Sunday, May 18, 2003

Dave Winer, picking up on a major thread in the blogging community, says "If you want to be in Google,... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] Dan Gillmor goes on to say The other issue is whether blogs get too much play, period. I don't think so, but it's clearly an issue that deserves more examination. Too much play compared with what? The issue deserves examination because we should understand the limits of any information access mechanism we rely on. An interesting technical question is whether mentions of offline sources can be automatically turned into "links." We refer online to all kinds of entities that do not have a URL. Can their existence and identity be detected from their online traces? My former colleague David Lewis once drew a neat analogy between the Web and a bubble chamber. 8:32:28 PM

DaveNet: If you want to be in Google... [Scripting News] Dave Wyner is being way too thin-skinned here. Geoff Nunberg's story in the Sunday NYT is perceptive and entertaining. Contrary to Wyner's claim Geoffrey Nunberg repeats Orlowski's story and theory, and like Orlowski, either doesn't understand the relationship to being on the Web and being in a search engine, or chooses not to clue his readers in Nunberg understands Google. In fact, his explanation is concise and accurate There was nothing underhanded in Mr. Moore's ability to co-opt ownership of the phrase in the rankings; it follows from the way Google works. Its algorithms rank results both by looking at how prominently the search terms figure in the pages that include them and by taking advantage of what Google calls "the uniquely democratic nature of the Web" to estimate the popularity of a site. It gives a higher rank to pages that are linked to by a number of other pages, particularly if the referring pages themselves are frequently linked to. Nunberg is not talking about the absence of the NYT in the index, he's explaining the prominence of Moore. Wyner also takes out of context and finds derogatory the following pithy remark of Nunberg's: The beauty of the Web, after all, is that it enables us to draw on the expertise of people who take a particular interest in a topic and are willing to take the trouble to set down what they think about it. In that sense, the Web is a tool that enables people who have a life to benefit from the efforts of those who don't. All of us who write on specialized topics for specialized audiences don't have as much of "a life" as everyone else. After all, it's a beautiful sunny evening and I'm writing this rather than going outside. Nunberg has written extensively on the grammar of punctuation among other specialized topics, so he knows something about not having a life, and is well entitled to making mild fun of his own. Wyner's claim that This kind of writing is unbecoming a paper of the stature of the Times, and probably reflects a bias, perhaps even a conflict of interest, on the part of the author of the article and the editorial staff at the Times. shades into ad hominem and paranoia. Nunberg was writing about the networks of language and the role of specialists in them much before there was a www. PS. Doc Searls writes a deeper analysis of the issue. I still think that he and Wyner are wrong in their interpretation of Nunberg's piece. Nunberg's point is that Google's ranking system stops at the edge of print and so may present a biased view of authority. This may not be evident to the average Google user, or NYT reader, and it is worth saying. The NYT may be creating a problem for itself by locking up it back issues, but the problem still stands in other areas. Influential writing in many areas is not available online, especially older writing. Blogosphere advocates may huff and puff about the shortsightedness of paper distribution, but the central issue is knowledge, not publishing tactics. Users of Google and other search engines need to be aware of the outgoing "links" into the print world and the implicit bias that not following them imposes on knowledge seekers. Google is an amplifying instrument that makes more obvious the edges of knowledge networks. This is not a criticism of the Web, rather a thoughtful critique. 7:46:58 PM