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Greatest Task of Web 2.x: Meta-Validation
CexpTretical writes "This Technology Review article about Web 2.x problems fails to mention the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to fulfilling the dreams of the Semantic Web — i.e., assumptions about the validity of metadata or tagging schemes. We can add all of the metadata and/or tags we want to web resources but that does not mean that the 'data about the data' honestly or accurately describe the resource or are 'about the data' at all. This is why Google does not place much importance on the metadata already contained in HTML document headers for search ranking, because it cannot be trusted. And to validate it would require more effort than to search and index that data from scratch. Ensuring or verifying the validity of metadata would be a task equal to that of initially creating it, but would have to be repeated on an ongoing basis. Hence all of the talk about 'trusted networks,' which then require trusting the gatekeepers of those networks. Talk about 'semantics.'" Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation offer one example of getting useful metadata in a non-trusted environment.
The tagging system might be a better example, or at least an example of mostly useless meta information.
What about the removal of accurate metadata, such as Slashdot's disabling of the "dupe" tag?
Especially here at Slashdot where a certain type of groupthink is very prevalent, it's not so much a matter of whether a comment is insightful or interesting so much as it adheres to the consensus view of the moderators. A non-conforming view is labeled 'Troll'. So in one sense, the metadata provided by the moderation system is useful in that you can tell at a glance how well a comment conforms to the Slashdot zeitgeist just by looking at its moderation score.
However since posts lower than zero do not get displayed automatically, views that are unappealing to the Slashdot community are relegated to obscurity regardless of their validity and correctness.
Linux sucks.
Slashdot's very own Hal Porter is an expert in the field of the Semantic Web and metadata classification and organization. Those of us in the UK who have followed his work know full well that he's soon going to be producing some excellent research. For years he's been telling us that the Semantic Web will take off and revolutionize the way we consider our data. I think he may be right, but I'm still thinking it'll take some time yet for most computer scientists, let alone average users, to see that he's correct.
I thought it was "elephant in the room"? Googlefight!. We're talking orders of magnitude here... Please tell me that lame TV commercial that botched the idiom isn't starting a trend? I think 800 lb gorilla should remain as the Urban Dictionary's "an overbearing entity in a specific industry or sphere of activity" and not expand to the more abstract, from Wikipedia, "an obvious truth that is being ignored"
You're completely correct. Most people don't moderate based on how a post or a story meets a certain set of criteria. They only ever get to the level where they "agree" with a story, or "disagree" with it.
When it was first becoming popular, I used Digg for a few weeks. Various people would post comments in stories I had submitted, saying how they had just "buried" the story as "OK, This is Lame" because they disagreed with it. Of course, that's now how Digg is intended to work. It's about a story's merit as a story, not about how it may conflict or agree with one's opinion.
I've seen other people suffer a similar fate. John C. Randolph, who many of us know for his past work at Apple, is often the victim of that sort of stupidity. Unlike 99.99999% of the Digg users, he has some clue as to how Apple works, and what sort of projects they're working on. Yet time and time again he's the victim of morons who outright claim his stories are "inaccurate". Unfortunately, there are so many morons that they completely outnumber those of us who know who jcr is, who know of his great work, and who know how perfectly accurate his information is.
At least here at Slashdot, there's some limit as to who gets moderating privileges. It tends to be only the most intelligent individuals. Contrast this to Digg, where any 12-year-old cocktard is given the ability to moderate stories that tower above their intellect and understanding.
I don't think that meta-validatino can *ever* work.
It's a lazy shortcut to somebody with a brain doing the editing/moderating themselves. The masses are NOT always right and are often wrong, in fact (Wikipedia). Meta-validation is a way to let "the users" do the work, even though those users are generally not qualified to do so. The whole value in say, a web site, is offering useful, accurate information to other people who don't already know that information. Meta-validation is essentially mod rule, with no order or methodology. Meta-validation is a shortcut to profit, and as a result, it will never result in good, long-term information.
Working with metadata from a non-trusted community is a few orders of difficulty harder than working with trusted metadata. All the examples from non-trusted user groups that I've seen are either 1) only able to track fairly simple data or 2) ambitious but disappointing. I'd put Slashdot's moderation and metamoderation in the first category. Relevance, quality, and a few kinds of description are possible, but these are fairly simple things to track. Most internet resources would require metadata that is much harder to validate to be useful.
A primary example of this that comes to my mind is the current crop of music recommendation services. The idea behind these sites is that they can, through one of various methods, recommend music to you based on what you like. I've experimented somewhat extensively with Pandora and Last.fm, and the difference in the quality of their suggestions is amazing.
Last.fm uses community data for recommendations. It tracks tags that users attach to songs and the collection of artists that each user listens to. Based on what artists you have listened to or which tags you select, it attempts to point out other artists you might like.
Pandora makes recommendations based on musical qualities. The data the service uses comes from the Music Genome Project, which paid people who have studied music to catalogue the musical qualities of songs in their database. Employees listen to songs and select which attributes are applicable to the song from a list of hundreds of attributes. To use the service, you enter some songs and artists that you like, and based on the musical attributes of those songs and artists, it recommends other songs you might like.
The results that the services provide, at least in my case, are like night and day. Last.fm's recommendations are heavily influenced by what's popular and how a common user would categorize an artist or song. They sort-of hit the right areas, but it doesn't get much better than Amazon's recommendations. Pandora's recommendations always seem to be more on target, even though it uses only a few artists or songs that you enter at the start, in contract to Last.fm, which can use my entire play history.
I guess a lot of this can be chalked up to the difference between association and relation - without some type of new innovation, it seems that community-based metadata can only be based on association, which is a far cry short of relation. Yes, it is a type of relation, but a set of data has qualities that a few simple tags from users are not going to be able to touch. It seems to me the next generation of metadata will only be possible when we can figure out a way to get the sort of data that Pandora uses from a community group. It's a daunting challenge that tagging and simple user activities like the Google Image Labeller have just started to slightly touch.
For metadata to be useful at all, there has to be some way to come to a consensus, and the most logical way to come to a consensus is by what the majority thinks. However, there are too many examples where the majority is wrong for metadata to be truly useful in my opinion.
Here on Slashdot, there is a selection process and a reputation system that determines who has the ability to moderate. How does this "Web 2.0" address the fact that anyone can attach and moderate tags?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Web 2.0 is an empty buzzword for the evolution of the internet. There is no single event that can be unequivocably be called the atart of "Web 2.0".
According to Daniel Glazman, Tim Berners-Lee has officially given up on XHTML as of last week's W3C Advisory Committee meeting in Tokyo, and then apparently explains what Web 3.0 is supposed to be.
TBL is apparently not the visionary we all thought he was. Apparently no one in the W3C can (or is willing to) figure out how to relegate HTML to the junk heap, like a 286 computer: it was a good idea at the time, but newer technology has come along. Eventually, someone will want to see one in a museum. Contrary to popular reports, the W3C has not fixed itself, but merely rolled back the clock on itself a decade or so.
After 8 years, what do all the developers who embraced XHTML get for our efforts? Our smorgasboard of web standards becomes a (tag) soup kitchen once again.
Web 2.0 is a fleeting concept with no substance, it's existence can only be inferred by serruptitiously attributing semi-related events to its influence. Now that the inventor of the WWW has bought into this folly, and simultaneously abandoned one of the W3C's greatest achievements, how can anyone put any stock in what he or anyone else at W3C says?
I held out longer than most in my hopes that web standards could be straightened out, but now the W3C is dead by its own hand, after 6 or more years of atrophy, manic depression, and schizophrenia.
You can't search on them, you don't have any incentive to tag them for yourself (since everyone is limited to the same 5 tags or so), and you can't get "More articles like this". Is it any shocker that they've turned into a veritable festival of in-jokes which provide no information you couldn't get from reading the summary? Heck, after you've read the headline you can provide all the tags:
"Is Linux ready for desktop?"
yes, no, fud, notfud -- and it would be marked omgponies, dupe, and thistagisfreakinguseless if any of those options weren't automatically stripped.
Its almost like tags are designed to be useless here, in a way that they're not with delicious (put the periods in wherever you want them -- I use www.delicious.com and I am so very glad it works). I can use delicious as a "Hmm, I want to read this later" bookmark-shared-across-machines, to categorize Java samples for my own use later, and to do things which are of use to *me*. The social aspect grows naturally from the personal uses, because when you mark Sun's whitepaper as being about Java or this photo on flickr as being of sakura everyone else gets to piggyback on your diligence. But if there isn't any personal use possible then tagging is just textual autoeroticism.
You can mark me fud and omgponies if you want.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
What I want from Web 2.0 is micropayments, by which I mean a form of digital cash with no more than 1% transaction fee down to a minimum transaction fee of 1 cent. I suspenct all the web content that's free now would still be free, but the ability to make money straight from viewers of a web page would be a revolution.
So, I'm really dubious about one of the myths about Google and metadata: that Google doesn't use metadata because it's unreliable.
Google does, in fact, use metadata -- tons of it. Google uses explicit metadata built into headers (like the description, robot control); it uses the rel-license microformat; and it uses titles and h1 headers. It also uses some crucial metadata that's not self-reported by the Web site -- namely, the number and text of links inbound towards a page. It also uses metadata in HTTP headers.
Google also uses lots of data that is unreliable or could be dishonest. After all, there's a huge dark business of blackhat SEO that has its sole intention to trick Google's bots into thinking pages are more important (or are on a different subject) than they actually are. There is no particular part of an HTML page or any other Web resource that cannot be a lie. Web spiders have to deal with this all the time, and they have to balance the information they get from different data sources to determine what's true and what's not.
It's true that Google's search results don't depend as heavily on the specific meta keywords the way many first-generation search engines did. But I think that's more a consideration of the remarkable naivete of early search engines than anything else.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
You (sort of) can. Go to http://www.slashdot.org/tags/foo
Click the tags that are listed, rather than clicking the arrow. If the tags were meaningful you'd get similar articles.
This gorilla was last seen apparently emitting methane gas. Who knows where it will be seen next? In an electronic voting machine or a DRM format war perhaps?
... oh, there it's done.
Whether emitting gas or validating meta-information, this gorilla has maintained his importance and kept his mass steadily high. Are there larger gorillas? And if there were, would it matter?
Some thoughts to ponder while the pr0n is loading
Haven't you heard that Web 3.0 is being released soon?
The trouble is that if there was a assured way to implement it, it would already have been implemented. Metadata and tags are simply the 'killer app' for web 2.0
Despite all that has been said in the comments and elsewhere, there simply is no good implementation of metadata for the Internet that applies to all types of data and all instances of data sharing.
If you want to be a hero, figure this little problem out and the world will beat a path to your door... so to speak.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation offer one example of getting useful metadata in a non-trusted environment.
Why, oh why, would you include that at the end of the summary? Even if there weren't horrible issues with the moderation system (there are), this particular audience is going to rip that comment apart.
An example of unaccountable, gameable metadata that generates untrustworthy info that is almost as useless, through abuse, as it is useful.
Slashdot's moderation could:
Those few improvements could introduce some accountability and feedback into the now mostly abused meta/moderation system. Until then, Slashdot has little to teach the world about the right way to accumulate useful metadata in an untrustworthy environment.
--
make install -not war
I only recently started posting on Slashdot, but I find your claim that the moderation system is mostly abused pretty inaccurate. While your suggestions for improving the system seem like they would be useful, moderation, which is certainly not perfect, successfully enables a large amount of people to share ideas and thoughts. Usually, at least in my experience so far, the truly thoughtful and thought-provoking posts get modded up, not (only) the ones that most readers agree with. I haven't seen anything that could rightly be called abuse, although I'm sure it exists on a small scale.
To bring this back to the point of the article, the type of metadata associated with moderation is of one of the simplest types. It results in a category and a number. The process of generating that data, though, is complicated yet functional, and I would say it's as good a start as most other systems currently out there to validating metadata in a community (I'd like to see some examples to the contrary).
It's only about .5% of the way to generating truly descriptive metadata, but it does what it needs to do. Now the tagging idea...that has a long way to go.
The ~real~ Greatest Task of Web 2.x is to establish one good browser as the standard so CSS and ECMA can become highly productive instead of being such a horrific waste of development time.
.NET as the Orcs. Mono as King Theoden. Ballboy Chairkovsky as Saruman. Darl McNovell as Gollum. Darl McNovell's lawyers as more Orcs.
This is the war that desktop-bound Redmond cannot afford to lose. One browser to rule them all, the men of Middle Cubicle, the Dvorves of Dvorak, the Geeks of Ajax, the Elvish and the rhinestone-laden Elvish Impersonators. Starring...
The rest of this roman à clef I leave to you, my fellow Slash Hobbits.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
First of all it just isn't true that slashdot moderation is an example of useful metadata from an untrusted source. The *presenter* of the metadata, i.e., slashdot, is a trusted source. When we see a comment with moderation 5 we know the slashdot system has moderated it 5 and that some random spammer didn't just lie and give it moderation 5. Sure this metadata is created based on 'untrusted' input but that is a different matter entirely and in reality the sources are sorta trusted because only accounts who contribute sufficiently get to moderate. The tagging thing might be an example of a useful app where the metadata is formed from untrusted input but either way the example isn't quite on target.
As for the issue of metadata on the web it is a serious concern and search engines can't continue to just ignore it. As ajax and other dynamic presentation technologies become more and more common less and less of the content on the web will be encoded in simple HTML. Sure everyone who writes up some fancy ajax site and isn't an idiot will leave some html files around for google to index but this doesn't solve the problem. If everyone who visits the site sees something other than the info in the HTML then the HTML itself has become the metadata.
This problem is solvable since, as the success of google itself indicates, if the data is being used by the end user for some significant purpose the authors stay honest. The reason websites sometimes give bogus meta tags is because it doesn't affect the user's experience in the least. If we get something like the semantic web where the users are actually making use of the metadata then things are no different than they are now.
I hope this is what happens as the other option where google starts learning to crawl through ajax calls is much less pleasant. It was bad enough when all ruby actions were gets and google would trigger all sorts of things to happen in your app. It will be far worse if they are deliberately trigger all the JS scripts on your page in order to search effectively. And they *need* to be able to search effectively as that is the heart of why the web works.
Alternatively maybe google could start incentivizing accurate metadata descriptions of *other* pages (via outgoing links) by giving your web page a boost in the rankings. Thus, like wikipedia, perhaps enough good contributions would outweigh the bad ones.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
On the one hand, people are trying to sell Web 2.0 as the "semantic web", on the other hand, AJAX is a big part of Web 2.0 apps and makes it harder and harder to actually get at other people's semantic data.
In the end, the whole thing is just marketing hype. Web 2.0 is just the haphazard collection of messy technologies people happen to be using on the web in 2006, and don't expect things to get any better in the next few years either: the W3C, Adobe, and Microsoft will see to it that things remain messy and complex, because, heck, if we actually made the technologies clean and simple, how would these companies and the swarm of overpaid and underqualified consultants make a living?
I think the tags are great; they let me get my whole article's worth of Slashdot groupthink in just a few seconds of skimming.
... "
For instance: "IT: Vista Designed to Make Malware Easy" is tagged "troll, fud, vista, notfud, microsoft". I mean -- that's it! That's the whole discussion right there. Point, spastic head-nodding, counterpoint, rehash of the original article. Thank you sir, may I have another.
I'm hopeful that on some future "Slashdot Mobile," they'll remove everything but the titles and tags, and display it as a feed. Maybe after that, they'll even get rid of the titles, so you can just see a constant stream of tags.
Forget a boot stamping on the face of humanity; that's the future for you: "microsoft fud notfud troll itsatrap google dupe evil internet hardware nvidia slashvertisement pigpile dupe sun esr fud ubuntu dupe microsoft dupe
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."