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do you see what i see? with online “filter bubbles”, maybe not

Nanette — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:14:35 +0000

Google shows you something different from it shows me, even if we search for the same thing. Facebook filters out what it thinks I may not want to see. And, apparently, these two companies are only the beginning of information gate keeping and siloing online.

In my own push-back against self-created barricades, I stumbled across Eli Pariser’s TED Talk on online filter bubbles (transcript at the link). Pariser, you may remember, is one of the people who started MoveOn.org, though I guess he has, well, moved on from there. Some of what he said was surprising to me, like that Google, using an algorithm and something like 57 signals you send when you land on the Google page (logged in or not), tailors the search results to what they think you want to see.

He used two friends of his, Scott and Daniel, both fairly young males, as an example. Both put the word “Egypt” into Google; Scott’s results were about the uprising in Egypt and other news information. The results Daniel got were about traveling to that country, cooking, I think and other non-news type stuff. Nothing at all about the Egyptian protests.

That’s a little freaky. Now, generally Daniel may be far more interested in travel and food than he is in news, but if he is doing a search on a topic that is hot news at the time, why assume that he has no interest in it? A casual searcher who fits whatever of the 57 points Daniel fit, and who doesn’t watch much television news, could come away from that search still as ignorant of what was happening in the world as when they went in.

Eli Pariser:

So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time — my Facebook page. I’m progressive, politically — big surprise — but I’ve always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they’re thinking about; I like seeing what they link to; I like learning a thing or two. And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends’ links than on my conservative friends’ links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.

[...]

So I do think this is a problem. And I think, if you take all of these filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is your own personal unique universe of information that you live in online. And what’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don’t decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out

And you can be left, as he says, in a web of one. I am not on Facebook much so I wouldn’t know what was edited out or in, but it is disturbing that people seem to have no choice in the matter. If you don’t know what is not there, how will you know what you are missing?

Pariser has written a book, by the way,

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You and this next bit is from an interview he did that is on his book page.

I’ve always believed the Internet could connect us all together and help create a better, more democratic world. That’s what excited me about MoveOn – here we were, connecting people directly with each other and with political leaders to create change.

But that more democratic society has yet to emerge, and I think it’s partly because while the Internet is very good at helping groups of people with like interests band together (like MoveOn), it’s not so hot at introducing people to different people and ideas. Democracy requires discourse and personalization is making that more and more elusive.

And that worries me, because we really need the Internet to live up to that connective promise. We need it to help us solve global problems like climate change, terrorism, or natural resource management which by their nature require massive coordination, and great wisdom and ingenuity. These problems can’t be solved by a person or two – they require whole societies to participate. And that just won’t happen if we’re all isolated in a web of one.

I have some thoughts on all of this and related matters, but I’ll save those for a different post. They connect with what Pariser has said, but branch out in a number of different directions and I don’t want to confuse or dilute his points.

Transcript below (the one at the TED site is interactive, though. ETA – cool, so is this one. Click a link and it will take you to that part of the video at TED Talks.)

Mark Zuckerberg, a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed. And the journalist was asking him, “Why is this so important?” And Zuckerberg said, “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” And I want to talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like.

So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, the Internet meant something very different to me. It meant a connection to the world. It meant something that would connect us all together. And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society. But there’s this shift in how information is flowing online, and it’s invisible. And if we don’t pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time – my Facebook page. I’m progressive, politically — big surprise – but I’ve always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they’re thinking about; I like seeing what they link to; I like learning a thing or two. And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends’ links than on my conservative friends’ links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.

So Facebook isn’t the only place that’s doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web. Google’s doing it too. If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time, we may get very different search results. Even if you’re logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at – everything from what kind of computer you’re on to what kind of browser you’re using to where you’re located – that it uses to personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore. And you know, the funny thing about this is that it’s hard to see. You can’t see how different your search results are from anyone else’s.

But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google “Egypt” and to send me screen shots of what they got. So here’s my friend Scott’s screen shot. And here’s my friend Daniel’s screen shot. When you put them side-by-side, you don’t even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when you do read the links, it’s really quite remarkable. Daniel didn’t get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. Scott’s results were full of them. And this was the big story of the day at that time. That’s how different these results are becoming.

So it’s not just Google and Facebook either. This is something that’s sweeping the Web. There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized — different people get different things. Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times – all flirting with personalization in various ways. And this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt said, “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

So I do think this is a problem. And I think, if you take all of these filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is your own personal unique universe of information that you live in online. And what’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don’t decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out. So one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix. And they were looking at the Netflix queues, and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed, which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses. They enter the queue, they just zip right out. So “Iron Man” zips right out, and “Waiting for Superman” can wait for a really long time.

What they discovered was that in our Netflix queues there’s this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves. You know we all want to be someone who has watched “Rashomon,” but right now we want to watch “Ace Ventura” for the fourth time. (Laughter) So the best editing gives us a bit of both. It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan. It gives us some information vegetables, it gives us some information dessert. And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that, because they’re mainly looking at what you click on first, it can throw off that balance. And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food.

What this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong. In a broadcast society – this is how the founding mythology goes – in a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. And along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that’s not actually what’s happening right now. What we’re seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. And the thing is that the algorithms don’t yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they’re going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they’re not just keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important – this is what TED does – other points of view.

And the thing is we’ve actually been here before as a society. In 1915, it’s not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities. Then people noticed that they were doing something really important. That, in fact, you couldn’t have a functioning democracy if citizens didn’t get a good flow of information. That the newspapers were critical, because they were acting as the filter, and then journalistic ethics developed. It wasn’t perfect, but it got us through the last century. And so now, we’re kind of back in 1915 on the Web. And we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they’re writing.

I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google – Larry and Sergey – people who have helped build the Web as it is, and I’m grateful for that. But we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. We need you to make sure that they’re transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters. And we need you to give us some control, so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn’t. Because I think we really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it’s not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.

Thank you.

(Applause)

a boatload of free nonfiction ebooks on amazon today

Nanette — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:59:00 +0000

Lots and lots of stuff in various categories. It looks like Kaplan put almost their entire list of test prep books on there – SAT, LSAT, MCAT, GRE, science, history and more. Plus, lots of business books, health books and just bunches of stuff.

If nonfiction is your cup of tea, I would head on over there now. It’s not often that this many nonfiction titles come up at one time and I doubt they’ll be there for long. I use this site to get a look at all the free stuff on one place, but you might have one that you are more familiar with, or you can just go to the Amazon site itself, of course.

Remember, you don’t have to own a Kindle to read these ebooks. Amazon has a free reader apps, Kindle for PC or MAC, and various free apps for smart phones as well.

playing around with a cool wordpress plugin: Anthologize

Nanette — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:03:31 +0000

Anthologize lets you make a book or publication from selected posts on your WordPress blog. Their tagline is “Your Blog. Bound.” And that’s pretty much what it is. It’s too early for me to think of spiffy ways of explaining what it does, but here is part of their press release. How the product came about is pretty interesting too:

After one week of intense collaboration, participants in the One Week | One Tool workshop , organized by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, are pleased to announce the launch of Anthologize, a free, open source tool to publish weblog content in a variety of book formats.
Anthologize enables anyone working with WordPress to grab blog posts, feeds, or newly-authored works; craft and edit the content; and then publish that content as a compelling volume available in several formats, including PDF, ePub, and TEI, an open XML format for storage and exchange.

Right now it is in Alpha and only works with WordPress installations, not the WordPress.com blogs, but they are changing that in future versions.

Anyway, I spent an hour or so playing around with it this morning, for no particular reason but that it looked interesting. And it is! It’s very easy to use, after the initial “what’s this for?” stage. First you create and name a new project (which will also be the book name,) and then you create “parts”, which are like chapters. Once you have a “part”, all your posts are listed on the left hand side of the screen and you can just drag and drop them into the part. It’s also easy to switch around posts between parts, should you decide you want this to go here, and not there. One caveat on the posts – it lists ALL of them, including drafts, so just be aware and careful of that. Mind you, you can filter the posts listed by tags or categories and stuff, but still. You can also bring in posts from other blogs through rss and add them in for your book or whatever. The imported posts go to the same list, right along with all the others.

So, how does it do? I put together a project of posts, both from here and imported, this morning. It took me about 15 minutes (and that included flubbing time, because I didn’t know what I was doing) to make a book of about 8 or 10 posts. I exported my project to both PDF and HTML with just a click of a button (well, two clicks – one for each export) and viola! there was my book! I would show you how they turned out except I haven’t a clue where to find them now. I assume they are on my hard drive somewhere but, if I was them, I would extend the point-and-click just a tiny bit further and have a little notation that “you can find your book here.”) That’s only a tiny complaint, though, and easily solved.

So. I would not, yet, use this for any sort of professional publication (as I said, it’s still in Alpha, but it’s open-source and I fully expect that third-party folks will soon be making stuff to add to the functionality of the plugin.) I can think of a few things, though, that Anthologize would be excellent for right now.

Genealogy sites/projects: I have a sort of family history site, but it’s also all mixed in with my posts about Black history, nattering about my book, little things of this or that that no one really is interested in. With Anthologize, I could just cull the relevant posts and send them out to family in PDF, for easy printing and sharing through email. Each part, or chapter, could be about a different branch of the family, or related history or whatever.

Or a more organized person could gather all the information, facts and dates and stories, about a particular branch of the family and send it to, say, a young relative who is just beginning to get interested in where they came from.

Show me your work!: I can see Anthologize being useful for building a portfolio of sorts, of your best work. Instead of sending someone to a dozen different links, one can just either send them the PDF file, or direct them to the HTML page that you’ve exported.

About that HTML page, by the way – it’s very basic, no formatting or CSS. I think, eventually, third party applications will take care of that, but for now I imagine that one might have to take the extra step of either linking it to an existing CSS stylesheet (not too difficult, especially if you have some sort of WYSIWYG program. Or styling it yourself. It’s still readable as is, but ugly. The PDF output is also fairly plain, but much better formatted. Remember, though, I haven’t yet spent a lot of time with the product, so there may be something I missed – but I didn’t see a way to format any of the stuff.

I’m sure there are plenty of other things one can do with this book creator but that’s all I can think of at the moment. I really like the idea, though, and the ease of use. And how it all came about. I’ll have to see what sort of other things they’ve been, or will be, working on.

You can download Anthologize here, or install from your plugins within WordPress.

free in kindle books today: recipe books from around the world

Nanette — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:10:36 +0000

I don’t *cook* cook, but I do love collecting recipes for maybe one day, just in case, as if. Remember you don’t need to own a Kindle to read these. You can download the free Kindle PC or smartphone software (bottom menu on the ebook page, left-hand side.)

Anyway, I thought these offerings were pretty cool (with the caveat that I have not read them so don’t know if there are issues within the text,) and different from the usual Kindle fare:


		Fine Filipino Food by Karen Hulene Bartell


		Cooking from China’s Fujian Province: One of China’s Eight Great Cuisines by Jacqueline M. Newman


		Nile Style: Egyptian Cuisine and Culture: Ancient Festivals, Significant Ceremonies, and Modern Celebrations (Hippocrene Cookbook Library) by Amy Riolo


		Old Havana Cookbook: Cuban Recipes in Spanish and English (Bilingual Cookbooks)

angels, demons and kindle free

Nanette — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 07:21:58 +0000

I have no idea how Amazon goes about choosing which ebooks to make free at any particular time, but from the looks of it they have those little critters on each shoulder whispering in their ear.

One day they’ll release a whole bunch of books about werewolves and vampire, blood, gore, death, murder and so on.

The next it’ll all be mostly (Christian) religious themed books – some attempting to masquerade as mainstream fiction, but not hiding too well. I learned a fun new term looking at the editorial reviews for one selection – “bonnet fiction”, which apparently refers to books about characters who… well, wear bonnets. Mostly they seem to be about the Amish or Quakers and whatever other of those sects that wear the head coverings. I’ve never read any, that I recall.

Anyway, it’s all free (and much of it is really bad writing, no matter what it’s about), so no complaining when it’s all about angels- I just wait for demon week and grab some murder and mayhem, and perhaps a few vampires.

(eReaderIQ.com is a good place to go if you are looking for free Kindle ebooks. The site lists the free ebooks as they come out, though the older ones listed are likely no longer free.)

random updates

Nanette — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 19:10:11 +0000

I’ve started on some stories of when I was young – the problem being, as usual, that too many come at one time. I’ve sort of figured out how to handle that with yWriter, but I don’t want to get all hung up on tools again and wind up not doing what I need to do.

I’m just happy that I have the impetus to do anything at all, really. I was sick (flu or something!) for a couple of weeks, my grades crashed in the two classes I am taking (not doing the work will do that) and, for a while, I just didn’t care. About that or anything else. I think there is sometimes incidences of depression or malaise after being sick, but then again maybe it was just… dunno. I didn’t want to do it.

Anyway, though, now I have a gabillion stories swirling around in my head again, which is a good thing for writing, maybe not so good a thing for school because I still am having trouble caring about that. I think, probably, because there is no time and no way to recover the grade, so… bleh.

I get my degree in October 2011 or so, and by then I’ll have decided if I want to continue on to a bachelor’s. I will need a break, regardless, just to rest my poor old brain, but I am (at this time, and at what I recognize is a mental and emotional low point) leaning against it. I already know a lot of stuff – I have read incessantly since I was 4, and have a good range of cultural experience (none out of the country, unfortunately, but nothing but money and time will fix that) and a degree has never really meant a lot to me. At 55 or so, which is how old I would be when I got my bachelor’s, should I continue on, I suspect it would mean even less.

Not that I think any of this has been a waste, mind you. One thing I have gained through this effort is a bit more confidence in my abilities and a realization that, while I am far from the best and far from the most skilled… I already can write better than some people and I will only improve with practice. What I need to do is join some sort of creative writing group, so that I can flubble along with others who are finding their way, and get and give encouragement. That means that I have to gather up my courage and actually put stuff out there (besides blog posts, which are different seeing as how I usually just dash them off and push publish.) To write something and edit it and put it out there with intent and ask others for their critiques, though… terrifying.