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
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
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!
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.
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!
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
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
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.
"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
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...
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?
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.
. 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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....
Oh! The irony!
Centralization breaks the internet.
Did you read the first link? As of right now this is what I get.
Now, let's look through the page. Nope, Moore doesn't appear anywhere. Ok, this seems fine.
Oh. Wait. That paragraph that's triggering the Google hit looks familiar. Thankfully there's a link to where the page's creator got it. Let's follow it, shall we?
Hmmmm... Well, what do you know? She got the paragraph from the page we are at, which, if you check the link to the original article on that page, got it from Mr. Moore's essay.
Hmmmmm.... Let's take a look at the rest of the links on this 1st page of results, shall we?
Well, the second one makes an explicit mention of "JimMoore?'s idea" right in the Google summary. So it's out.
The third one seems a little confused as to what the hell it means by it, but it references "Joi Ito" which, having read the Register article, means that it's a reference to Moore's definition.
Numbers 4 and 5 are links to different pages as the same site for number 1.
6 links to a sports article from the Palm Beach Post.
7 & 8 link to "Library Planet discussion on Second Superpower" which, if you follow the link on the page, ends up being Mr. Moore's article again.
9 links to comments on an article called "The Second Superpower" which, if you go back to the site's main page, turns out to m=be Mr. Moore yet again.
That leaves just site number 10 on the first page. It's a historical discussion on the Truman doctrine and the Cold War.
So: 8 out of the first 10 results returned by "Second Superpower" -moore reference Mr. Moore. The other two have nothing to do with the definition referred to in the Register article.
It seems to me that knowing how to use Google has little to do with why the authors were unable to find it.
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.