Thursday, February 03, 2005

PERMALINK

Wall Street Journal liberals: And then there were none Over at the New York Times, William Safire has retired, and people are speculating about whether the paper will replace him with another conservative, or whether David Brooks constitutes a sufficient dosage. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal op-ed roster recently lost its one token liberal voice when Al Hunt decided to leave the paper. Hunt was never a terribly exciting writer, but at least he exposed the Journal's readership to a glimmer of light from outside its own serenely hermetic universe. Would the Journal keep any room on its opinion pages -- otherwise filled with the usual motley gang of social neanderthals, rad-lib[ertarians] and Bush sycophants -- for a dissenting voice? Apparently not. Today the paper told its readers that Hunt's old Thursday slot was going to be filled by a rotating gang of commentary writers presenting outside-the-Beltway perspectives. Look, I'm all for getting out of the Beltway. But getting out of your own partisan wagon-circle is also healthy. Doesn't the Journal have room for a single dissenter? Or is that whole concept just so, like, pre-9/11 that the Journal doesn't even think it's worth addressing? comment [] 2:57:13 PM | permalink

Tree-cutting and tag-spinning I have been mulling over a big old post about tagging and folksonomies, but book work has taken priority this week, and by now most of what I wanted to say has been said by others (here are some good links). So this is all I think I'll throw in to the discussion -- and append to my previously posted skepticism that people beyond early adopters will pursue tagging with any avidity: "Tagging" is a great word. "Categories" are onerous; they sound like work. "Tags" sound like play -- like a game we played when we were tots. (Hey, it's ludic!)"Categories" also implies, to many users, a mental model in which each item must live in one category to the exclusion of others. "Tags" encourages overlap, duplication, experimentation. I like the way David Weinberger puts it here, as he compares older-fashioned information hierarchies with folksonomic tagging: "The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together.... The old way -- trees -- make sense in controlled environments where ambiguity is dangerous and where thoroughness counts. Trees make less sense in the uncontrolled, connected world that cherishes ambiguity." And the world of software is so allergic to ambiguity that we should cherish any new development that opens a space within the digital realm for multiple meanings. If the software that begins to harness the tagging phenomenon can stay true to the spirit the word evokes, I think it has a chance of overcoming human intertia and resistance to doing more than the bare minimum of metadata labor. Which places a premium (as Ross Mayfield points out) on ease of use. If people are going to tag things at all, you need to make it really easy for them to do it fast. Del.icio.us -- once you set up its toolbar shortcut -- is pretty good, though I think it would be great if it showed you how other people tagged a link before you did your own tagging. Technorati's experiment with tagging for blog postings obviously has a very long way to go, but it's moving in the right direction. Will the whole thing get debased by commercialism and swamped by spam? Sure. Then we'll return to the drawing board. comment [] 2:38:45 PM | permalink

Astroturf journalism at the White House President Bush has relied on a ringer in recent press conferences: This guy named Jeff Gannon from a right-wing news site called "Talon News" spouts the GOP party line and lobs softball questions at the prez that repeat his own press releases. Metafilter and Salon's War Room have more. This is the dark side of the "now everyone's a journalist" blogosphere meme, a concept that for the most part I think is positive. But once anyone can set up as a journalist, public figures can summon astroturf reporters to do their bidding, and officials can "paper the house" with sympathizers the way theater producers have always done on opening night. (This reminds me of what happened in movie criticism in the '80s and '90s, as a variety of bozos went into the business of providing movie "reviews" to borderline media outlets with the sole purpose of giving the movie marketers a bottomless well of positive quotes.) The only answer, I suppose, is to say to the White House press office, hey, if your bloggers and guys-with-Web-sites get to ask questions at press conferences, the other side's should, too. Get Kos and Atrios and Tom Tomorrow in there! Mix it up! (No way, I know.) comment [] 1:18:29 PM | permalink