
Archive for the 'Internet' Category

Hyperlocal, anyone?

This is a minor appendix to my former post. It’s intended as a bulletin board over Danish hyperlocal blogs (please note that I decide what to count as hyperlocal and that I’ve already disqualified AOK).

I’ll update it when I find something to post. So far, I’ve found these:

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Hyperlocal news

In connection with familiar words like ‘blog’, ‘news’, and ‘content’, the term hyperlocal has been a buzzword, at least since the launch of the hyperlocal content network Outside.in in 2006. We’ll get back to Outside.in and why I think it’s so important, but I’ll have to set some terminology straight first:

Hyperlocal means ‘over-local’; it refers to information not only about a specific location (that would just be plain old ‘local’ information) but implies a closer affiliation with the place, typically in terms of residence or some degree of familiarity. The rationale behind it is this: When people blog about the place they live, it attracts people who see themselves as connected to the same place. Very often, good old community feeling lies at the heart of it all.

Buzz rarely originates directly from community feeling; it’s more of a down-to-earth business kinda thing, and in order to turn volatile notions as community feeling into something tangible, the idea has to translate into a business model of sorts. Around 2005, with the rise of blogging in general and neighborhood blogs like Gothamist in particular, the aggregate amount of high-quality local content had become so extensive that it was in fact starting to look like an alternative to the news coverage of mainstream local media.

In this situation, what you need to make it a real alternative, is an aggregator that lets you gather the content you want and source it to users who will be able search and browse it. While millions of readers certainly is more than your average blogger could hope for, it’s what newspapers like New York Post crucially needs, and for that they’re more than willing to pay.

In briefly sketching the hyperlocal business model, I’ll throw in a few more buzzwords (hint: do watch out for the italics!):

Premise 1: Let there be given a lot of hyperlocal content on the web

Premise 2: Let there be given a news network that will let you

  • find and collect stuff, you want to use (that’s called aggregation),
  • select what you see fit to publish (that’s curation, but if you’re bluffing, please avoid confusing curation with ‘editorial work’) and
  • publish it to your own site

Consequence: Receive lots of traffic and ad-revenue.

While refraining from adding a Quod erat demonstrandum to the argument, there’s evidence that the model is working: New York Post (here’s a page for the Flatiron District) and CNN have teamed up with Outside.in, AOL acquired Patch, and MSNBC bought EveryBlock.

Outside.in is important, because it represents a genuine intersection of blogosphere and traditional media; it’s not just another newspaper letting a few reporters do some trendy blogging. What comes to mind is that this is in fact the most extensive local news coverage I have seen: Not only is there more content, the news are also much more granular.

If you’re interested in the really big picture, you’ll be sure to get it in Outside.in co-founder Steven Berlin Johnson’s excellent talk at SXSW 2009. As a little aside, I’ll be posting a little companion piece with a (hopefully growing) list of Danish hyperlocal blogs.

[Online 09] Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt, The Semantic Web Revolution – Unleashing the World’s most valuable information

Besides finding out who’s sponsoring the hugely important conference drinks, the opening keynote is also about remembering why we decided to attend in the first place. This year at London’s Online Information the main attraction, for me at least, was the track on Semantic Web. In his introduction conference chairman Adrian Dale phrased the question like this: How can we make the most out of the shift from the document-centric to the information-centric world?

The opening keynote was delivered by Dame Wendy Hall, professor in Computer Science, and Nigel Shadbolt, professor in AI, both at the University of Southampton.

First, to get an idea of where we’re going with semantic web, Wendy looked back on the evolution of the Web from read only, via read/write, and on to today’s social web. But what were the theoretical foundations of the current Web?

Well, pioneers of the Web, people like Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Doug Engelbart, envisioned more intuitive computer systems, systems that would (sort of) mimic the way we think. That is to say, we dont think in hierarchies, but in a more associative (read: “link-like”) manner. Engelbart thought such systems could augment, not replace, human intellect.

Now, on the threshold of what could be a new era in the history of the Web, we might well take a look at the lessons learned since the Web grew big in the 1990’s. Those are:

  • Big is beautiful; there has to be a certain critical mass of material/web pages, before things get going
  • The network is everything, and it doesn’t matter if parts of it is scruffy and has broken links
  • Democracy rules. If the web wasn’t open and free, it (probably) wouldn’t have taken off the way it did

But what’s missing from the web as we know it? Wendy suggests that we’ve lost the idea of conceptual linking (where targets are referenced not by their location, but by the semantics of the document). Instead, where links are missing we use search engines to fill out a gap. Nevertheless, we’re hungry to share data, and in doing so we may also, by means of RDF, structure and add meaning to it. When this is done, machines can begin making inferences.

With RDF we’re seeing a web of linked data starting to emerge. This new Web, which Nigel Shadbolt calls the Pragmatic Semantic Web, is yet another layer of abstraction on top of the Web, which was itself an abstraction on top of the physical network that existed prior to it.

The technical principles of this kind of semantic web are:

  1. the URI that enables you to refer unambiguously to resources
  2. the fact that resources can be dereferenced
  3. that it’s got RDF at the backend (this makes it flexible)
  4. linked data, which can be subjected to search (Sigma is a search engine for RDF annotated material on the internet)

To get information out of RDF triples, there’s been developed a special data access language called SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol And RDF Query Language). With SPARQL, which became a W3C recommendation in January 2008, it’s possible to answer complicated questions, such as “Give me all people born in London before 1827”. But are there any data to query?

As a matter of fact there are. Besides the BBC, the UK government is publishing (data.gov.uk) large volumes of public data which are now being described with RDF and thus being prepared to be repurposed/mashed-up by whoever’s interested. This enables users to type in a postal code and get all the public data (crime statistics, local transportation, etc) available for that area.This way, public data have social and economic value, but on a larger scale linked data matters, because it supports interoperability.

Related: Richard Wallis interviews Wendy Hall on the Semantic Web Revolution.

This is not transparency

A key factor in establishing authority on the internet is, as David Weinberger convincingly argued, transparency:

What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

I agree with much most of it, and perhaps the point can be further illustrated by a quick example. If you take a look at the Wikipedia article on the epistemological sense of, well, Transparency, the contrast between then and now will be clear:

WikipediaTransparency
As you can see, there’s an explanation and a reference to an article by professor Paul Boghossian. The reference is the interesting part, because in academia this is perfectly sufficient for convincing readers that the material can be trusted. At least, it leaves you with an idea of what to do when you get to the library.

But the internet isn’t like the research library at all. Here, everybody could have made the claim that a certain Paul Boghossian said so and so about transparency, but, since links to resources supporting it (e.g. Wikipedias article on Paul Boghossian, for one) are extremly few, the article isn’t transparent and doesn’t meet Wikipedia’s requirements for verifiability, let alone follow conventions of the internet media.

Transparency is not the new objectivity, but comprehensiveness just might be

In a terrific post, Transparency is the new objectivity, David Weinberger argues that the hyperlink nature of the internet is reshaping our notions of authority. With everybody suddenly a potential author, the old claim to objectivity seems more and more trite and outworn:

Objectivity used to be presented as a stopping point for belief: If the source is objective and well-informed, you have sufficient reason to believe. The objectivity of the reporter is a stopping point for reader’s inquiry. That was part of high-end newspapers’ claimed value: You can’t believe what you read in a slanted tabloid, but our news is objective, so your inquiry can come to rest here. Credentialing systems had the same basic rhythm: You can stop your quest once you come to a credentialed authority who says, “I got this. You can believe it.” End of story.

Instead we demand transparency; to be able to “see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position.”

Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

I think that this kind of “hyper-transparency” -where citing a book isn’t enough, but where a link has to point to the actual resource- may be an essential feature of the internet medium; but whereas it certainly is a necessary condition for establishing reliability, it’s hardly sufficient. After all, what leads to reliability is not the number of hyperlinks to the author’s sources, but trust in the fact that the relevant aspects of the matter have been adequately dealt with.

So, instead of objectivity, I’d suggest ‘comprehensiveness’ as a condition for reliability. And it’s a sufficient one too, because on the internet comprehensiveness seems more than ever to subsume transparency.


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