Lazycoder

Digital Ethnography – wait..wha…?

The Machine is Us/ing Us Discussion

(Via new Uncle Brian.)

OK, so you may not understand the title. But the video makes some interesting points. I got 2/3rds of the way through it before YouTube stopped loading the video. Now it won’t come back up for me. It looks like it’s pretty popular right now so I’ll try back later. I wanted to touch on a couple of points that I did see in the video.

Web as a giant connected database

There are a lot of problems with this concept, well not with the concept but with some of the assumptions that go into the implementation.

1) Things that are related SHOULD be related to each other. – This is broken currently in the web. Spam links relate web logs and forums to non-related content. As long as non-moderated linking is allowed, this will always be broken. No search engine can get this right.

2) It’s easy to orphan records and hard to repair them. – links go dead (404), get renamed, and the content changes often (breaking rule #1). This lowers the reliability of the web as a whole. Lets use this video as an example. Right now, it won’t load for me. So it may not load for you. Which means you are relying on me to accurately relay the information in the video. I may misunderstand part of the video or may interpret it differently than you. Either way, if the video never comes back up, the context for comments and posts linking to it has changed.

We are in some way part of the new Web 2.0 machine

I think the social aspect of Web 2.0 has been overstated quite a bit. Sure there are thousands of blogs out there, but how many link to each other. Sadly, it’s a few high-traffic sites that get all the links. Which sites are on the A-List changes depending on your topic. Most of the time, we group together based on topic or based on who we know. So what you see when you look at graphs based on links and topics really look more like algae blooms. Big puffs with concentrations in the middle (high traffic sites that link a lot) with some crossover between topics. (e.g. sometimes political blogs link to tech stories and vice versa). Most of my social network contact lists consist of the same people. I go to a site, invite them, they link to me and I link to them but we never really find anyone new.

Hopefully I’ll be able to watch the rest of the video and then come back and add more (thus changing the context of anything linking to this post by changing the content).