Slashdot Mirror
The Googlewashing Of Our Language
KIondike writes "The Register talks about how a term ("Second Superpower") coined by the anti-war culture suddenly got radically neutered and altered by a weblog that a lot of people link to. Searching for the term on Google now brings up his blog and other people talking about his blog for the first several entries. Can Google's power to give information to the people be misused and perverted? This only took 42 days." First the widespread usage of "googling" to mean web searching, and now this.
Googlewhacking, Googlewashing, Googling, what else are there?
Google is a freaking web-based index and search tool. Why is this a concern at all? If Second Superpower is the name of a company, than I would expect to see it be on the list where it belongs. If someones blog or site is named that, what is the issue? Many people are linking to it, and it escalates the PageRank.
Welcome to proof that Google works the way it was intended, in only 42 days!
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
You may have handled Google.
Now, prepare to get Slashdotted.
"5... 4... 3.. 1... OFFBLAST!"
"Second Superpower" would make a great band name.
(apologies to Dave Barry)
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
i don't remember ever being consulted about my stance on war in any poll.
so did you just make up at statistic, or do 7 of your 10 friends support the war?
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
New forms of communication and commentary are being invented continuously. Slashdot and other news sites present high quality peer-reviewed commentary by involving large numbers of members of the web community in recommending and rating items. Text messaging on mobile phones, or texting, is now the medium of choice for communicating with thousands of demonstrators simultaneously during mass protests. Instant messaging turns out to be one of the most popular methods for staying connected in the developing world, because it requires only a bit of bandwidth, and provides an intimate sense of connection across time and space. The current enthusiasm for blogging is changing the way that people relate to publication, as it allows realtime dialogue about world events as bloggers log in daily to share their insights. Meta-blogging sites crawl across thousands of blogs, identifying popular links, noting emergent topics, and providing an instantaneous summary of the global consciousness of the second superpower.
... who does not see a huge difference between the two definitions of the phrase "Second Superpower"?
Mmmm.. Donuts
While the effects of linking are multiplicative in their effect of raising a page's ranking, the problem is that it requires someone to actually put those terms into the search engine to get to them. If someone is going to find a definition of a word, they'll probably go to a dictionary. While I do see an increase in the practice of entering a phrase into the search engine to learn more about it (I've done it) I would consider this more mis-/dis-information or tangential discussion than actually changing the meaning of the words.
Then again, it is kind of an interesting phenomemon, sort of similar to that blog-scraping-trend-watching program that appeared a few weeks ago on here. The difference is that people don't really see trends unless they look for them, or look at many different examples of something. The meaning of the word isn't going to change because a few people over a short period of time are talking about it differently. It won't change the meaning for people who already know the word and aren't exposed to any of the discussion, which will probably be far more than those taking part in the discussion of the alternative meaning of the word or phrase.
I have the feeling that I've spoken much but said little...
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
I think the point is that I might hear someone mention the phrase "Second Superpower" and trust Google to give me an authoritative answer. Google are free to return whatever results they choose.
They might choose to flood the results for "war" with articles which espouse a particular political stance in return for a fee. But most people assume that search engines are politically neutral.
Remember a lot of people are using Google to search for amazon.com. These are the same people who believe that what it says in the dictionary is what a word "really means".
ohhh man... do you know what this means.... every poll is BS, cause they didn't all ask me, and if they did, what if they didnt talk to you.
Great Linux Site
Okay, let me get this straight. One guy calls world public opinion a second superpower. Another guy calls informed netizens a second superpower a few days (weeks?) later. Now the Reg is upset that the first guy is not showing up on Google? What the f*** ??
Does he have a right to come first on a google search? Maybe if more people linked to him, he would be first. How is this a conspiracy? Is there any evidence that Google actively did this? If they are so pissed about it, may be they should start a link campaign, or propagate their version of the "second superpower" more...
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
Thanks Taco! Now, thanks to your creations of yet another link to this blog, the meaning of the phrase can be contorted even MORE, all thanks to the help of Page Ranking!
The first rule of Googlewashing is you don't talk about Googlewashing. The second rule of Googlewashing is you don't talk about Googlewashing.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
The Register article complains solely because a search for "second superpower" now links primarily to an article on a Harvard weblog about something increasingly similar to the term they preferred ("second superpower" being those global antiwar protestors).
What does this mean? Google's relevance works -- I saw links to the Harvard article on almost every major weblog I read--it's a popular concept, and google reflects that.
Google is not an encyclopedia, nor is it a movement organizer. Google categorizes information based on some perceived level of web popularity. I think its doing its job.
As a libertarian I've become well-acquainted with the "hijacking" of terminology -- to the point of which it becomes exceedingly difficult to discuss some subjects because the people discussing it may not be talking about the same thing...
One example of this is the term "liberal". Once upon a time this had a very different meaning, and "classical liberalism", while on some issues resembles modern liberalism, is very different on many others. I doubt someone like Tom Paine would agree with much of what today's Democratic party supports.
Another example is "anarchy". To the Republicans, it's equated with chaos and a lack of any form of control, though in actuality it's meant to describe a social system that relies on self-control. To the socialists, it could only mean "classical anarchy", or "anarchosocialism", a sort of communist utopia. Libertarians often support "anarchocapitalism", where people can own the means to production.
The term "libertarianism" has been similarly obscured in meaning. Socialists have attempted to claim it for their own in the past. Many people, including the leadership of the Libertarian party, consider it equivalent to minarchism, while other influential people seek to equate the term to a restriction against the initiation of force. Meanwhile, other organizations also wish to subsume the term.
That seems to be what the entire article amounts to: "Gosh, we were trying to create this "meme" that large global gatherings of communists, students, and people without jobs were some mysterious force known as a 'Second Superpower,' and then someone went off and used those words in an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WAY without asking our permition! It's not fair not fair not fair! How DARE they used free speech differently than we do?"
This is news? (I know, it's a slashdot story, so it has no requirement to even resemble news.) Whatever happened to "the cure for speech you disagree with is more speech"? It's not like anyone has a copyright on a silly phrase like "Second Superpower." Get a grip already...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I read the article, and it looks like one big whine to me, that could be summed up as "Some other small social group stomped the arbitrary phrase that my small social group created." Ho hum, so what? I had never heard that phrase until I read it today in Slashdot.
Unlike some other posters who also commented on this story, I do believe the polls that claim 70%+ support for the war among americans. I run in a number of real life social circles, and some of these social circles are rabidly anti-war. They make the same claims about made up polls and mass media conspiracies. The funny thing is, most of these people choose to include only other liberals in their group of friends. A side effect of that choice is that they don't have any friends who support the war. That side effect of their personal choices gives them a very skewed view of overall public opinion. I'm not so selective of friends, and I know far more people who support the war than who oppose it.
We just bitch a lot; we aren't "protestors" of anything more than megalomaniacle corporations and bribed governement officials. See the difference now?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
"second superpower" my arse.
Listen.
Do you have nukes?
No?
SHUT UP
Do you have military installations world wide?
No?
SHUT UP
Do you have a network of spies and counter spies embedded in governments and multinational corporations around the world?
No?
SHUT UP
Do you have spy satellites capable of taking high accuracy pictures of, oh, just about anything?
No?
SHUT UP
Do you have ICMBs, the worlds LARGEST military air force capable of decimating any section of the earth, and nuclear subs submerged beneath all the worlds oceans?
No?
SHUT UP, FUCK OFF, AND GET A GRIP ON REALITY
Maybe nobody ever made it clear to these irritants. The United States is NOT a super power because of its "large world wide voice". The United States is a super power because IT IS POWERFUL ENOUGH TO COMPLEATLY DESTORY EVERY MAN WOMAN AND CHILD IN ANY NUMBER OF NATIONS AT ANY POINT IN TIME IT SHOULD SO CHOOSE TO DO SO
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Of course, by posting the link on slashdot, Google's pagerank for this site will only jump higher.
Call me a skeptic, but I think it takes longer than 42 days (and the limited audience of blogs) to coin the meaning of a new term. I've never heard this term used before I read this article. It seems to me new word definitions come about because of a need for them, not some strange, perverted miss-use of google.
I guess I'm a little confused by the article. Is the author saying there is some causation of this new word meaning stemming from Google? If so, that is their any apreciable percentage of the populace doing google searches each time they encounter a new word? If Google is merely a tool to tell us the more accepted definition of a word, then is google really an accurate tool for this?
Sorry, but I see this a very weakly supported theory, and don't think it deserves enough attention to have been posted to slashdot.
AccountKiller
I do remember that at least a while ago if you googled (hehe) "Dumbmotherf@#cker" and took the first link (feelin' lucky) you ended up at G.W.B's campaign webpage....
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
My website has become the first site in every
.pdf formatted spec sheets for
google search for several models of laptop
computer. This in spite of the fact that it
is served over a 128k link from a P120 laptop
in my kitchen.
90% of the traffic from this machine is people
downloading the
these rather popular computers... apparently my
site is the only one in the United States that
has the spec sheets, so I rose to the top based
on some preference for U.S. based sites. Most
of the hits come from overseas, so it is not just
that they weight toward the nearest site, but that
they weight U.S. sites more heavily.
I really wish I cared,only...I just dont give a google.
and "secnod superpower" is I believe a googlewhack!
I might as well mention the phenomenon of registering misspellings.
Try searching for Second superpower -moore and all the references to the James Moore article magically vanish. Wow, that was hard.. .. and no, I see very little difference between the term as defined in this article, and the term as defined elsewhere. "Public Opinion" in the Moore article, "Public Opinion" in all the other search results. Where's the Googlewash?
The register article didn't make it very clear what the 'original' definition was supposed to be, and I had assumed that the US Government and/or pro-war groups had been trying to redefine the "Axis of Evil" as the "Second Superpower.", because otherwise I just don't see what the problem is.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
The article asserts that the original definition was destroyed by a weblog. I'm not convinced. If the anti-war movement had been able to stop the U.S., then claiming to be a second superpower would have had some legitmacy. However, the anti-war movement did not stop the U.S. In my view, that's what killed the original definition.
the parody of All Your Base starring George Bush and Saddam Huessien. Any of you got the link? I know that this is off topic, but this topic kinda sux, doesn't it? In 42 days these blogs will have other linkages and this will move down in pagerank(tm) and return to it's "original" meaning. At least the All Your Iraq are belong to U.S. is funny - even if it is a litte lacking in photos and photoshopped photos at that.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
So how does one quote a search engine as a source in a term paper anyways?
I don't know about anyone else but Google certainly isn't the single source to define whatever topics I'm doing research into.
And by research I'm not talking specifically some kind of thesis or paper. I mean even the little stuff such as a definition of a word or phrase that I've come across in a book or an online article.
There are plenty of other search engines and plenty of other indexing algorithms to go with it. I can't let one "fuzzy logic" formula control my view of the world.
This is why when learning how to write a term paper in high school we're told to get at least X number of different sources. Perhaps a refresher course where we replace the concept of "term paper" with "internet".
And lastly, is this a trend that we need to worry about? Does Google really have that kind of influence that if it starts linking to one definition of a phrase instead of the other, the world is going to conform to what Google tells us?
Farked if I know. Or care.
[insert response noting reference to fark and its influence over me. TIC ppl.]
1. Define your idea/agenda in a proactive, positive way, ala pro-life vs. anti-abortion or pro-choice vs. pro-abortion.
2. Parasitic exposure to a wider audience, or an audience that is seeking something other than what you have to deliver. Consider this the Spammizing of culture and marketing.
As to this latter trend, the more media channels there are to promulgate a message, the more intense seems to become the competition to exploit them by whatever means.
Letter To Iran
I read the article (yeah, yeah, I know) and several times they mention Orwell's newspeak, and how the totalitarian state would try to co-opt the meaning of words, to redefine them, and reshape public opinion to their liking. People respond to keywords, so if you know how someone is going to respond to a certain keyword, and then you can associate that keyword to something else, people will project their feelings about the keyword towards the "something else." Kind of like how since September 11th, everybody wants to call anything they don't like "terrorism," and try to link everything from driving an SUV to smoking pot to file sharing (!!) to terrorists. I'm just waiting for the next time I'm at the movies and the guy behind me won't stop talking. I think I'll call him a "whisper terrorist."
Anyway, I digress. So, the protesters are pissed off because they think this blogger re-defined their "Second Superpower" bit. Well, hello, protesters, you did it first. People associate "Superpower" with powerful nations like the US or the former USSR. Somebody that, even if you don't like what they say, you have to listen to, because they're a SUPERPOWER, damnit!
Now, the classic definition of "Superpower" has always been "somebody really big and important, with lots of money, and guns, and influence." The result is, you listen to a superpower. Now, the protesters want somebody to listen to them. So, they re-define "superpower" to mean "college students looking for something to crusade against, aging hippies, the unemployed and employable, oh, and, uh, France." "See!! Now WE'RE a Superpower, so you have to listen to us! We're the SECOND SUPERPOWER, get it!?! Except, umm, instead of money and guns and nukes and tanks and influence, we have signs, slogans, and a VW with flowers painted it. But you still have to listen!" Oh, well, looks like your re-definition just got re-defined.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
And there really isn't a second goolepower. The parallels are obvious. When you have a leader, far ahead, Microsoft Corp., McDonalds, USA, Google, the vast majority benefit from what is involved, but that's not to say a critique won't occure. Indeed, as Google has grown, so has the anti-google-ites. Privacy issues and now issues like knowledge flow manipulation. Obviously, Google is the best and I'll keep using it....Hmmm hasn't that logic been applied to: Microsoft, USA, etc.
------ Michael A. Romig
To be honest, I would love to have a switch in google that excludes blogs. Given the way Google works and the culture of linking to and fro between many different blogs, sometimes (another annoying feature of google) an innocuous search on "Talmudic discourses" will produce a raging Anti-Semitic diatribe in a blog. I think that person has a right to post such stuff, but I wish I could filter on it to get to what I am looking for. "Talmudic discourse -blogs." Yes, currently the search is not producing the blog I saw the first time. Grrrrrrr.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
How about you get your head out of your ass. Try Gallup, FoxNews Dynamics, and Zogby polls that all back up the 70+% number.
"the number of Internet users who look at blogs is " so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs.""
phew!
Considering how much they're talked about lately, I was afraid I was the only one that thought they were pointless.
I think the gist of the article is that a not very widely read, techno-elite, blogger network has out "Page Ranked" the original New York Times article that was the origin of the term "Second Superpower".
The register article is pretty long, and mind you it would be pretty funny if it ended up being the number one search result for "Second Superpower"...
Remember how PageRank is supposed to work - it ranks websites in order of "importance". I still not sure if I agree with this as a whole (and prefer the HITS algorithm). It seems hard to imagine that the (in this case anti-war) Blog community is more authoritative than the NY Times.
Not sure that there's any solution to this issue, but I think its more of an observation on the limitations of PageRank.
Winton
PageRank _is_ democratic! The internet started talking about Moore's writing about "Second Superpower", linking to it, etc, and so it showed up on google, that only makes sense The high rank in google is justified because the majority of links on internet blogs with the text "second superpower" were pointing to moore's page. Google never claimed to be a measure of what THE WORLD was talking about, just a measure of what THE INTERNET is talking about, and that is precisly what it is doing here.
If the original coiners of the term want thier definition to be the top definition on the internet, then they should have thier own blogs where they talk about it, and democracy will take over in google's pagerank process, whichever sites get the most links will have a higher ranking.
Google is a COMPUTER it isn't making value judgements, it is just following a formulla that gives every website a vote.
No matter how much 'crap' you pile on, at the base core Google is search engine. It's not a creator or define-or of words and phrases.
Google's ranking system (IMHO) is just like a movie critic - there for information but if you base everything on it you'd better remove the horseblinders so you can at least see someone slapping you upside the head!
Orwell's Big Brother will come to pass if we continue to let others tell us what what we should think. I know it's hard for some people but try to draw your conclusions AFTER consulting more than one source...
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
So, he writes an article shamelessly distorting the essay, and makes dark pronouncements about how Google is too powerful and an enemy of Truth. Others apparently agree that "Google's power to give information to the people [can] be misused and perverted".
Anyone else extremely grateful that these people don't have any substantive power in the US? Any surprise that things turned out the way they did when they got power in other places?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Right now there is heavy linkage to the blog. Sure, but what about in the future? When the links get archived and Google stops seeing them? As time progresses the web graph should stablize and the "true" meaning should come to the front.
Of course, I think both effects are great. Why? Well if a term takes on a certain meaning for a local period of time... wouldn't you assume that most searches/links to it are using that definition? And that over time a more stable definition would dominate? I don't see this as a bad thing.
What is music when you despise all sound?
If only somehow we could harness the power of all the people surfing for pr0n on the net...
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
"Slashdot and other news sites present high quality peer-reviewed commentary by involving large numbers of members of the web community in recommending and rating items."
Obviously that man has never been here.
Two:
"The shared, collective mind of the second superpower is made up of many individual human minds - your mind and my mind - together we create the movement."
Sounds like the Borg.
"Inflammable means flammable? What a strange country!" -Dr. Nick, The Simpsons
"second superpower" pushes ahead of even "al-jazeera" (which recently passed "sex") in today's Google Zeitgeist...but only for 7 hours, starting around 7:34 PM.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
As far as Google's involvement is concerned, where's the beef? Google is working as designed. Just because it links to stories in a way you don't happen to agree with, too stinking bad. Life's rough; get a helmet.
The point of the article isn't about competing "memes", it's about flaws in Google's PageRank system. In this case, the weighting of site importance on the basis of the number and authoritativeness is being thrown by the incestuous linking behavior of weblogs.
If there's a flaw in the article, it's that it implies -- without ever quite coming out and saying it -- that there was some sort of conspiracy or malice aforethought. Obviously, there was not.
Also implied but not stated directly is that Google has some kind of responsibility to make sure that its results aren't skewed by anomalous inputs. Whether they do or not is a matter of opinion, but the article would have been much stronger if the author had addressed the point directly. OTOH, considering how little traction the idea of social responsibility has among the center-right libertarian crowd that reads the Register, I can see why the author declined to wander into that quagmire.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
France has just officially surrendered to the "Second Superpower".
Live web cams
find the community of ants analogy just a bit amusing?
In any event, this blog seems a bit lofty. Ok fine, there is no government like NO government, yada yada, whatever. The best democracy is unanimous and direct (i.e. what everyone would vote on is what everyone would have done anyway). Since this is unlikely to manifest itself anytime soon the only alternative is a pluralistic democracy in which people disagree. I'm in college too, but I get sick and tired of people talking about "the revolution" and what not. Look, you don't like the way things are? Write your representative a letter, not an email, a letter. If he or she doesn't listen, vote them out of office. People often say they don't vote because there is no one that they feel they can vote FOR. Some of these people vote anyway just to vote AGAINST someone (e.g. you hate A? vote for B, because you hate them less). Well, here's an idea, don't vote for a candidate, just vote out the incumbent, whoever it is, until you get someone good. No rational politician wants to get voted out after one term.
We've got a good system here, people should use it. And be glad you can vote freely.
sig
Wrong. As described in Register story, the phrase was created by one guy in a newpaper article. Just because HE choose it to describe a significant movement - is that suppose to automatically override the tech weblog A-list?
Can you say, utopia? The article is extremely bias and obviously anti-war. It doesn't seem to be able to really understand the human psych either. I will use just -one- line in order to prove how badly thought out the article is.
"Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants."
Ants have a queen to guide them. If all the people in this "second worldpower" were mere 'worker ants', as I dub them, then who will be the queen? Obviously not the government since the 'first worldpower' is the US government according to the article. No, this article is calling for the utopian version, or a 'perfect' version, of Marx's Communism where everyone shares the wealth and reaps the benefits of the majority.
... just to say "42"!
Soooooooooooooooo...the riots in L.A. are the results of a superpower? Tienamen Square, superpower as well?
Personally I think if you stupid enough to beleive everything you read off the web, and from just a single search on a single search engine you just _may_ deserve what you get. So one search on a search engine takes away some of your dim light, cry me a river. What does this say about the real morals here, what is more important the publicity of the message of the people protesting for peace by breaking shop windows and forcing stores to close early so paychecks are short and sales destroyed for the day creating economic hardships for many, or the attainment of peace itself through peaceful means? I don't think that the recycling of a silly buzzword from a single search engine is the real cause for alarm here.
*tosses two bits
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
. China is already the 2nd superpower and has been since the fall of Soviet Russia.
We used to live in a world of 3 superpowers now we live in a world with only 2.
China has the economic and military might and 1/8th of the world's population needed to supplant the USA as the dominant player in the late-21st/early-22nd century. I hate when people say "the US is the only superpower" because it lets me know they have a huge blindspot. China is smart enough to exploit that blindspot.
Sorry, some people have pipedreams of "people power" and the EU being a counterweight to "the only superpower," but you're seriously disconnected from reality.
And, to state my bias (because everyone has one), I am a pro-American, American. I don't like the idea of the PRC, and not the Angloshpere, running the planet, but the smart money is on China.
One Milllllllllllllllllllllllllllllion divisions. Each division has laser beams attached to it's head too.
Live web cams
Yes, but the Internet will eventually strike back. To borrow the words from an anonymous author at alt.religion.kibology, I suspect a new emerging trend on the net is about to become the standard course of action:
"The Internet interprets blogging as damage, and routes around it."
Okay, I'm not quite grasping how weblogs enter that much into Google ranking. I understand how Google ranks based on how many other sites link to you. However, I don't understand exactly, from a technical perspective, what's going on here. How did this Moore character subvert Google? Can someone help?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
You know what? I don't care who the "second superpower" turns out to be. It can be a nation. It can be a people. What gets me is that people seem to think there has to be one.
I'm going to be point blank honest. If someone has to be the dominant superpower, I want it to be the United States.
Why? Well several reasons but the main one is that I'm a United States Citizen. It's in my best interests for the U.S. to be on top. The United Nations doesn't hold my best interests. France sure as fuck doesn't.
Another reason is that I consider the Constitution of the United States to be the single greatest document ever known to man. The United Nation's Human Rights charter tried to be that but it's little caluse about all right's being null and void if they go against the goals of the U.N. really fucked it up. The Constitution puts the power into the hands of free men and not the government.
I love how both the republicans and democrats seem to think that our rights are confered on us by the federal government. What kind of bullshit is that? Did they read the document they swore to uphold? Our rights are endowed to us by our creator. It is the governments job to safeguard those. If they fail, we have the power to put in a government that WILL.
Just as in everything, it's survival of the fittest. If another nation rises to be a superpower then bully for them. I personally think it's stupid for a government to be more concerned about what the U.S. is doing and how they stack up to the U.S. than to be concerned about it's own people.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
And the fact that the stupid stuff got pushed to the top through this democratic process is nothing new. Just like the stupid people seem to out-breed the smart ones, the general populace has an appetite for pseudoinformation; content that is more aimed more at stirring emotions than at informing.
Real information is burried under lots of chaff. As one of the "intelligent" people of this world, you should already understand (and expect) that you have to dig to get to it.
I agree with some posters claiming that the Register article isn't the best example...like many, I think the two meanings of "Second Superpower" don't seem that different, and both seem productive.
But to focus on that alone is to completely miss the point of the article! What's much more interesting are the claims it makes about PageRank. It makes the case that bloggers only make up 4% of the web-surfing population, which might be a BIT low but sounds right to me. THEN they point out that because of how PageRank works with its distributed scores, all it takes is for 10-20 "A-List Bloggers" (ie. a very small fraction of an already small 4%) to link to something to catapult it to the very top of a Google search. We all use Google, so we know how important this is.
The point, then? PageRank claims to be democratic, yet the article demonstrates that 20 or so people can effectively dictate the order of search results for certain terms. It's not a conspiracy...yet. Certainly worth noting, however!
The basic point of The Register piece is that PageRank often causes mediocrity to rise to the top.
Look at the comments in this thread. A perfectly coherent, valid critique of PageRank, posted by The Register, is now drowning in a sea of blogger-like idiocy surrounding the keywords "second superpower," due to the fact that Slashdot, with its scandalously-high, Googly-geeky ranking status, couldn't leave well enough alone.
Shame on Google. Shame on Slashdot.
At PDI, we did some of the very early, but not the earliest, morph animation. The earliest developers/users were Tom Brigham at NYIT and Doug Smythe at ILM.
One thing we did, though, as our tool was used over and over again back in '90 and '91 was to push the use of the word 'morph'. We were working on things like the Michael Jackson Black or White video, things that really pushed the technique into many people's eyeballs. ILM was pushing the word 'morf'.
A Stanford student did a survey of the use of the word 'morph' in the news media, and it exploded from almost unused to being used in thousands of articles over the period that we were striving to push the word out, and as we were doing those videos. It was fun to coin a word, and have it become accepted.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I do believe the polls that claim 70%+ support for the war among americans. I run in a number of real life social circles, and some of these social circles are rabidly anti-war. They make the same claims about made up polls and mass media conspiracies. The funny thing is, most of these people choose to include only other liberals in their group of friends. A side effect of that choice is that they don't have any friends who support the war. That side effect of their personal choices gives them a very skewed view of overall public opinion. I'm not so selective of friends, and I know far more people who support the war than who oppose it.
I would disagree here. Wait, I am disagreeing here. Hmm. Anyway, I would say that 70% of the people do NOT support the "WAR" but that 70% of the people support out troops. After all, our troops are our brothers, sisters, moms, dads, children, friends, and co-workers. Not many people want them to die, and few people understand *really* why we are in Iraq anyway. Most people just don't have enough time / money to spend a lot of effort for ANY side of the war. (and I bet many anti-war protestors still drive oil-burning cars)
But what *my* question is - What the F is up with all these polls? I mean, I have been a registered voter for over 10 years. I own a home, I give to charities. I am in the phonebook, and not hard to find. I have *never* been polled once (unless GM calling to see if I was happy with my service at the Chevy dealer counts). So I just won't believe a poll, until they can poll more than 15% of the actual population.
I think the issue is more evenly split - just like the country. I would imagine that urban centers are predominatly anti-war, and rural areas pro-war. Hmmm, strange that, eh?
I do agree that this particular article is a bit odd. Isn't the point of a search engine to find relevant results? If you search for "Second Superpower" and the engine returns a bunch of discussions about it - isn't that good? Or is it bad simply because you might disagree with the pages topic? Whether you agree with the political message or not - it DID discuss "Second Superpower"...
Other factors can influence things - more than just of the political orientation of friends. How about economic status, religious affiliation, geographic location? Maybe people might have more liberal friends because they live in Eugene Oregon, and are unemployed.... Maybe not...
Does anyone else find it amusing that the number of days this great and horrible tragedy took happens to be the answer to life, the universe, and everything? Douglas Adams, anyone?
The anti-war people are quite free to put up Web sites that talk about the "Second Superpower" and link to other Web sites that are sympathetic to their cause. They might actuallly go up in the search engine rankings if they did this in an organized fashion.
I think that the real beef is that the anti-war guys don't have as much mindshare as they believe that they should have. So they're upset that their use of the term is overshadowed by some blogger who happens to have more links and references than they do.
Search engines just report what's there and what's referred to by others. They don't make moral judgements on the importance of the content. They don't really care if you personally think your definition or usage is more important than the next guy's.
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
Those who forget the past are doomed
I would like to add a bit to this. The modern "liberal" movement essentially hijacked the term "liberal." It used to refer to what we would now call neo-liberalism, or free-market.
This is not to say that the label as applied to "liberals" is completely unjustified: the liberals of old believed that the free market was a good way to promote personal freedom. The New Deal Liberal (the longer term for what many people think of as "liberal") believes that government can be used to promote personal freedom. Both are oriented towards personal freedom, they just take radically different approaches.
This causes the huge confusion related to libertarian. I remember trying to talk to my step-dad (a Republican) about libertarians, and he was absolutely convinced that libertarians were communists. Because they had the word "liberal" in their title. Kinda. Sorta.
Chomsky and Nader, two of the more influential "liberals" have tried to distinguish themselves by calling themselves "socialist libertarians", and calling libertarians "neo-liberal libertarians" or "free-market libertarians." The goal here is to a) clear up some massive confusion in terminology, and b) separate the "socialist libertarians" (greens and many, many others) from the "socialist authoritarians" (Communists, Democrats, Republicans - though those last two are hazy. I say that mostly based upon the way they tend to vote).
One of the perils of free speech is one of lexicon: many concepts are usually gathered under one word. What do you do when someone starts using that word to mean what they consider to be a significant subset (the "true" subset) of the word? People often forget this, but one of the elements of speech being free is being able to choose your own words - even when those words are wrong. Just something to think about.
"second superpower" -moore
Presto! The first link that comes up makes no mention of Moore's essay, and in fact it links to somebody else's essay that expounds upon the exact point of view that the article wants.
But that's beside the point. A search engine is a tool that responds to rules. If one side is better at manipulating those rules than the other, tough noogies. If one side is exceptionally good at manipulating the rules, it will become obvious to the point of diluting the value of the search engine.
Furthermore, I never heard the phrase "second superpower" before this was posted to Slashdot! So my language can hardly be said to have been "googlewashed" of this phrase. Besides, "second superpower" is just a symbol for "antiwar movement". Symbols don't change the underlying meaning. They are just that--symbols. I think the author overestimates the value of symbolism. Most people can see through to the real meaning. Take "USA Patriot Act" and "People's Republic" as examples. What do you think when you see these symbols? If the coiners of these phrases assumed that they would be taken at face value, they were both sorely mistaken, and so is the author of the article.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Separating out the bizarre attacks on Joi Ito for eating lunch, his thesis seems to be that 'A-list bloggers' have hijacked and neutered the phrase from the Anti-war (or anti-Bush) protestors, and swamped Google with this new interpretation.
In fact, the original article he cites (reproduced here) did not contain the phrase 'second superpower'; it had a throwaway rhetorical flourish in the first sentence:
The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
(Orlowski elides the first part about the Western alliance to support his these that it's all about the street, man).
As he says, this meme circulated about the web a bit, and eventually James Moore explored the idea in more detail, and a broader context than just marching against Bush, combining it with the preceding discussions on 'emergent democracy' that had been going for a while. Of course this gets a higher rank for 'second superpower' - it is in the title, and enough people found it interesting enough to link to.
Instead of a lot of incoherent slogans, here are people discussing how to bring it about.
Orlowski then completely distorts the quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden I posted to the list. Discussing a report on the very disruptive, street-blocking protests, where protesters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington and elsewhere shouted the same slogan, "This is what democracy looks like!"
Patrick said
No, that's not what democracy looks like.
It's what protest looks like, and it's often the right thing to do. And of course "democracy" had better entail significant tolerance of unruly protest, or it's not very democratic.
But that slogan is stupid, even by the standards of slogans. Long and often boring meetings are what democracy looks like. Tiresome horse-trading is what democracy looks like. Talking to your neighbors is what democracy looks like.
Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets. It can't function at all without that other stuff.
The emergent democracy group is about how to build tools and structures to capture democratic intent in a digital world. If you're interested in this, join in.
Perhaps what Orlowski is really worried about is that a group who aren't part of the clerisy of professional Journalists and activists are taking an interest, and actually discussing ideas calmly and rationally, and thereby attracting links from other people, Doc and Dave earned their high Google ranking by writing lots of things that people found interesting enough to link to, day after day for over 5 years.
Andrew, if you have interesting things to say about the future of democracy, join the discussion, but don't troll for cheap links by stooping to selective quotation and ad hominem attacks.
Google is a mechanism, but it's not the drive. People picking up new phrases is the drive. The Register itself is part of it -- a popular, respected site, it will now drive the meme further and further.
Google is a good, efficient mechanism for a meme to spread, but it certainly isn't dangerous or evil.
May we never see th
Look, Google isn't the messiah. But it isn't Orwell redux. It's a tool, and it seems to be one that does what most people want when they use it.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The logicical conclusion, IMO, is to bar blogs from being spidered by google.
If nothing else it will prevent me from having to hear about everyone's freaking lunch any further.
He's just using the Fox News logic where they trace back the spinnoffs of the anti-war groups to the 19th century when they were all communists. Hey, did you know Fox News spun off of tabloids... oh, wait, no-spin zone, duh. They didn't spin off.
Rather than whining about having their meme hijacked, they should try and take it back, by starting/colonizing a zillion lefty-leaning blogs that use "Second Superpower" the way they want it to be used. This is right in line with the traditions of free speech and the democratic nature of the net, which the original posters support, right?
Granted, this takes work and resources. It's far easier to just post a complaining article with just a hint of conspiracy theory...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Google that.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
A Google search for "eighth superpower" returned zero hits, so I hereby declare myself the eighth superpower. First through Seventh already had hits. I didn't check 9 so there may be no single digit superpowers left! Ha!
What is my superpower? I make people puke over the network. Hey... whaddya expect, I mean, by the time you get to 8th all the cool stuff like teleportation and x-ray vision is taken. At least I got single digit though. I pity the foo who has to settle for 135th superpower.
Oh, BTW, negative superpowers are evil.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
After reading all the posts on this thread, I've realized something, most (not all) are not replying to the actual article, it's actual meaning. Everyone is argueing the term "Second Superpower", and not the fact that Google is flawed towards a minority of web-log people. (just say no to BLOG!).
/.'er told 'em too? when a /.'er gives me advice I advise you to do the opposite, especially if it has nothing to do with tech.
While I too have strong sentiments towards war, and protest, I have the clarity of thought to SEE what is actually going on, mainly nothing to do with glorifying protest.
So everyone now please, turn off CNN, take a deep breath, and RTFA! If you still want to rant for/against war and protest, please buy a dog, thats what their here for.
Nobody is going to be swayed by your opinion anyway. Who's seriouly going to revamp their value system because some
Sorry, just one moment of coffee driven zen-like clarity.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Now, as for Google itself, I do think it's not good to have a single search engine that everybody relies on. Google seems to be trying to play nice, but they do make mistakes, and who knows what their management will be like in the future. If it bothers you, there is a simple thing you can do: use another search engine as your default.
How it could miss a freaking NYT article? Well, it's probably because the New York Times makes it difficult to link to themselves. They take down older articles and charge for "research" forcing most people to trudge off to the library or do without. Most people who don't want to look like loons pointing to non-extant links don't point at the NYT and so the NYT is going to sink very low in Google results. They deserve it.
Just the same, we should all be aware that Google can and does miss the originators of ideas. It's a huge step up over pulp publications which could miss entire social movements or hoplessly prevert them according to the world view of the publisher. Google can shine it's light on fledgling ideas you would never have found 20 years ago, much less in today's consolidated media. Yet for all it's goodness, it has not earned its PhD yet.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
So, let me get this straight. Basically, the argument is "you stole our word!!" We're talking about one colloquialism's meaning competing with another. Spare me.
Google didn't kill your word. This is a non-issue.
As a member of the left, I am so dishearted by the left's willingness to stand up for itself. Democratic politicians have apparently decided that their electoral success lays in being Republican-lite. War protesters have been cowed into silence by the right wing and the media by the slightest suggestion that war protesters are unpatriotic. People who consider themselves liberal are frightened to confess that in public.
Read 1984 people. Groupthink is not patriotism.
The left needs to stand up and fight back. Especially now, since the right's vision of the future is a government that is keeping tabs on people who buy 1984 and Cather in the Rye from Amazon.com.
The difference between a liberal and a conservative is that the liberal cares about you and the conservative doesn't.
I don't know why people are complaining, this isn't the first time a word's meaning was replaced by another, nor will it be the last...
Look at the words, gay and chauvinist. Gay used to mean "to be happy", but now when most people use it; it ussually refers to homosexuality. Chauvinist use to mean, "to be ultra patriotic/nationalistic", but now it's used to denote a male sexist... More recently look at the words, bad and sick... same thing....
what about google affecting our spelling... by that i mean that becuase it auto corrects spelling maby our spelling isn't getting any better.... i shure as hell know mine isn't...
Support Objectivism and the United States,
Ayn Rand
Based on increasing interviews with Iraqis, you might want to bump that up to 3...
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
I think more important than the story is the recent trend to use the term "Google" as a common phrase - "to google," "googlewashing." Xerox, Kleenex, and Microsoft are all aware of the possibly of losing exclusivity of their trademarks by having their brand become a household name.
I hope Google is paying attention.
"Second superpower" -moore Patrick Tyler
and see three big hits. Kinda wimpy after the 813 hits to inofensive blather Also shocking after a New York Times article then a Quote from the Secratary General of the UN, no?
The point of the Register article is that Google can be bombed. People who wish to influence public opinion can set up a few web pages and screw Google over. I noticed this durring the 2000 presidential election where Al Gore used his great knowledge of the internet to capture the first 100 hits for three articles published in various pages all with duplicate text for the phrase search "Al Gore" "liar".
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I'm not sure that was the point of the article to the author, but that was it's point to me. It seems to rather cleanly point to a weakness in the pagerank system that Google will need to address.
(No, they aren't obligated to address it. But now that someone has identified a weakness, others will rush to take advantage of it. And that will reduce Google's utility unless they take steps to correct it.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Oh! The irony!
You are truly the ugly American. I'd say you should travel a bit to broaden your view. But then again, as an American tourist, I really don't want to encourage you to take a serious piss on the local culture wherever you go. That would cause more people to treat me badly when I travel abroad. So please, stay locked in your basement with your copy of the constitution and your arsenal of guns. The liberal media conspiracy are coming to get you!!!
I consider the Constitution of the United States to be the single greatest document ever known... Our rights are endowed to us by our creator.
Look out, your creator might think the bible is better than that constitution.
Oh yeah, it was hard to find that link. A search for "Second superpower" -moore "Patrick" "Tyler" pulled up a big three links. Flush.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Centralization breaks the internet.
The point of the article isn't about competing "memes", it's about flaws in Google's PageRank system. In this case, the weighting of site importance on the basis of the number and authoritativeness is being thrown by the incestuous linking behavior of weblogs.
First, I don't see it as a flaw.
Second, I'm not sure what one would do that would be considered "better".
May we never see th
But it would also be a good band name...
a couple years ago, I think it was right after the election, if you typed 'dumb motherfucker' into Google it brought up a link to the bush jr. official store. You can see one of the original stories about it in this wired article.
I think they actually threatened to sue Google over it- Google had to force the removal of it from their system. It was very funny!!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Google is the real "second superpower".
First of all, I don't have any problem with the PageRank system. But you have to admit, google has entered our vernacular ("googling") and affected the way we perceive the internet. Google is, and stands to remain, the dominant web search engine. People are beginning to equate google with web search. Imagine how you would use the internet if you had absolutely no search capability? (Of course, there are other search engines, but what I'm saying is that people are starting to think that google=web searching. When they do that, they subconsciously assign that level of value to google.)
This is the latest sign. The story is not whether google is "fair" or not about some stupid attempt at creating a meme. The story is that:
1) People are starting to think about whether something that google does is "fair" or not. That's the kind of language usually used to describe government entitlements, social conventions, democratic processes, etc. Remember, Google is a company. It used to be a little company; it's probably not very large still. Think of the kind of power that they have!
2) Google was able to spread this new meme extremely far in 42 days. That may sound like a long time to people used to thinking about how quickly an email virus can propagate, but it seems really very fast for a meme to propagate. An email virus can infect the next host by an automated electronic process. For a meme to be effective on google, the meme must be part of something that one user reads, thinks about, and posts an essay or some comments about, then a latency is incurred until the next person(s) reads these comments. Brains are much slower meme-processors than computers are virus-processors. But google is proving to be a very fast "network" connecting us as nodes.
It's no wonder that Microsoft wants to compete with google. They are beginning to see how much power google holds and they envy it. I hope google wins that battle, because I trust their excellent track record of good decisions over Microsoft's.
Still I can't help wondering if the growing power that they enjoy over the "internet experience" is a healthy thing. It's kind of like living in a country that has a benevolent king. Things are great, but it makes you wonder what the king's son is going to be like.
Dave
Now presumably Orlowski has read his 1984, but if he has then he missed the point: Orwell was (quite properly) concerned with official mutilations of common, fundamental language; indeed the ever-shrinking Newspeak dictionary is conceived in order to make the population mum with no choice but consent -- that is, to end the very possibility of recourse to a language capable of opposing government power. We don't have much to worry about from bloggers in this regard. At last check, they still aren't the Big Cheese -- no matter where Google ranks them.
I think most people have missed the point to this topic, and have rushed to the defence of beloved Google, informing us how to - and : and & and whatever to refine our searches.
The point raised is that it may be possible for a small number of people to subvert any searchable term - in a fairly short time - by working the pagerank system.
Most posters who suggest that you can simply use Google's (excellent) filtering and logic abilities to cut the cr!p out are really just reinforcing this the articles suggestion...by applying a filter, you have to know what you want to be filtering out! And lets face it - if you're searching for a term for the first time, that you are unfamilar with, how many people filter? What do you filter with?
In the example in the article (and this is what it is, not some leftist whinging - you can tell this if you actually read the words) a keyword to a specific body of information which was not widely known but was reasonably well defined, was replaced by a completely different body of information in one month! WTF?!
It's been worrying me now for a while that Google ranks ideas (yes, those things you search, are all some form of idea) by popularity...not relevence. You all know that popular things are not mostly relevent. Hands up all S-Club 7 listeners. Touche.
Google essentially fails to correct for the number of links a page author tends to put in, meaning that authors who just put in a lot of links have a larger effect of google than authors with a sparser linking style. Since authors who put in a lot of links tend to have readers you do so as well, communities with this behaviour are overrepresented on google (when they happen to mention the subject you're searching on, at least).
Probably the PageRank effect should be reduced if the linking page links a lot (*1/root(links) or *log(links)/links). Of course, google can probably come up with a better solution.
The other thing is that google should probably attempt to produce the most unconnected highly-ranked pages, since if a page is connected to a search result, you can probably find it that way. This would lead to having a blog entry at the top and no other blog entries near it.
"The United States is NOT a super power because of its "large world wide voice". The United States is a super power because IT IS POWERFUL ENOUGH TO COMPLEATLY DESTORY EVERY MAN WOMAN AND CHILD IN ANY NUMBER OF NATIONS AT ANY POINT IN TIME IT SHOULD SO CHOOSE TO DO SO"
Russia can still do the same, but are not considered a superpower anymore.
Superpower is one of those words so overused that people forget its meaning. A regional power is a country that has a large amount of power and influence in a particular geographic region. Britian, France, and Germany are European powers. China and Japan are East Asian powers.
A Superpower is a country whose influence extends far beyond its region to every part of the globe. During the Cold War, United States and Soviet power was evident in every region. The Soviets had power all the way into the Americas as evidenced by Cuba and the communist uprisings in Central America. The United States had power in places as far off as Europe, Korea, and Turkey.
After the fall of the Cold War the United States is the only country that has that sort of reach. Russia can't extend its power to start uprisings the Western Hemisphere anymore. The United States just a short time ago helped the Northern Alliance take down their enemy the Taliban half a world away in a land notorious for "chewing up" big-shot powers for hundreds of years. That's power. That's a superpower. It is not just being able to blow everyone up. It is also being able to influence people through ideas and arguments. Its about making what you want to happen actually happen.
Not every country strives to be a superpower. Remember this when you hear about China being the next "superpower". China has shown little interest in what happens outside their region. If they had Taiwan they would be pretty much content.
Europe recently failed the superpower test by their inability to stop the genocide in the former Yugoslavia and the necessity of the United States to come in and stop the madness once again. That is just embarrassing. Imagine if France had to come over here and deal with Mexico. You have to be able to deal with your own region before you can see yourself as a "superpower".
Brian Ellenberger
And why you're at it, maybe the USA that has your and my best interests at heart can just give us a lot of money so we don't have to go to work and can spend all our free time surfing slashdot. Maybe they should give us girlfriends too so we don't have to waste our time at the singles bar. Wouldn't that be wonderful?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This is somethign that is also done by a synthetic oil company called "Amsoil"
If you try to do a search on any info regarding synthetic oil you will get pages and pages of results that point you to Amsoil or one of their multi level marketers, regardless of which search engine you use.
Get a free ipod.
One of the things we discussed on the Emergent Democracy list is the problem that Google assumes a link is an endorsement. When I link to Orlowski's hogwash, I am pointing out what is wrong with it,but Google takes that as an endorsement by me.
My Vote Links proposal is meant to fix this.
As ubiquitous as its usage might seem to us, Google is only used by somewhere around 30% of regular internet users, whose numbers are put at 134 million in the US. That makes google users account for approximately 13% of the US population. The rest of the 87% never use google. Even of the 13%, many probably use it only rarely, or only for school/etc. research. Certainly only a very small percentage of people (slashdotters, basically) are influenced enough by google that it would define their speech patterns. Social influence at school/work/etc. and television/radio are much more likely to do that for the vast majority of people.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
be misued and perverted? Yes, everytime he opens his mouth.
it trawls finds links that link to lots of highly linked stuff ergo clicking on search results take you to "powerful"/"hub" info spots. get a grip people If you don't line it - use aol or msn and have them nanny you through the internet
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
There are different nuances, but I think the blog is within the bounds of legitimate discussion on "Second Superpower."
But there are two important issues raised by this example. One, James F. Moore never credits Tyler (or anyone else) with coining the phrase. The only mention of The New York Times is in the context of the importance of big, possibly biased news media. That is out-of-line for legitimate discussion, especially since he seems to indicate a connection to Harvard in his byline.
The second issue is the way Google separates news from the rest of the web. A search of "Second Superpower" in Google news provides a much broader discussion of the concept than a Google web search. Maybe the real issue is that blogs are not static content, but actually a new form of journalism. A simple fix would be for Google to list blogs with news.
your point being that Retoric trumps Logic
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
middle class? not outside of the major citys the rest of the country thinks their nuts
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Surprisingly enough, google is a search engine, not a dictionary. More "important" pages show up first. More people search, follow searches than link, etc, to the blog that to other pages so it comes on top. I thought that was the point in the first place?
This sig was cut off by the sla
And which part of that is the job of the United States government under the Constitution? I don't remember the "we will be a nice socialist state and provide these things for you".
;) I've learned a bit. I just worry about bad science making decisions that can cost us too much.
You know why the rich get richer? Because they work for it. I don't remember the last time a poor person signed my paycheck.
Free health care is not a role of the government in my opinion. You end up with bottom-feeder doctors and the cheapest work possible.
While a society benifits from an educated populace, education is not the pancea that many make it out to be. I've known some people who are over-educated and still stupid and without common sense and work-ethic.
I personally think our punishments aren't harsh enough. This parole shit needs to go. Actions have consequences. Unless you happen to be someone famous.
Capital punishment is not a topic to debate. It's just like abortion. It never goes anywhere and breaks down into who's emotions are stronger.
Why should the government dictate what a business can pay it's employees? Let adult people make adult decisions and agree on a contract. The companies that don't pay for shit won't have enough employees to survive. Competition. Free Market.
I have no problem with environmental concerns. It comes with having a fiancee who works for the EPD
I'll get back to the representation issue when I have a chance to read up on how NZ does it.
Screw the foriegn aid alltogether. We never get anything in return for it. It's not like any of the countries we've ever provided aid to have done anything in return. If you want to discuss some sort of moral obligation, I say go to church and discuss it. Keep moral issues out of government. It's why we have stupid laws banning consentual adult sex between adults when they both happen to be of the same sex. It's why a woman's right to do whatever she wants with her body is being taken away from her. FYI I'm opposed to abortion but that's a personal, moral choice. I don't want government dictating morality.
Everyone has the same chance to succeed in this country. As long as a man has his liberty, he can achieve the things he wants (as long as those desires do not rob another of his/her liberty).
Well you and I probably differ on the role of government in social programs but from a pure cost perspective treatment is cheaper than enforcement. I'd rather the government let adults make stupid decisions that only affect themselves and not try to play parent.
I appreciate the discussion BTW.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
On March 23, I marched against the war in Manhattan
with 100,000 or 250,000 other protestors, depending
whether you believe the cops or the organizers. So don't
talk to me about opposition "melting away".
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Don't name your product something that's easily searchable on google. Name it something badass and cool, but something original that hasn't been big... Unless you want to drive down your profits and the profits of another company with the same name.
God spoke to me
Google is not a dictionary. If you want to look up a word in an "authority-approved" way, don't use a WWW-search engine, better yet, don't use the WWW at all!!
This is a classic case of people complaining about a tool, when they're using the tool the wrong way. Google doesn't have any more power than you give it.
Besides, as long as Google rank their pages in a semi-democratic way, I don't see how people can complain about that. The fact that the article ranks so high up, is because of people's interest.
Do you claim YOUR interest to be worth more than thousands of others? Then YOU might BE the problem.. Often people who just complain, are...
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Super power does not mean power about normal power. The term super power was created as a level about the Great Powers - France, Germany, Russia, WWI era stuff. After the end of WWII and the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union at a whole new level, a new term was needed, hence, Super Power.
To say that peace protesters have no power is incredibly short-sighted. The Vietnam War is the most recent example. The British gave up on the US's revolutionary war partially due to a large peace movement at home. Many, many more examples of protesters changing public policy exist.
I should think that the opinion of the vast majority of the world(which is what the term "second superpower" assumes) is at least equal to all the planes, tanks, boats, and nukes the US has. Pen and sword, and all.
Valete!
This off-topic, didn't read the article, third grade grammer level, illogical, chest-beating rant crystallizes why most of the world believes America to be a land of arrogant jerks.
Valete!
If google is begining to provide results where all but 3 of the top 30 spots in a search for anything are a single page, then I doubt I'll be using it much longer.
I mean, google worked great when it first came out, but the rankings seem to have gotten steadily worse since then. How much longer before it's not worth using?
The referenced Register article, which chronicles the "Googlewashing" of the term "second superpower", is an excellent example of social network theory and its effect on language.
Unfortunately, the Register incorrectly assigns the blame on alluded conspiratorial behavior of webloggers. In fact, the phenomenon is not the result of a conspiracy, but a natural consequence of the dense network that interconnects bloggers.
The critique of the Register article along with an introduction to social network theory is provided here
Michael.
Linux : Mac
You forgot Googlegoggled. As in
"I have to look through how many hundred thousand pages to find what I'm looking for?!? I'm Googlegoggled!!!"
Googlegoggled -- despairingly stunned at the amount of work that lies ahead of oneself, especially when that amount of work appears unexpectedly.
"Just thinking of writing that thesis googlegoggles me!"
"There I was down to +10 health, when I rounded the corner and was googlegoggled by the number of monsters between me and the exit!"
"We were at 90%, thinking we could deliver with only 10-hour days the rest of the month, when the client googlegoggled us by changing the specs!"
(See how useful it is? 8^D )
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Google essentially fails to correct for the number of links a page author tends to put in, meaning that authors who just put in a lot of links have a larger effect of google than authors with a sparser linking style.
How do you know this?
The last whitepaper Google published on their design (cool though it is) is *years* upon *years* out of date, and AFAIK they're not handing out info on the specific metrics, and haven't for a long time. They have definitely revised their system since then to avoid various attacks people have tried on it.
They could be doing precisely what you're predicting.
May we never see th
Nobody ever promised us that Google would be an accurate representation of society, of the language, or anything else. It's just a way of finding stuff on the internet.
We have started giving Google these almost God-like qualities. Google is still "working" just fine. It might turn out that it is not a sure source of universal wisdom, however.
It's a search engine. Get over it.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
...The Second SuperPower
Previous examples have been funnier:
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
It may yet decide the Spanish election later this year, and the anti-war sentiment of the populace of Mexico, Chile and Turkey appears to have affected their governments' votes on the Security Council or their cooperation with American military plans.
Not long ago a new phrase for this sort of thing was "People Power". For a long time we've been calling it "democracy". Now we've had millions demonstrating together worldwide. It's fun to have a global consensus.
Second Superpower?
imo Orlowski's gripe is unwarranted and Moore's proposition is interesting. Blogs are the big media story of the aggression in Iraq. Even the old, broadcast media (e.g. bbc) are scrambling to get in on it. The key aspect of current media usage is that tv viewing is down, and internet searches are up. People are skeptical and are seeking out alternative sources of information. Blogs are getting crazy traffic. And on search engines "al jazeera" is more sought after than "sex." Story here. This ain't simply armchair resistance; it's a widespread and determined rejection of official viewpoints, and that's way political. The phenomenon suggests that the internet is to some degree realizing its potential for making information free and allowing people to be better informed citizens of the world.
It's in my best interests for the U.S. to be on top. The United Nations doesn't hold my best interests. France sure as fuck doesn't.
You know, the same reasoning would (to some extent) make you prefer despotism to democracy. Your neighbor doesn't hold your best interests, you do. Still, you agree (I assume) to give your neighbor(s) some power over you. I don't think that France or French people want to decide what the US or American people should do in their everyday life. The idea here is that in some rare critical international issues (read "war") a "democratic" international body (the UN) should override individual countries interests. I'm not sure how far I can push this nations/people analogy, but I think you get the idea.
I consider the Constitution of the United States to be the single greatest document ever known to man
Everybody in the US seems to believe this, or that no country is freer than the US, or whatever along the same lines... This is truly amazing! Do they tell you that repeatedly in school as soon as you can talk? Come on, who can say that the US constitution is better than any other democratic country's. Are you a consitutional lawyer? Have you actually read the US constitution? Have you read other countries constitutions?
Besides, more important than the constitution is the way it is implemented. Have you visited other countries, do you read foreign newspapers? All democracies have their flaws. I acknowledge that most European countries have serious issues regarding corruption and excessive bureaucracy. But the US is far from flawless! To a foreigner, the deep (incestuous) ties between the government and big business in the US should be a major concern for any responsible American citizen. Also, many Europeans are puzzled (to say the least) by the absence of clear distinction between state and religion in the US. This feeling is exacerbated by the recent drift of the Iraq war toward a religious war. This seemingly absolute faith that the US is right or has moral superiority is both a strength and weakness for America. Yet I think that Americans should think about it a little bit more. It cant't hurt.
This post is not intended as a flame, nor does it want to protest or support the US intervention in Iraq. I'm just trying to improve my (and maybe your) understanding of these complex issues.
And yes, I'm French, you can start frogbashing.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
mmm. try search for "html documentation"..
You will be surprised (or maybe not) by how much documentation there exists presented in html.
"The vast majority of the world".
:) (j/k)
Dream on. On so many fundamental levels that's so completely ignorant of fact and history that there's nowhere I can begin to correct it.
LOL, I just noticed your nickname, I guess it makes sense.
Brilliant analysis.
What libertarians as a whole do not seem to understand is that the purpose of a society is not to see who can win/survive in the most savage, primitive, undignified and brutal ways imaginable just to satisify the semantic definitions of absolute individual freedom. It is to provide a maximum level of comfort for the greatest amount of people it possibly can.
Do you honestly think that all the money you pay in taxes goes towards law enforcement? Even if you used all of your tax money to pay for personal gaurds, where will get the money to pay for all the other things the government used to do? How will you maintain the roads? Will we all need Hummers to travel from city to city? When diseases run rampant and there is no government funded CDC to study and combat them what will you do?
I could go on and on and on but I would much rather know this, WHY do you SEEK to live in such a world? How could your mental processes be so corrupted to think that such a state would be preferrable to what we have now? Are you just criminaly bored, sadistic or both? Are you seething thru your teeth that there are people currently alive who would not survive for 5 minutes in a Libertarian's Dream World of Brutality and Inhumanity?
I already know what you guys want. Just tell me WHY you want it.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
> I pity the foo who has to settle for 135th superpower.
> Oh, BTW, negative superpowers are evil.
Actually, I declare myself [me.person] the complex superpower (i).
Actually I don't do anything special.
But engineers need me.
k2r
Then I just thought of a great idea for a new search engine. It would use google's PageRank system, but lowest ranked pages would appear at the top. Presto! The hardest-to-find pages are now the easiest to find.
I think I'll call it.... Elgoog.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Yea, and just look at how effective this "second superpower" was in enforcing its will. (I'd hardly call the "peace movement" a power, nor would I consider world opinion to be united enough to exist as a single coherant entity.)
Then again France is still considered by some to be relevant in today's world.
Like looking for the legendary "DOSPLUS 2" OS for PCs. It's hard as fsck to find, but it's known to exist...and no amount of STFW will do anything... :\
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
Welcome to Slashdot, Your Holiness! Don't click on the goatse.cx links.
And that's the problem
You see, there are lots of people who never heard the term before (myself included). So one day you hear "Second Superpower" and what do you do?
1.-Search for it on google
2.-Find some useless weblog
3.-Decide that is nothing important
4.-Ignore that there can be any other possible meaning.
The "Second superpower" was supposed to be the power of public opinion. You could be interested in joining it. you could be part of this superpower. But because of disinformation, you are simply not interested.
Kilroy was here!
Endorsement, in the Google sense, doesn't mean that you endorse the views espoused in the linked-to page. It simply means that you believe the linked-to page accurately represents the text inside your what blah is about</a> tags. I personally think Dennis Kucinich is a steaming pile of crap, but the link from his name in my most recent blog entry goes to a news story that should be relevant to anyone searching for "Dennis Kucinich".
You're not making a moral judgment on the page, you're just "voting" on what the page represents with the text you use for the link.
ICMBs [..] worlds oceans [...] COMPLEATLY
I guess when you spend all that money to buy all the military hardware you need to become a super-power, you've got to make concessions to other *ahem* social services. But hey, who needs spelling when you've got ICMBs?
Basically, google CAN function like an old-school boolean search engine if you want - additionally, it can do a whole lot more.
I think the only kind of site that is more of a problem with google is something that has low traffic, nothing linking to it, and deals with mundane, redundant information that pulls up a jillion links.
For what it's worth, I search for some wierd shit sometimes, and almost never fail to find what I'm looking for. You just need to know how to massage google.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Just click on the page numbers at the bottom and go to lower ranked pages.
.
I also don't see what's the problem with using -this and -that to filter out the results. You can't expect a computer program to read your mind.
The great thing is, if you don't wan't the vanilla results, the tool allows you to get them, like this or like this
If that's not enough, there's even a Google API for tweaking the way google works. Some information on this and more is in this book.
I say Google is still efficient, and flexible enough.
/* TAANSTAFL */
If the war in Iraq goes on for 8 or 9 years like Vietnam and the Revolutionary war, with nothing remotely looking like victory in the future, yeah, maybe, the peace movement will change policy.
So we've got, what, at least another 7 years, 50 weeks to go before that can happen.
Oh, and in the two examples you gave, the soldiers were conscripts. You think Clinton would have been protesting the war if he didn't have to worry about getting drafted (well, he probably would, since it would help him get chicks).
"Do not overestimate the power of this technological marvel you have created. The power of this station is no match for the power of the Force." (or something like that) --Darth Vader
All distinctions are arbitrary.
However did you come to the conclusion that having everything paid for by tax money is in the people's best interest?
Capital punishment? I live in Texas. The problem in Texas isn't that the people are bloodthirsty, it's that, for some stupid reason, it is impossible for a jury to sentence somebody to a life sentence. They can get out on parole. You can't put somebody away for life in this state. So if a jury thinks that somebody is too dangerous to ever be allowed out in public again, their only realistic choice is the death sentence.
You must be in your 20s. You've obviously never worked through an economic downturn before. Do you know that the average standard of living in the European countries you admire is about two-thirds that of the average American?
Don't expect a revolution anytime soon within America.
First, I don't see it as a flaw.
Well, it either is or isn't a flaw, depending on what you want to get out of Google. The author of the article plainly wants to get search results in which websites are ranked in a manner that reflects their offline significance, which is, as you note, probably not possible.
OTOH, Google's apparent over-reliance on link density as a measure of "authoritativeness" pretty obviously breaks down when blog culture is thrown into the mix. Exactly what practical use can be derived from searching blogs is beyond me. They are useless as a metric of current trends -- there is, after all, a reason why surveys are conducted in accordance with fairly strict statistical standards. As simple sources of information, a blog is roughly equivalent to listening to a random conversation on a bus or a university cafeteria.
Consider the search keys "meme" and "paradigm". Of the people who use one or both terms, there's probably not one person in a hundred who actually understands them and uses them correctly. And particularly in the case of "paradigm," there are several correct usages particular to different fields -- the CS usage has little to do with the philosophy-of-science usage, and neither have much to do with the New Age usage. How far down the list of Google search results do you have to go to get to useful information about memetics or paradigm shifts? Quite a ways.
Another example, and one that personally vexes me, is "visualization". As a Google search key, the term retrieves link after link after link about data visualization. Good luck finding anything about mental visualization unless you figure out some additional keys to select psychology-related pages. (Hint: "cognitive" is a good secondary key.)
The root problem, I think, is that Google doesn't really take into account topic-specific usages. If you were to make a graph of links between "visualization"-related sites, you would see a big island composed of computer science sites, a smaller island of cognitive psychology sites, and a still smaller island of Shakti Gawain fans. Odds are that any given user will be interested in only one of those islands. Northern Light, before it closed its public front to become a CIA contractor, actually did a pretty good job of grouping related subjects in a convenient UI; one can only hope Google eventually will, too.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
No, it means more than that. Google takes it to mean that the terms on the page itself are relevant. Some of your PageRank authority is conferred on that page. I want to be able to link to a page and tell Googlenot to give it any pagerank from me.
Da Blog
Google won't let me do some things that I could do then.
I'm just curious. Why don't you use a different search engine?
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
You're always welcome to use robots.txt or the robots metatag. Easy!
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
That works per page, not per link. I'd have to indirect each link through a refresh page with robots.txt set. Yuk.
Nice idea. And by the way, at this point the term still belongs completely to you.
Anyone feel like doing a bit of googlewashing?
From the fact that they end up ranking blog sites higher than they ought to. If they have corrected for this, they haven't yet gotten it right. Of course, I don't know a better metric than what they're using, but that's why they're running the most popular search site, and I'm not. In fact, I'd be surprised if they weren't in the process of trying to correct the situation.
is almost as good as /. karma.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.