In an easily recognizable, but nonetheless idiotic, ploy to sell magazines, Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has published a short article called The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. In it he claims that the mere availability of data on a huge scale means that theories and models are unnecessary. As long as we have statistics that can pick trends, correlations out of the madness, we don’t need the scientific method anymore.

I’ll let this excellent rebuttal by John Timmer at Ars Technica do most of the work in explaining why Anderson’s argument is so flawed it should never had been printed. (Ah hah! More evidence against Andrew Keen’s argument for the return of the old-school editor! Anderson’s crap would never have passed muster on Wikipedia.)

For me, the most important rebuttal is about falsification and repair. Without theories that we can test, how can we know we’re wrong? What will being wrong look like? Without reasoned explanations for why things happen, how will we know what to do when things break? The reason that scientists are so wary of correlations is because they offer no explanatory power - they’re misleading as often as not. If we act on them, completely ignorant of the underlying mechanism, we don’t learn anything at all. Anderson’s most staggeringly ignorant move is to suggest that theories and models are somehow unnecessary simply because they’re often wrong. Wha? I guess the benefit of never having a model or a theory is that if you make no assumptions or predictions no one can ever disprove you.

I’d be willing to dismiss Anderson entirely if, presented differently, he wouldn’t have otherwise tackled an interesting topic. As Timmer says, certainly the availability of massive data is changing the way we do science. But the end of theory? C’mon, Chris, that’s ridiculous, and a transparent attempt to appeal to the data-heads that read Wired. This point of view is SO common, at least around San Francisco. I’m amazed that otherwise smart people would adopt such an ignorant, arrogant point of view. Fighting this kind of thinking is depressing. It reminds me of something Anthony Bourdain said about his most hated chef nemesis, Rachel Ray. (I noted this in a previous post.)

Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can’t cook… She’s a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that “Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!” Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, “Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could–if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?

A lazy, soulless, superficial, inexplicably popular idea. It’s days are numbered, though. I predict that inside of 5 years, Google is going to hit the wall on its data-center driven problem solving. They’ll call for more cowbell, find there’s none to be had, and return to the land of the living where the rest of us live.

Yahoo!’s new reputation design patterns got me thinking - what makes a reputation? When I browsed through the 9 design patterns lumped under the title of ‘reputation’, my first thought was that these are interesting and valuable, but they are not reputation elements.

But then, step back. A reputation system is a substitute for personal experience. It provides you with the information you need to make a determination about someone (something?) else without having had to go to all the trouble of getting to know them. Traditionally, that determination has been about interpersonal trust. eBay’s reputation systems is the best example. I don’t know anyone who’s selling blidgets on eBay, so I don’t know how likely they are to cheat me. eBay has found a formal way to represent the likelihood that I’m dealing with a seller who will meet my expectations.

So, the reputation design patterns aren’t like that. They’re not about trust, at least not directly. But, they are signifiers that help me know someone better. Just like my score on eBay represents something about my behavior, so do achievement badges, rankings, etc. They encapsulate information about the type or volume of my participation in different ways. And this information, in turn, may help me figure out something more about trust. Certainly, in an indirect way at least, these things act as elements of a reputation because they substitute for my personal experience with someone else’s contributions over time. If I’d been there to see what they did myself, I wouldn’t need the badge or the level information.

Still, if we take this view, is my age reputation information? My address? After all, that information saves you the trouble of having to be around to count the years, or having to travel to my town to check where i live. (I’m going off the deep end now!)

More importantly, why does any of this matter? Who cares whether it counts as a reputation. Well, there’s a bit of truth in that - maybe reputation is in the eye of the beholder, at least in practice. But only sort of. When it comes to design patterns, I think the important thing is to realize what badges or points are good for. So, certainly my badges and levels help others figure out how to assess my contributions when they don’t know any better. But they also work as incentives that make me feel valued, like my contributions count, like I’m making progress, and like people think of me as an expert. They give me a goal or a quota to shoot for, or a status marker that tempers my insecurity.

I think Yahoo! gets this. But the patterns kind of mix up the part that’s for you (the reputation) and the part that’s for me (the incentive). If the point is to understand your users deeply, design incentive mechanisms with them in mind, then breaking those two apart is essential, and there’s a lot of good work to be done there. Anyway, as I said, I’m somewhat conflicted. Comments welcome (as always)!

Through it’s Developer Network, Yahoo! has just released a nice set of design patterns for reputation systems. I have some issues with some of the language and patterns, but overall, I think they put together a really great typology.

My biggest beef is with the most ‘meta’ pattern that they call the ‘Competitive Spectrum‘. I understand the desire to simplify, but in my view, these 5 things are not really on the same spectrum at all. I think the ‘combative’ type is off in a corner of its own - a corner that really doesn’t exist much on the web. As for the other four, I can’t make out what the axis is that they vary on - overall level of competition doesn’t make sense to me. Yahoo! seems to realize the confusion themselves, as they include a variety of caveats in their description of the spectrum.

I really agree with Bryce Glass (one of the patterns’ creators), who points out that these patterns are pretty ubiquitous now, and so simply pointing them out isn’t enough. It’s how they’re used - or more specifically how intelligently they’re used - that will make them powerful. I think Yahoo! still has some work to do to provide best practices for implementing these patterns intelligently. Obviously, given my interests, I’d like to see them look at some of the underlying social psychological processes, and use them to make some informed recommendations. Also, I think designers really need an accessible way to understand the ‘corruption effect of extrinsic motivation’ (or, as economists call it, ‘crowding out’). I would argue that in many contexts when incentives like the ones Yahoo! lays out don’t work as expected, the corruption effect is a big reason why. But, all in all, its a great start. (Note that my opinion is in no way influenced by the fact that I’m an intern at Yahoo! this summer… heh)

(Thanks to Ben for the tip!)

You’ve run a fine campaign. You’ve shown that a vigorous and competitive process is an improvement over the usual method of ordaining whichever candidate happens to win the first few primaries. You’ve made huge leaps for women and politics, and shown that sexism, though still rampant, doesn’t have to be a barrier. So, all in all, I think you’ve done well.

But now it’s time to go. Throughout this race you’ve proven yourself willing and able to do and to say whatever it takes to move forward. You’ve reinvented yourself so many times that it’s hard to know who you are anymore. I understand, that’s politics. But the point is that we don’t want that politics anymore, and more than that we don’t need it. We have an alternative, in Barak Obama, who has told the same substantive story, who has made the same case, who has fought on the issues since the beginning of his campaign. More importantly, by every algebra but yours, he has won more states, more pledged delegates, more popular votes than you have. He’s won. So it’s time for you to step aside.

Yesterday’s DNC Rules Committee meeting was really your last chance to make any gains at all, I understand. (Though, as you know, even if all of the delegates had been seated at full strength, you would still be far behind in pledged delegates.) Thankfully, your attempts to influence the committee failed.

In my view the correct political decision but the wrong moral decision was made. Michigan and Florida need to have a voice, and we need them in the general election, so this was the right choice to that end. However, no reasonable person (without something to gain by it) could claim that the elections in those states were fair or unbiased. It’s not the voters’ fault, it’s the Rules Committee’s fault for invoking a bad punishment to begin with. But we can’t turn back time. As it is, you’ve come out ahead! You’ve gained delegates from unfairly contested elections - can’t argue with that!

So, now to the purpose of this letter. (The purpose other than filling up my blog.) Let’s see what happens in the last three primaries today and on Tuesday. Then, please, let that be that. You’ll have lost. Find a way to bow out gracefully, accept the accolades that are rightfully yours, and throw yourself full-tilt into the fight to get Obama into the White House. Please don’t take it to the Credentials Committee, please don’t let this drag on. Remember the serenity prayer, and go back to the Senate with new purpose.

All the best.

I don’t often feel the need to rave about software. That’s partly because I rarely find software I’m that excited about, and partly because I often find other people’s raves annoying. So I’ll try to keep this one short.

Get DropBox. Do it now. This is software that just works, and I can’t believe it took someone this long to come up with it.

Here’s the deal. I install DropBox on my laptop, on my desktop, on my work computer. Each computer gets a folder called ‘My DropBox’ that acts like any other folder in my file system. Now here it is, and it’s easy to understand: the folder is the same on every computer, all the time, effortlessly. I put a file in the folder on my laptop, it’s instantly sync’d with the other two machines liked to my account. I change it on another computer, and the changes are sync’d back too. And it backs up the files to a remote server. And it keeps a revision history so I can go back anytime. And it’s all encrypted with a key that I can choose (if I want to).

Holy hell. These features should have been in Windows 95. There’s lots of other solutions to the problem of cross-computer file sync, like Groove, SVN, etc. None are as seamless and painless as DropBox.

They’re in Beta, but sign up now. I have a few invites I can give away if you’re desperate.

Yesterday Oscar Pistorious was approved to run in Olympic qualifying events and go to Beijing if he can make the qualifying time. Oscar had his legs amputated at the knee when he was 11 months old, and uses carbon fiber prosthetic “Cheetah” blades.

This is a random topic, but I was reading through the comments on ESPN.com, and I’m torn about this so I thought I’d share. Here’s the thing: apparently reasonable people (and scientific experts) disagree about whether Oscar gains an advantage over able-bodied runners with his prosthetics, and therefore whether he should be allowed to run. An MIT professor says no, a German professor says yes. Who’s right? Who knows.

But here’s what bothers me, and why I think I’m leaning towards thinking he shouldn’t be allowed to run. While every other runner is stuck with muscles, Oscar gets to choose his equipment. Now, to be fair, I’m sure if he had a choice Oscar would choose muscles over carbon fiber. But, as it is he gets the benefits of materials science and engineering. He gets to decide which legs he puts on. If we had conclusive evidence that his chosen equipment mimicked legs perfectly, or provided no advantage whatsoever, then fine. But we don’t have that. And I’m not sure we ever will. My hack scientific view on biomechanics is that the Cheetahs operate on fundamentally different principles, and what might be an advantage for one body type would not be for another.

I realize this is controversial. I don’t think what I’m saying is discriminatory, or at least I don’t mean for it to be. I just think this is a dangerous precendent for sport. Thoughts?

My adviser Coye Cheshire, and I have just had a paper published in the latest issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. It’s titled The Social Psychological Effects of Feedback on the Production of Internet Information Pools and it’s freely available here.

I’m excited because this is the work that set me down the research path that I’m currently on, and that will lead to my dissertation research (and beyond). It’s based on research I did while I was working on Mycroft, which then became a relatively short-lived startup company called inChorus.

It’s the first day of the rest of my life. Recently I realized that I have been a full-time course-taking graduate student for six consecutive years now. Six long years of coursework. If you count being an undergrad and culinary school, that makes 10 out of the last 11 years in higher education taking courses. That’s a long, long time. And I’m tired.

Don’t get me wrong. I have loved coursework (and still do). I’ve learned (and forgotten) more than I can say. But lately I’ve started to get a little weary. I’m so, so excited about the research I’m doing - or not doing, I should say, because the courses take up so much of my time.

But today, as I said, is a very special day. Last night I attended the last course that I will ever have to take. Oh, I’m sure I’ll take a class here and there before and after I finish my degree. But I won’t have to, and that matters.

Very soon, I hope to be blogging more, to have the time to pursue all the thoughts and ideas I’ve been pushing back for lack of time lately. It’s all very exciting.

I think, in last night’s debate, both candidates showed their substance. Clinton, however, also showed her true colors as a petty, hypocritical, run-of-the-mill politician who is willing to tell lies, half-truths, distortions in order to get ahead.

Hilary accuses Barak of plagiarism:

The other shoe drops:

And again:

Silly.
(via Daily Kos. Thanks, Sundhar!)

Take a look at these results, recently released by Hitwise and reported on TechCrunch. Couldn’t be more skeptical, I must say. Hitwise’s methodology seems pretty typical of web survey and analytics companies. They’re subject to a huge number of biases to begin with, and systematically over-represent certain parts of the population and certain contexts, despite their best efforts. I know Hitwise is doing everything they can to combat these biases, but they don’t go into enough detail on their website for us to be sure of how. I have a strong suspicion, for example, that these results are not so much representative of SES as of geography. But SES makes for a better story. That big purple blob at the bottom right probably represents suburban areas in a very few markets like San Francisco, New York, Boston. The top left quadrant, that’s middle America. And none of this is news - Yahoo knows the heartland is their wheelhouse. Plus, what’s ‘Varying Lifestyles’? Is that the catch-all for all the people they can’t pidgeonhole?

We’ll continue to see analytics like this, of course, but I think recent news should make us all more skeptical. Advertising is a business that has been run on analytics from the beginning, and unsurprisingly, they got it very, very wrong from the beginning. The knowledge that a small percentage of individuals do most of the clicking (and very little of the buying) should shake the industry up, but it won’t. So sad!

Something’s happening, and it gives me hope:

Trader Joe’s has come through again with a value on wine that’s so amazing I have to share. 2005 Caves des Papes Cotes du Rhone. $4.99 / bottle. You can’t miss this oddly shaped, fat and squat wine bottle on the shelf. Everything I have to say about this wine should have ‘…for $.4.99′ tacked on the end of it. What a value. It’s well balanced, not too tannic for a young wine, has a good amount of fruit, and even that characteristic earthy quality in the nose that makes some Rhone wines unique (especially one of my favorites, Chataeuneuf-du-Papes). This is everything an everyday wine should be, and for less than $5, you might as well drink it everyday. If I’d paid $20 for this wine, I might not be so glowing. But the Caves des Papes is loads better than so, so many wines you can find at that price point, especially the young ones. Go get it.

Duncan Riley’s recent post at TechCrunch is a little contradictory, on its face, about the fate of the new Digg-clone Ximmy. Ximmy is Digg-style social voting with the twist that they pay people for making pro-social (or at least pro-Ximmy) contributions. First Duncan says “Will Ximmy steal away top Digg and Reddit users looking for pocket money? probably not” but then he ultimately concludes:

I’d bet that sites such as Ximmy (although perhaps not Ximmy itself) will win the hearts and minds of a decent portion of the market, after all, if we’re going to spend time building value for these sorts of sites, it’s not much to ask in return that we should be compensated for our time, even in a small way.

Now, there certainly is a subtle distinction there between what could happen to extremely dedicated Digg users and what could happen to the rest of the rabble. I’m just not sure that Duncan is making it. I’m going to make a slightly different prediction that sort of splits Duncan’s down the middle. First, I agree - Ximmy will not steal away top Digg-ers, any more than Knol will steal away top Wikipedians (see my previous post on this subject). If we were to prioritize the incentives that motivate these people, monetary incentives are far down the list, and much less powerful than robust social psychological incentives like rational zealotry (i.e. fierce belief in the cause), reputation, status, and group belonging. Greenbacks just can’t compete.

However, Ximmy and sites like it will never be a large part of the market in the long term for at least two reasons.

1. Cash recruits the wrong kind of content, the wrong kind of users. Paying users to submit and promote stories may indeed promote a certain amount of contribution - but what kind of contribution? Ximmy chooses to offer a comparatively large payoff when a submitted story gets promoted to the front page - undoubtedly a move that’s intended to encourage high-quality postings. However, experience with Digg has shown that quality often has little to do with what gets promoted to the front page. Some have argued that a small cabal of powerful users can effectively get any story they want promoted. Other analyses have shown that stories in certain categories are much more likely to be promoted overall. Case in point - stories with the word ‘Linux’ in the title are almost 10 times more likely to be promoted.
   

   So, gaming the system is possible - that’s not news. The story here is that when you pay people, you make it about the money - social norms, ideology, community-orientation can all take the back seat. Amongst several options, you encourage gaming the system. So, though a caring, thoughtful, internally motivated user might view the payment as an incentive for quality, most users will just see it as a way to make money. So, cash will promote the wrong kind of users and the wrong kind of contributions. Quality will suffer, promoted stories will be old-news, garbage, or within a few narrow, stereotyped categories like Linux and lolcats. Critical mass will never arrive for the Ximmy community, it will fold right quick.

2. The economics won’t work out. This is a corrollary of reason 1, in a way. (Keep in mind, I’ve not done the reasearch necessary to back up this claim, but one could speculate, for example, about what would happen it Diff were paying users Ximmy-style, if the right stats. were available.) So, now Ximmy is paying plenty of people, but the content is garbage. They’re drawing the wrong kind of users who are motivated by the money. It becomes something of a closed system - a relatively small number of people who submit and promote each other’s stories. Since Ximmy doesn’t provide anything new content-wise over Digg or Reddit, its postings are lower quality and its community is smaller, they’re having a hard time getting pageviews. How does this business model work out? It’s a simple equation if we had the right inputs. How much is each of Ximmy’s ‘points’ worth in dollar value? How many do they give out each day? Take that amount, plus overhead, plus at least 40% to make it a sustainable, profitable business. This scenario seems very unlikely to me. Is this a funded start-up? I hope not. I assume the guys at Ximmy tried to work this out themselves, and if they got funding, convinced some VC’s that it would work. But if they did, they were operating on a false assumption - that cash would stand in for other motivations.

So, anyway, I expect that Ximmy will fail, and soon. I would guess that most of the user-generated content site-clones that are popping up will fail in the same spectacular way when they try cash-based models. I’m sure I sound like a broken record by now, but Duncan got the most important part of online participation wrong. He thinks that ‘it’s not much to ask in return that we should be compensated for our time.’ But people are compensated. It just turns out that the narrow-minded view of online participation is that anything we can’t fit on a spreadsheet or assign a dollar value to can’t count. But I think cash is a weak and fickle tool when compared to the powerful social and psychological incentives that drive people on the web, and I think the next year will prove it.

Yesterday, as most everyone knows by now, Hillary Clinton narrowly won the New Hampshire primary over Barack Obama. I’m not sad - Clinton would make a great president. She is smart and capable.

But today, I am very frustrated - not really at her, but at a group of voters with short memories. Let’s examine a series of events. Obama wins big in Iowa with a message of change that appeals to young people. He is earnest and hopeful. He gives a MLK-esque victory speech, surrounded by young, passionate supporters who hang on his every word. Hilary comes in second by running a campaign focused on her experience and smarts. She gives a speech with Madeleine Albright, Wesley Clark and the rest of the rich, white, over-50 Democratic machine behind her.

This was all less than a week ago. On that day, give Clinton’s campaign credit for realizing they needed to change message. She softens her rhetoric, talks to voters more, has an ‘emotional moment’ in a diner, and wins New Hampshire. She gives a victory speech, this time surrounded by 19 and 20 year-olds (most of whom, I might add, looked totally bored, and more excited to be on TV than anything else).

Does any of this seem manufactured to you? I have said for months in political discussions that I like Clinton, but I feel like I don’t know who she is. Sure, all the candidates are ‘handled’ and orchestrated by their respective machines, but any commentator will tell you that the Clinton machine is unlike any other. She has armies of strategists who tell her where to go, what to say, and how to say it. She is a fantastic tool for all those smart people - she executes the plans they draw up well, adds her own significant intellect to the show. But when I see Clinton, I see a well-rehearsed act - granted a dynamic and evolving one.

Who knows why Clinton won New Hampshire after all the polls showed her an 8 point dog to Obama? If it’s because of her recent turnaround, though, that makes me angry. Obama has been hopeful, personal, genuine, and engaging for a year. Clinton does it for a week, and we all get right on board. Which is the real Clinton? I think it’s easy to tell. Watching her victory speech actually made me a little queasy as she said ‘you helped me find my voice.’ Oh yes, now we’re seeing the ‘real’ Hillary.

Blogs have been buzzing lately about the introduction of a new(-ish) platform from Google called Knol. Check out the announcement about Knol on Google’s blog. The idea is that Knol is a cross between Wikipedia and one of a few systems (e.g. Squidoo, Mahalo, Hubpages) that give users tools for creating portal pages on specific topics. The hope is that people will take ownership of particular topics, style themselves as experts, summarize and edit all the content that’s out there in the cloud for everyone’s benefit. Most of these sites have thus far tried to motivate users through a combination of reputation and community involvement. And let’s not forget the value of the knowledge base itself.

Google is tackling issues of motivation and quality with reputational and social networking tools, just like everyone else. But with Knol, they also seem to be stepping in with the increasingly classic Google move: add cash. How else is a deep-pocketed late-comer supposed to make a dent in the market? The strategy is no-doubt driven by Google’s bevy of economists who argue: when a rational person has the choice between doing something just for the warm-fuzzies, or for warm-fuzzies and cash, that person will go for the cash.

I’m surprised, however, that for all the talent they have on staff, no one around there has told them how dangerous this idea is. It turns out there’s all sorts of evidence that when you add monetary payments (or, more generally extrinsic incentives), all kinds of unexpected things can happen. Motivation can be reduced, quality can dip, resentment brewed. I recommend the good folks at Google get started by reading Not Just for the Money by Bruno Frey (an economist!) and The Hidden Costs of Reward edited by Lepper and Greene.

Of course, all of this will depend on just how carefully Google designs their system. One of the most fascinating areas of my research is understanding how the minutiae of user interaction and design elements can influence social psychological motivations. Crowding out (when extrinsic incentives push out intrinsic ones instead of adding to them) can in some cases be crowding in when the context is right. We know so very little about this stuff right now, at least in a scientific sense.

Ultimately, there’s a pretty fundamental divide here. Wikipedia is the 10-ton gorilla of knowledge sharing, and they’ve gotten this far without paying people a cent. Google is betting that Knol will be able to leech away contributors from Wikipedia. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch seems to agree. And they may be right. But, I worry, to Google’s own peril. Who are those users who will abandon Wikipedia to feed from the Google cash trough? Are they they the invested, high quality, knowledgeable contributors that Google would need to build a respectable knowledge repository? Doubtful. But it may be presumptuous of me to assume that Google cares about the quality of their Knol content. Maybe sheer volume is enough. It’s their own property, so they can promote it in their search results all they want, and if the eyeballs and ad revenues are there, maybe Google is happy. But then let’s not fool ourselves by calling it a ‘knowledge repository’ when it’s really just another ad vehicle.

Last night Tamar and I spent a particularly wonderful night with some good friends drinking wine at our favorite wine bar in SF. It was unusual and amazing enough to be worth sharing, methinks.

We started the evening with a bottle of Domaine J. Laurens Brut NV. This French sparkling wine was a bit too sweet and apple-y for my taste. Not much in the way of yeasty or toasty complexity, and I prefer the bubbly a bit drier, more all the time, probably, owing to the influence of Tamar’s family.

Then we moved on to the reds. Marissa wisely ordered a bottle of Louis M. Martini Barbera - Lake County 1993. Most of us thought this wine was quite good in the ‘interesting’ way - something we couldn’t try anywhere else. This old wine was almost over the hill, and so showed a great deal of inconsistency. One sniff/sip would bring some interesting dark red fruit and bramble, while the next gave hints of over-ripe figs and prune. All in all, we were glad to try it, and it was a super bargain.

Next we had a bottle of L’Avenir Pinotage 2001. This is a huge wine from South Africa’s oldest winery. At first, it was almost too much in my face, but with some air, it settled into a wonderfully balanced, still powerful wine. Wet cedar, very jammy, surprisingly smooth gives the 14.5% alcohol. Not ‘hot’ or acidic at all.

Unfortunately in the wrong order, next we ordered a bottle of Georges Cleret Morey-Saint-Denis 1994. This burgundy was the polar opposite of the L’Avenir. Subtle, light, hugely elegant. It had wonderful earthiness, a light floral character, and a long, long finish. It too got better with an hour of air, and paired really well with some seared tuna that Mike ordered.

After all that wine, I think Mike was feeling a little over-excited, and so on a whim he ordered a bottle of Moreira Colheita Porto 1957. That’s right, ‘57. This wine sat in oak for 43 years before being bottled in the year 2000. Oh… my… god. Smooth as silk, lots of brown sugar, nutmeg, allspice, sweet tobacco in the back. Our excellent server Patrick noted a bit of apricot, which is a little unusual. We took our time with this bottle, partly because its alcohol content is 20% and partly because each sip lingered in our mouthes for about 5 minutes. Best port ever. We were beside ourselves.

A couple sitting at the next table noticed our little wine adventure, and leaned over to chat. Seeing our ‘57 port they said, ‘Wow! Are you Google or something?’ We all died laughing. We’re grad. students. heh.

The Economist recently reported the results of Radiohead’s bold experiment in giving their new album away for free on the internet. It turns out 60% of people paid nothing for the album - unsurprising if you believe that a rational, self-interested individual would not pay for something he could get for free (as many economists do, for example). And yet, 40% of people paid something for the album, quite a few of them more than they would have paid if they’d been able to download the album from iTunes or Amazon. Who are these people?

One window into that question might be opened by looking at the pricing data longitudinally. A few weeks after the album was released, I remember reading that the number of free-riders was only about 30%, though I can’t remember the source. But still, it puts the question out there: how did the distribution of prices change over time?

My completely unsupported guess is that the vast majority of the high outliers came right away - motivated fans, ideological supporters of new music models, enemies of the big record companies. Even if we take the narrow view of pure rationalism, we can call these people ‘rational zealots’ - we must factor the belief and promotion of a valuable cause into the price they were willing to pay. I’d also guess that the percentage of non-payers increased dramatically as time went on, and that these days most people download the album for free. Who’s got the data for us to check?! Any way you slice it, this is a cool experiment.

Why do I keep writing about Wikipedia? Mostly it’s because Wikipedia is emblematic of the sorts of online collective action that I study. And I just love that all their dirty laundry is falling out. Actually, I don’t intend that to be mean - more that Wikipedia has, up until now, been driven by a sort of utopian ideal that masks a lot of the turbulence and reality under the surface. And we shouldn’t be surprised - this is what happens when people try to cooperate, online or not. It an everyday part of social systems.

Anyway, The Register is reporting on a new scandal in which - shocklingly - it turns out that Wikipedia is not as open and democratic as everyone thought - or hoped. Turns out a select group of upper-level administrators have been using private mailing lists to coordinate responses (read: attacks) on users they think are trying to undermine their power, among other things. My reaction is similar to when I hear about a White House scandal - it’s good to get a tiny window into the machinations of people in power, but we don’t even know the half of it.

An interesting question is, would Wikipedia be able to survive without the ‘rings of hegemony‘ that have now apparently sprung up? Would the challenges of coordinating the efforts of millions towards a stated goal (uber-open-online encyclopedia) overwhelm any truly democratic, egalitarian (dare I say socialist?) efforts? I have opinions, of course, but if anyone is out there, I’m interested in yours.

I’ve had this rant brewing for a long, long time. Now it’s serious. So serious that I’ve had to create a whole not post category on the blog. Here it is:

I am just so sweating, sputtering, stomping mad at Berkeley cyclists. Commuter cyclists, not the real kind. For so many reasons. Here’s a group of people (myself included!) that bitches endlessly about dealing with cars in Berkeley. And yet it’s so disrespectful of cars and pedestrians, laws and social customs that it singlehandedly creates the horrible tension and animosity that makes the motorists treat cyclists badly to begin with.

But I digress. I’m going to focus this cathartic rant on the single most inexplicable thing cyclists do. Here’s what happens: I’m sitting at a red light, as I should since everyone knows cyclists have to abide by traffic laws. As I’m sitting, a second cyclist arrives from behind, and casually pulls up in front of me. The light turns green, the jackass cyclist pulls off first.

What? When did turn-taking get lost among cyclists? I got there first. If you pull up second, you’d better stay behind me and let me go first. I don’t care if you pass me while we’re riding, but for Jebus sake, wait your damn turn.

This amazes me because turn-taking is one of the social norms that we learn earliest in life - like when we’re 2 years old. It appears in nearly every area of life, and yet somehow these cyclists forget about it. This is FIFO, not LIFO, people.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and I’m not buying it. I’m well aware that the cyclist’s foremost priority is the law of conservation of momentum. If you’re going to pull up to the light at the last minute so that you can roll through when it turns green, no problem. But these rat bastards aren’t rolling. They’re stopping. In front of me.

Do they all assume they’re faster than me and so they’d have to pass anyway? That seems unlikely. The bulk of these people are just your average casual peddler. I’m a fairly decent cyclist. I go faster than 9 out of 10 riders I pass on my way around Berkeley. But I still wait my turn at a light, and pass when we move on. Shit, half of the people who stop in front of me at the light are people I blew by a few blocks back.

In the grand scheme of things, this is probably one of the lesser transgressions of your average Berkeley cyclist. So many things they do are way more dangerous. Like blowing straight through red lights and stop signs without looking. Like weaving in and out of traffic as though it was some kind of amusement park ride. Like Critical Mass (ugh!). And (OMG, this is the worst) riding the wrong way down a one way street, e.g. the four block stretch of Telegraph between Bancroft and Dwight.

Sure, some of those dumbasses get into accidents. But much worse is that those sorts of choices get other people into accidents while the stupid cyclist is on her merry way down the street. Sigh.

I think this recent clash between Wikipedia editors and webcomic creators is just the tip of the iceberg - we’re going to see more frequent and intense clashes in the near future. Read the short article linked above to get the gist, but basically: a few Wikipedia users (one in particular) went around deleting many pages related to webcomics, saying they did not meet Wikipedia’s notability guidelines. The webcomics community is angry, refusing to help with Wikipedia’s fundraising efforts, trying to raise the profile of the issue.

As an observer, I love that this battle is happening. On the one hand we have editors who feel that it’s their duty to police the boundaries of Wikipedia, and delete content they feel does not meet the notability guideline. On the other we have a community of content producers who, irrespective of any other measure of notability or popularity, perceive the intentional deletion of articles about their webcomics as a slight.

And rightly so. It is a slight. Someone with more power than most - in this case the user Dragonfiend - has applied an arbitrary interpretation of the notability guideline. Editors do this all the time, right? Well, it wouldn’t be so problematic in this case except for two factors - and these are two fascinating factors that I think will continue to haunt and define Wikipedia in the years to come.

First, Wikipedia is wrestling with its openness as it grows. It wants to be democratic - indeed it has built its brand upon it. It’s “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. (Actually, right now that slogan strikes me as a little duplicitous. *Almost* anyone can edit, and someone may end up denying your edits in the end.) And yet the challenges of immense popularity have made people like Dragonfiend necessary. As the size of the encyclopedia increases, the problems of order and coordination also increasing. In Wikipedia’s case this seems to have required increased activity by self-appointed editors who wield the power of interpreting Wikipedia’s policies as they see fit. Check out, for example, this recent paper that documents the increasing use of Wikipedia’s Talk pages to handle emerging problems of coordination. The arbitrariness of these interpretations, as well as the mere existence of people who, like judges and editors, can single-handedly influence the system, is clashing with Wikipedia’s democratic, open, community-based ideals.

None of this would be as big a problem as it has been, however, if it weren’t for the second factor I want to mention. This debate is a lens that magnifies the social and cultural position of prestige and authority that Wikipedia has come to occupy among certain stakeholders. The webcomics community, for example, probably wouldn’t be so upset if their articles were not included in the latest edition of Britannica. That encyclopedia just has a different position as a sociocultural icon. Similarly, many (but not all) chemists, philosophers, and literature critics (and the like) might not be as upset if they were left out of Wikipedia (and indeed they are under-represented there), but would be aghast at being left out of Britannica.

To generalize (in a slightly unfair way): In 2007 the web is a platform for community to coalesce around their hobbies and interests, to push across geographic boundaries and form dense networks of content creation and sharing. For these sorts of web-enabled, tech-savvy folks, Wikipedia was supposed to be a safe haven where they could participate and be included on the same footing as everyone else. After all, these were the exact people who embraced the new model that Wikipedia represented when it was just taking off. And now that they’re being pushed to the fringes as Wikipedia is forced (or chooses) to take on the character of a traditional edited publication, they’re pissed. Who can blame them?