Undercurrent

That’s the motto of Tim Berners-Lee’s latest initiative, unveiled yesterday. The World Wide Web Foundation seeks:

to advance One Web that is free and open,

to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,

and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.

Worthy goals that won’t be reached without effort and good policy choices (see for example Jonathan Zittrain’s worrying message about the future of the internet). From Berners-Lee’s opening speech:

Our success will be measured by how well we foster the creativity of our children. Whether future scientists have the tools to cure diseases. Whether people, in developed and developing economies alike, can distinguish reliable healthcare information from commercial chaff. Whether the next generation will build systems that support democracy, inform the electorate, and promote accountable debate.

This last point is expanded upon in a BBC interview. Berners-Lee is worried that the web enables effective distribution of disinformation. The web is a good tool for cults and all kinds of enemies of reason. I think this is a built-in problem, and Berners-Lee’s ideas here — “new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources” — sound unpractical and exceedingly difficult to manage. But let’s wait until we see what that initiative is really about.

Related: An article by Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt in Scientific American: Web Science: Studying the Internet to Protect Our Future.

Though it remains unclear if the McCain campaign or the Republican party initiated it, the editing work done on the Sarah Palin article just before she was announced as candidate again throws light on the importance of Wikipedia:

In total, YoungTrigg – whose user name is a reference to Ms. Palin’s infant son, Trig – made 30 “edits” to the article, all positive and largely unnoticed, since they came at a time when few were discussing her as a possible running mate of Senator John McCain’s.

This surely looks like a version of what I was circling in a post about the war in Georgia. Wikipedia as first stop for many users = Wikipedia will be a battleground. As the NYT articles also notes:

While ethically suspect, the idea that a politician would try to shape her Wikipedia article shouldn’t come as a surprise. In modern politics, where the struggle is to “define” yourself before your opponent “defines” you, Wikipedia has become an important part of political strategy. When news breaks, and people plug a name into a search engine to find out more, invariably Wikipedia is the first result they click through to; it is where first impressions are made.

From September this year, the complete archive of classical music magazine Gramophone will be available for free on its website. The archive goes back to 1923 and includes gems, as the editor explains:

There are some amazing contributions, such as Rachmaninov on the state of piano playing when he was around.

After seeing the latest comments from Metafilter vs. YouTube users side by side, the Freakonomics blog asks if the $5 membership fee on Metafilter is the reason behind the obvious difference in quality. The comments to that question clarify things. The pair is rather odd — it would be more instructive to see similar, competing entities such as newspaper websites side by side – but it’s anyway clear that the entrance fee itself can’t be decisive. As Brandon Blatcher says:

Metafilter’ls success and generally better comments are probably due to a number of factors, and the $5 admission fee is just one. There’ls also the presence of the mods, how they’lre moderating, how many people are posting links, how many people of are posting comments and more importantly, the quality of the those two things (a crappy post of a controversial subject tends explode), timing (if a crappy post of a controversial subject happens when the mods are off somewhere, the explosion tends to last longer, sparking other explosions), the state of the world in general and the United States in particular (most Mefi members are American and with the elections going on, there’ls a tug of war about whether to post political links) and just sheer luck. All of these things and more are at play in particular moment, so Mefi’ls light moderation touch tends to work well. There’ls also a certain X-factor that comes from the mods, in that they actually seem to care about the site and it’ls goals and the sum of those parts make it more than a job, which tends to shine through in the site’ls darker moments. $5 ain’lt got nothin’ on that.