Re: Project PM
Subject: Re: Project PM
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 3/16/10, 18:52
To: Mark Cohen <mark.simon.cohen@gmail.com>

Thanks for taking the time to look this over. Briefly, what if I were to take out the last problem (lack of traditional media self-correction) and address that separately? 

Here is the Solutions section to accompany the problems section; let me know if you have any additional comments (or if you have a different take on the comments you've made thus far) in light of this portion:

The Solutions

By way of a network designed to take better advantage of the existing informational environment, Project PM can help to remedy the problems described above without significant effort on the part of participants, yet with potentially dramatic results on the efficiency of information flow.

(a) Watering down of contributor quality within participatory networks: Project PM will greatly reduce the accumulation of low-value contributors by way of the method by which contributors are brought it. The network will be established with a handful of contributors who have been selected by virtue of intellectual honesty, proven expertise in certain topics, and journalistic competence in general. Each of these contributors has the option of inviting into the network any number of other bloggers, each of whom will initially be connected only to the contributor who brought him in. Each of these new participants also has the option of bringing others into the network in the same fashion as well as offering a connection to any other participant, as will anyone they bring in, and so on. To the extent that the original participants are of value in terms of their judgement, they may be expected to bring in participants of similarly high value, and so on; meanwhile, as the network expands, participants will be likely to form new direct connections to others whom they have determined to be of particular value relative to other participants, and conversely, to disestablish any direct connections they might have established to those whose output they find to be below par. Of course, none of this precludes the network from eventually encompassing participants of low desirability relative to that of the average participant, but to the extent that such a thing occurs, its effect are largely neutralized by way of the dynamic described below.

(b) Data overflow: Information flows through the Project PM network by way of a single button accessible to each participant. When a participant either writes or receives a blog post or other informational element, the participant may "push" the item, thus sending it to all of those with whom he is directly connected in the network. In such a case as a participant pushes forward items that others may determine to be of little merit, the resulting clutter is only seen by the participant who brought such a low-value blogger into the network in the first place, as well as those whom the low-value blogger has to this point brought in himself along with those who have agreed to connect with him from elsewhere in the network. To the extent that a given participant exercises good judgment in establishing connections, then, he will only receive informational elements of value while also being able to quickly transmit them to contributors who will be able to make best use of such information. Meanwhile, below-average participants will have only very limited means by which to clutter the network, as informational elements become less likely to be pushed forward as they approach above-average participants within the network, who themselves are "buffered" from such things by way of the competent participants with whom they surround themselves by way of their connections and who, by virtue of their competence, are unlikely to push forward low-value information.

(c) Barriers to obtaining raw data: The dynamics described in (a) and (b) collectively provide for a means of information inflow that should theoretically be superior to any other medium currently in existence in terms of overall quality, both by virtue of the network's improved organizational methods as well as the relatively high competence of participating bloggers relative to members of the traditional media outlets as a whole. Accessibility to particularly valuable items of information will be enhanced further by the option to set one's widget in such a way as to display any piece of information from the network, regardless of "proximity," if such information is pushed forward (which is to say, approved of other participants) a certain number of times. This should help to ensure that, as the network expands, particularly valuable information does not become unduly "regionalized." A variant on the widget for use by readers (as opposed to network participants) displaying information that meets similar thresholds of popularity within the network would likewise provide those readers with a source of information above and beyond other existing mediums. 

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 6:33 PM, Mark Cohen <mark.simon.cohen@gmail.com> wrote:
Ok, I think that your argument isn't entirely clear is it stands now. Your 4 points (a)-(d) are neither totally independent problems nor quite exactly a linked line of reasoning. (a) and (b) are relatively specific, focusing on problems with specific aggregator sites; (c) and (d) are much more general, putting forward the central Problem of the alternative media. If anything, I'd say the order should be reversed. Here's how I would reconstruct it:
  1. A relatively decentralized network of information producers and interpreters have appeared to supplement and challenge the established, editorially-managed "one-way" media of print and broadcasting. This alternative network, while being a quite powerful source of criticism and correction for the traditional media, has only a limited capacity to wield meaningful punishment for the shortcomings of traditional media outlets and commentators, because, as you observe, "Those who would benefit most from learning that certain of their sources for news and commentary are working in a demonstrably flawed fashion - the people who get their information from such sources to the exclusion of the better blogs - are, by definition, not reachable by way of our medium in any direct sense."
  2. The participants of the counter-media of the internet, while continuing to follow the traditional media as well, have needed to develop alternative networks for data collection and sharing. They've done this through the selective collation of sources, both in the traditional and alternative media, but participatory and "algorithmic" aggregators of content have also appeared.
  3. However, those "participatory" news sites that have appeared suffer from a dilemma of growth. While they can serve at first as highly useful nodes in the informational networks of "cutting-edge" bloggers, as their popularity grows, such sites suffer from an influx of contributors and voters, increasingly the total quantity of material on the site and diluting its average quality.
Basically, I this intro would work better as an argument. (1) sets the broader context of challenging the traditional media. (2) establishes the specific task facing the attempt to do so. (3) explains the shortcomings of previous tools to tackle that task. The implication is that Project PM will contribute to (2) while avoiding the problems of (3). If this is incorrect, then I've misunderstood what you were writing, but either way, I think you could be clearer about what the specific problems are that this project is going to address, and where they come from.

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Project PM Network Summary

The institutions and structures that have developed over the past two decades of accelerating public internet use have had what we reasonably describe as a wholesome effect on information flow. But the information age is a work in progress, and thus there are potential improvements to be made. More importantly, there are improvements that can be made by an initially small number of influential participants working in coordination. The purpose of Project PM is to implement these solutions to the extent that participants are collectively able to do so, as well as to demonstrate the beneficial effects of these solutions to others that they might be spurred to recreate or even build upon them independently of our own efforts. 

The Problems

Project PM is intended to address the following inefficiencies: 

(a) Watering down of contributor quality within participatory networks: Open institutions such as reddit.com tend to peak in terms of the erudition of the content conveyed a few years after coming about, with this being due to the particular dynamics of network growth. By definition, early users are early adapters[adopters?], who themselves tend to be better-informed and otherwise relatively capable in terms of the value they bring to the network. To even know of such networks early in their existence is to pass a certain sort of test regarding the potential quality of one's contributions; as knowledge of the network expands, this "test" becomes easier, and to the extent that it does, the network is less "protected" from those who did not pass such a test by virtue of the fact that they did not know of the network until knowledge became more common. Obviously, failing to be aware of some particular institution does not come anywhere near precluding one from being intelligent and knowledgable in general and thus of value to the institution, but the influx of valuable participants versus damaging participants appears to decrease after a certain level of notoriety is reached. Again, the decline in the intellectual relevance of content at reddit.com is a good example of this.

(b) Data overflow: The watering down process described above does not only result in one coming across information of relatively low quality, but also in having to contend with more of it. On reddit.com, for instance, a user who scans new submissions will find not only a certain amount of potentially useful information, but also some amount of almost certainly useless information. The watering down of contributor quality also contributes to the extent to which the latter is perpetuated within the network itself insomuch as that lesser contributors are more likely to vote up useless information, thus helping to ensure that the barriers built into the network in order to facilitate the viewing of important rather than unimportant content - in this case, a pre-established threshold of up votes necessary to bring something to the front page - will thereby lose their effectiveness.

(c) Barriers to obtaining raw data: The obvious fact of data overflow - that some data is more useful than other data - is dealt with by means of selecting certain sources of information which one has identified as being a provider of quality output relative to other sources. Bloggers and others who require a steady stream of data in order to operate have certain methods of obtaining that data, and there is of course no reason to believe that any of these methods could not be improved upon to an extent that these improvements would be worth adapting. One has RSS feeds flowing from sources one has selected (and by virtue of having been selected, the sources must have been necessarily known to the blogger in the first place); one has algorithm-based sites like Memorandum.com (which merely shows what bloggers are talking about rather than necessarily providing any insight into what they should be talking about); one has democratic or pseudo-democratic sites such as reddit.com and digg.com; and one has the fundamentally one-way outlets of television and newspapers, the content of which is decided upon by a handful of producers or editors (who themselves are working within an incidental structure that does not appear to be of much value relative to what may now be found among the better portions of the blogosphere). A means of obtaining data that improves upon these and all other methods would be of great utility insomuch as that the quality of data is of course one major limiting factor with regards to the quality of output.

(d) Limited self-correctional powers of the traditional media: There does not currently exist any real process whereby a pundit may be caused to lose a column or television spot simply by virtue of not deseserving to have any such thing. Even to the extent that the blogosphere identifies some significant error in the work of someone possessing a signficant hold on the public attention, this information tends to make it only to those who read some degree of the better blog output - and to the extent that they do, they're likely to be already aware of the deficits one finds in the traditional media. Those who would benefit most from learning that certain of their sources for news and commentary are working in a demonstrably flawed fashion - the people who get their information from such sources to the exclusion of the better blogs - are, by definition, not reachable by way of our medium in any direct sense.