ISP censorship reveals fragility of our connections

Looks like a number of UK ISPs have been 'persuaded' to censor your internet.

In quick summary, a series of UK ISPs have bowed to pressure from the online watchdog the IWF (a quango) to block access to a wikipedia page about rock band The Scorpions. The row is about an image from one of their album covers - of a naked girl.

From the Beeb: "...the IWF, which warns internet providers about possible images that could be linked to child abuse, said it had consulted the police before making its decision."

It's not clear if the ISPs or the IWF had even spoken to wikipedia before taking the action it did. After all wikipedia has (controversially) frozen pages in the past when libel issues have emerged. And surely child abuse is at least as big a concern to all parties as libel?

The ISPs have not just blocked the picture in question, they've blocked text and, wikipedia says, blocked many peoples ability to edit parts of wikipedia. (Image courtesy)

The issue reveals a wider and painful truth we must face:

The internet is created by us, is connected by us. It is ours - but our access to it - our very ability to use it - is not.

While ISPs are run by people who can be threatened with legal action by the centre (Governments and the like) they can be controlled. Mobile operators are already subject to rule after rule about what can and can't be distributed using their infrastructure.

That ISPs have come under so little pressure so far is something of a surprise. The reality is the centre can literally turn off all our access to the web tomorrow. And there's little we could do about it.

While the ISPs retain such power the network is at risk.
Yes, we are the distributors and in the idea of the eighth mass media I claim:
"We are the connections. We are also how the connections are made."

At least, we are when the eighth mass media arrives. What this ISP censorship issue reveals is that it is not yet with us. We don't have as much control over distribution as we'd like to think - as much as we must ultimately demand.

Peer-to-peer distribution requires the means to distribute. And that remains in the hands of the centre.

Only when the distribution itself becomes more distributed itself, a loosely connected network of nodes itself rather than these giant central on/off hubs, only then will the risk to the network be removed.

The eighth mass media requires the free distribution of metadata beyond silos to increase our ability to connect one to another. But one of the biggest silo walls remaining is centralised ownership of ISPs.

I have a feeling we have accepted and tolerated this only as long as the potential power the ISPs holds remains unused.

Examples like today's wikipedia clampdown give us cause for concern and raises questions about how long we'll tolerate this control.

And as we see time after time - people and their connections have a way of finding their way around control.

Community defined? You can't take part without creating part of it

My buddy Badgergravling got me thinking with a question on twitter this morning.

I don't know the 'why' of what he wants to know at the moment ( "Still researching content creators vs audience figures/ratio...anyone got examples/figures etc?") but the question itself made me think about our definitions, and valuation, of community.

Wikipedia and YouTube provide great examples of products made entirely from user generatated content. The question often thrown at them is "yeah but, how many people create content compared to those who simply consume it?"

The answer is thought to be a consistently low number (1%?) who contribute while 99% consume. I'll gladly update this with more accurate stats if you happen to have them.

Let me be clear. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The 99% now have something they want to consume, created by that busy 1%. It didn't exist before. It's been carved from that cognitive surplus that Clay Shirky introduced us to. New value has been created.

Of course, it could achieve twice the scale and value should another 1% of the consumers become creators. But then, the theory goes, each time you double the number of creators, you'll scale up the number of consumers, too. That means the ratio of creators to consumers will remain static. Let's call it 1:100 for the sake of argument.

So, the more people who join the community by creating, the more 'audience' you'll grow. Clearly worth getting the tools of creation right then? If nothing else the audience gets to connect with the community through repeated exposure... and that drip-drip effect may inspire some to cross the theshold from audience to community.

All good, of course.

What made me pause for further thought was the fact that I was having this discussion on twitter.

Without creators there is no twitter. Same with YouTube or Wikipedia of course.

But twitter is made with communities of creators as its primary concern, not for consuming viewers. It is built for communities of purpose to form in a networked conversation-driven way, not for an audience to consume what they are creating. It's about small numbers sharing their conversations.

SecondLife follows that formula, too.

In both cases you can't take part without creating part of it.

I'm not about to claim there's no value in products which mix creation with consumption - YouTube and Wikipedia stand as testimony to the folly of that line of argument.

But I do think this raises questions about how uniformly we can apply laws of creator/consumer ratios. The purpose of the tools has a huge influence on this.

I imagine there are some twitter users who only 'follow' (ie only read the content others have created). But I'll make a wild guess: That number is way closer to 1% than the number of people who create content on twitter is.

In really community-focused models (from the architecture up) the creator/consumer ratio is likely to get turned on its head.

And that clearly hasn't done any harm to the likes of SecondLife and Twitter.

So being part of a community is to take part in creating it. All the rest is broadcast - sharing the community's metadata with a world of self-selecting potential members.

It means of course that twitter must come up with a monetising solution which fits the networked world. Can't wait to see which way they jump.

Searching for Powerset? Now in public beta

Powerset has gone live with a public beta - at just about the time talk is brewing that Microsoft plans to acquire it.

Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.
One thing is for sure, it's going to need cash to burn to move from the indexing of wikipedia it has achieved to the 20billion web documents it has ambitions to cover.
But try it for yourself - it's the latest attempt at the New Search.

Google Knol: Knol = Limited Knowledge

Is google knol the answer to a doubt that doesn't really need to be raised? You know, the one that goes..."ah but you can't trust what you read on wikipedia"...

Google Knol, illustrated above (and in very limited beta at present), is being characterised as a wikipedia rival. And there are those who claim wikipedia is unreliable so perhaps organising chunks of expert knowledge in easily sorted boxes is just what the web ordered.

I'm not a subscriber to that view. Wikipedia is rarely wrong for long. The wisdom of the crowd is a rapidly self-correcting beast - certainly much faster than Mr I M Expert can be, even if he does bother responding to 'suggested edits and additions' on his Knol.

Knols look like being sealed units - essentially wikipedia stubs that only the original expert author can add to. In this respect (and this one alone) they are more like a blog than a wiki.

But google has a blog search and a self-publishing platform in Blogger. So what's the point of Google Knol?

Perhaps Google doesn't trust itself to deliver the right search results? (rate the likeliness of this below!) Or perhaps it just likes the look of all that juicy un-google-adsensed traffic over at Wikipedia? (ditto).

Let's assume it is simply a way to organise chunks of expert information as unique pieces of knowledge rather than streaming through the dialogue of the blog? Apply all the usual social media functions we'd expert and we could have league tables of the best expert guides to life the universe and everything.

Michael Arrington on Techcrunch tells us: "It’s a new knowledge base for authors. Anyone, eventually, will be able to write on any topic they choose. Google will provide authoring tools, store the information, allow others to comment and suggest edits, add ads with the author’s approval, and provide traffic via their search engine."

But even this doesn't make the best use of the collaborative power of the networked world.

I agree with Stowe Boyd when he suggests knowledge is vested in/created by rich conversations ( a la blogs) rather than sealed off units (a la a Google Knol). It's the whole point about connections creating the value, rather than the nodes themselves.

So perhaps it is apt that google has gone for a conjunction of the word knowledge as its 'unit of knowledge'... a restricted, sadly stunted version.