization that they can exert influence over the world in which they live. Kelly is ready to cede this influence entirely to the computer scientists and product developers at Microsoft. I am not.

A beautiful holiday weekend needs rock of the purest kind.

The little sister headbanging and playing air guitar in the front is the best. Lesser bands would have kicked her out of the room, claiming rock as older brother territory. The Gauchos knew better.

Frontline is currently running a four-part series called News War: An Investigation into the Future of News, and they’re putting it all online as it airs. Part I (the only part that has aired so far) was fantastic, and I was happy to be able to see it in high-quality video with no stuttering. The accompanying site looks pretty, and is fairly easy to navigate, but the way the accompanying material presented is a wasted opportunity. The web content for Part I consists of some extra interview transcripts, an FAQ on the freedom of the press, some supplementary documents, and a really great curated set of links. All of these are of interest, but after watching the (gripping) documentary, going through this material feels a little like homework. Why not present this material at the appropriate times as I’m watching the video, so that I can not only go deeper or get some more context for what I’m seeing, but that I can make the decision to do so at the moment of seeing, instead of relying on my recall of what I finished seeing? It might be objected that doing so would interrupt the flow of the video, but the video is already split into segments. The relevant material for each segment could be presented after a segment, and linked to the appropriate shots from that segment to allow easy navigation back to what was just seen.

OK, enough about the architecture of the News War site. What about the Future of News? I’m going to withhold detailed commentary until I’ve seen the whole series, but Part I did a good job of explaining a facet of the Valerie Plame case that I didn’t understand all that well: how it represents the overturning of 30 years of de facto recognition of journalists’ right to not reveal the identity of confidential sources. Though this right was explicitly ruled not to exist by the Supreme Court, activist lawyers had succeeded in persuading states to adopt an interpretation of this ruling which did weakly recognize this right, and journalists were rarely subpoenaed. That has changed in the wake of the Plame case, since Richard Posner, and then a circuit court, stated that the activist interpretation was unsupported by the law.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series, particularly Part III, which will look at “citizen journalism” and new media news. But I suspect that Frontline will drop the ball by looking to elites like Eric Schmidt for insights into this stuff. Schmidt basically shrugs his shoulders and says (I am paraphrasing here), “the Internet has determined that the power formerly concentrated in the press shall be concentrated here at the GOOG. It’s perhaps not ideal, but what can be done? We’ll try to send some traffic your way, though, ’cause hey, we have a kind of nostalgic regard for editors and all that manual processing of information stuff. Good luck with that making a living thing.” This kind of arrogant technical determinism is what keeps getting Google sued. Talking to chiefs of staff when you’re reporting on the government or the NYT is a good strategy; when you’re reporting on a loosely interconnected set of networked forums it may not be. Neither Schmidt, nor network architecture, nor Google’s algorithms will determine the future of news, and we needn’t sit back and accept the dissolution of institutions of news gathering and dissemination as inevitable.

The February 2007 issue of Harper’s has a great series of essays on the theme of collective authorship that make it well worth picking up if you see it on the newsstand.

First is a complaint from Ian Jack about the trend among American writers toward thanking (in print) ever wider circles of friends and acquaintances. While acknowledging the mythical status of the popular image of the writer in solitude, and admitting that writing is often a cooperative act, he worries that this indicates a deeper trend toward the “industrialization” of the production of literature.

Such industrialization is the central vision of a manifesto by Sergei Tret’iakov, a Russian avant-garde writer who died in Stalin’s purges, calling for the “deindividualization and deprofessionalization of the writer.” Tret’iakov argues that small cliques of professional writers are no longer adequate “to keep up with the tempo of the present” and envisions a kind of literary assembly line, on the model of the newspaper, where specialized teams focus on first collecting, then processing, then testing the literary object being produced. I was struck by how this three-tier system echoed some other triads I’ve heard lately: Collect, Curate, Consume, or Create, Synthesize, Consume. “Testing” may at first seem to be quite different from “consuming,” but when you consider that contemporary digital media companies often use their consumers as testers, you see that they are just two sides of the same coin, as are “collecting” and “creating.”

Collecting as creating is illuminated beautifully by “The Ecstasy of Influence,” a remarkable collage text by Jonathan Lethem. As someone who has read a lot of writings on “free culture,” and not knowing the nature of what Lethem had created, I found myself wondering why Lethem was repeating so much tired rhetoric. Yet it flowed beautifully, and I enjoyed reading it. I was truly surprised when I reached the “key” to the piece at the end and realized what a virtuoso performance I had been experiencing.