Words’ End

Linking in Web 2.0. Moderator: Saul Hansell, a reporter for The New York Times.

(I confess that it’s not clear to me yet what Web 2.0 is, exactly.)

Hansell: Think of the internet in terms of “cultural physics,” as a cyclotron that separates The Internet into Very Small Particles, each of which is “a piece of communication.” Based on their trustworthiness, they combine (link) into various compounds.

Nicholas Carr, former editor of the Harvard Business Review, book author, and blogger. Interested in the economic structure of “what we call Web 2.0″, in partic. how it influences how we consume media and other creative content. On consumption side, the link and other characteristics of W2 is disambiguate the units of consumption. Unit = not a newspaper or magazine but an article, for ex. On the production side, this means that each unit has to stand on its own economically (commercially) speaking.

Concern: even if you want the market to determine the above, what the hell is this market, that says everything has equal value, and that value is zero?

Martin Nisenholtz, Sr. VP, Digital Operations, The New York Times Company. Talks about writers who drive the most audience: people who write about less economically-connected topics tend to make less money!, regardless of how interesting/relevant their pieces are. Much else that I, sadly, missed.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia talks about the uneven representation of information about certain parts of the world, as compared to other parts. The internet is actually equalizing that a bit: reporters who write about, say, Africa have way more articles than they’re able to get print-published, but they can put them on the net. Wikipedia finds the internet to be amazingly subversive, and blogs are a large part of that (see also, Iran). Ethiopia, Wales says, has gone from being an extremely journalistically open country to a monstrous Big Brother. So people have gone on the net, which has connected three groups: Ethiopians, the Ethiopian diaspora, and the larger [interested] community.

Nisenholtz again: we can throw out all communally-created artifacts and nobody would miss them. The important stuff is created by individuals. Uproar on the IRC channel! Someone asks (online) whether we should throw out the Talmud.

Ethan Zuckerman, Fellow, Berkman Center, Harvard University, disagrees with Nisenholtz more eloquently than I do above.

Discussion ensues, and there’s too much going on on IRC – I’ll try to synthesize some of the most interesting thought from the channel later on.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 10:14 am and is filed under digital [humanities|libraries], tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.