On the other hand, I’ve never been much of a protester.

I went to a Peace Protest while I was in Wellington last year, the first I can remember going to since university days. The turnout wasn’t huge. New Zealand is the most peaceful nation on Earth (according to a recent global audit), and in that context one might think a peace protest makes no sense here anyway, but it was the start of a year long “global peace march”, and in that context, starting in NZ makes perfect sense. They’d also chosen to start on Ghandi’s birthday – which means it was my birthday as well, albeit many years later. The other reason I was going along was because I’d heard Richard Stallman was going to be there, and I wanted to ask if he remembered me from a certain 48 hour party we were at in Christchurch about a decade earlier (random factoid: the dude can dance). Anyway, as I said, there wasn’t a huge turnout at this protest. Maybe a couple hundred people. It was a workday, and they hadn’t done much advertising (it even took me some time to google the details of the march once I’d figured out it was happening)

Yesterday I went to a much larger protest – over 3 thousand, according to National Radio (vs “hundreds” as reported  elsewhere, a good example of how the media coverage of a protest impacts its impact!), in our local Cathedral Square, to protest the recent disbanding of Ecan (our regional government) by the national (National) government. I turned up late (this isn’t exactly unusual) but somehow ended up being the representative “protester” quoted in the press (The Press) this morning.

“Protester Seth Wagoner, of Christchurch, said he was shocked at how quickly democracy was taken away and he was showing solidarity with the environment.” (link)

Which I figured would sound better than “Well, my friend was going, it was only a couple blocks away, and I wanted to see how many people turned up“, when the reporter asked me “Why are you here?”

But thinking about it in retrospect, I’m glad I was there, and I shouldn’t have been so ambivalent it. People should protest more often, even those of us who arguably have “more important things to do”.

I could ramble on about this for quite a while, but the truth is I do have quite a lot of important things to do, so I might come back to this later. After all, I’m not trying to get into All Souls College here. But if I was, here are a few threads I might try to weave into my narrative:

1) The reasons people choose names like “National” for their political party, or “The Press” for their newspaper, and whether we should let them do that.

2) The nature of ECan, a “regional council” that many people barely knew, and how the rights of hundreds of thousands can be appropriated by a few people who actually care, and understand what they need to do.

3) How the power change at Ecan – swapping out an elected “council” for an appointed “commission” may or may not effect the civil servants who actually do the real work – with a somewhat dubious analogy to the recent power changeover in Britain, particularly with respect to:

3.1) transitions of power in a democracy, and how the week long decision making process from the LibDems caused the media to condemn them for leaving Britain without leadership, even suggesting that the Queen should step in and do something about it, how the reporters from Europe laughed at this notion given the occasional 6 month coalition forming process they have to put up with, potentially diverging into a discussion of

3.1.1) the role of the Monarch in (a) Britain and/or (b) New Zealand, past, present, and or future.

3.1.2) advantages and disadvantages of different types of “representation”, with respect to:

(a)  in the case of ECan, replacing a “democratic” council elected mostly by local landowners, with a technocratic “commission” appointed by a government that was chosen nationally by everyone – both in general and in this specific case.

(b) in the case of Britain, the upcoming referendum on the AV “Additional Vote” , how the various stakeholders appear to feel about it, how the question of (more) proportional representation affected the coalition forming process, and why the referendum will (probably) be a historic moment in the world’s oldest surviving democracy.

(c)  in the case New Zealand, our upcoming referendum on the retention of the MMP electoral system

4) How Local Government ‘parties’ have formed in some cities that have only a loose affiliation with parties at the national level. In the legislatures of the USA, it is republican vs democrat all the way down, so far as I know. In NZ it is much more diverse. How affiliations between National, Regional, and Local government parties, and the movement of personal between the ranks may or may not affect how the votes go and the policies we end up with as a result.

5) “Headlines”, with respect to:

5.1) how this post started out with the title “Protest”, switched to “Democracy. Use it or lose it”, and then “Democracy. It’s complicated.”

5.2) the rarely mentioned role of newspaper sub-editors (who write the headlines, among other things) in the democratic process.

6) The media and their role in reporting on protests, other ways they affect public opinion, and their resulting power over both elections and sitting governments.

6.1) How the ownership of newspapers and other mass media affects the editorial positions taken, delving into the relationships between the owner(s), the owner(s) other media and non-media companies, the editor(s), sub-editors and reporters, giving examples such as:

6.1.1) Fox News, and their supposed disconnect between “News” content, which is supposedly fair and balanced, and “Talkshow” content, which clearly isn’t.

6.1.1.1) The phrase “Fair and Balanced”, how Fox tried to trademark it, what that would have meant, and how the EFF  stopped them.

6.1.1.1.1) A potentially lengthy diversion into the relationship between intellectual property law and representative democracy, by which time the essay markers would I’m sure have already decided to give me an “A” or an “F” depending on how they felt about indented intellectual diversions, but given that they’re expecting one to write an essay length response to a one word question, intellectual diversions are clearly something they are looking for.

6.1.1.1.1.1) Yet *another* potential diversion onto the subject of how one can clearly have “too much of a good thing”, for instance:

(a) “Freedom” in Market Economies, as demonstrated by the recent global financial maelstrom (with at least a footnote relating to the nature of the words “Free” and “Freedom” and how they are leveraged into new roles, eg by the “Free Software” movement started by Richard Stallman (mentioned in Paragraph 2 above) and also in respect to our new “Free (as in Speech) Beer” brand, which of course started out just as an opportunity to take the piss (hur, hur) but evolved into something approaching an actual business model, with it’s own domain name(s) and the beginnings of a new “open” licence  (but then I got distracted, which as you can see in my case, isn’t very hard) or;

(b) intellectual diversions, potentially enlightening but ultimately leading one further and further away from the original topic under discussion.

6.1.2) The venerable Wall Street Journal, recently purchased by the same media conglomerate that owns Fox News, has, as with most papers, different standards for the “News” parts of the paper, which tend to stick, roughly speaking, to reporting the known facts, versus the editorial pages, on which, particularly in the case of the Journal, the most absurd nonsense has often been printed, quite regardless of and often in direct opposition with the known facts.

6.1.2.1) This separation of policy as regards fact checking, at the world’s largest newspaper, is well known to sophisticated consumers of news content. However, to unsophisticated or inexperienced news readers, comprising perhaps 95%+ of registered voters, the imprimatur of the Journal, with it’s long history and imposing credentials, gives an undeserved advantage to said editorial content, no doubt fooling many readers into accepting as fact what is merely opinion…

6.1.2.1) Furthermore, when one considers the (relatively recent) co-ownership of Fox News and the WSJ…

6.2) A more general diversion into how consolidation of media companies, their ownership by other companies, or ownership by people who own other companies, may have an effect on their editorial policies, their news sourcing, etc, and by extension, have an effect on the “constituency” they share with the politicians.

6.3) Perhaps something about the fact that most printed news is sourced from only 3 big networks – the AP…(nuts, I’ve temporarily forgotten the other two…one is french…)  and suggest that editors should take a look at Allaboutthestory.com [disclaimer: owned by some Kiwifoo friends] and www.project-syndicate.org to freshen things up a bit.

6.4) And perhaps even attempt to drag in Chomsky & Herman, “Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media” which is really compulsory reading for anyone who’s serious about this sort of thing. I read it over a decade ago and was highly impressed. One key takeaway for me was that you really didn’t need some grand conspiracy to control the media and/or popular opinion, the economics of the situation pretty much ensured the ‘elites’ would stay in charge (these days I’m a bit more sanguine about that, and not in any hurry to try Chomsky’s desired experiments in Anarcho-syndicalism thank you very much). I haven’t seen the more recent documentary, which I expect was a bit less detailed. How relevant is it to the modern day media situation or countries other than the US? Not sure, but it’s worth reading anyway.

7) A personal connection. My friend’s dad lost his job when ECan was disbanded. He’s an interesting chap, as is my friend.

7.1) For instance, my friend put a footnote in his doctoral dissertation (on the geopolitics of the Patagonian toothfish, for what it’s worth), promising a bottle of scotch (I can’t recall if it was a malt or a blend) to any of his three examiners who actually read that footnote, for his feeling was that in general examiners rarely bother to read the footnotes, meaning they were likely to miss potentially vital details, such as the reason my friend had brought three bottles of scotch to his oral defence – none of which were claimed. Given the growing length of this outline of potential threads in a hypothetical answer to a demonstrative example of the question no longer being asked in a fellowship exam at a college I never plan to attend, I will attempt a similar wager. A pint of most excellent ale awaits the first three people who read this sentence and let me know they have done so.

8) Realising the end of the exam time period was drawing near, I would then valiantly attempt to draw several of the preceding (sub-)points into something approaching a conclusion.  Perhaps something along the lines of “In conclusion, protests perform a vital role in a representative democracy, a mechanism for the populace to display their displeasure with the actions of their leaders. Active suppression of street protests by police, or at worst, the military, is a sure sign of unhealthy democracy. However, the impact of a protest, its ability to spark ongoing debate, further protest action or to actually bring about the changes sought by the protesters relies crucially on the role of the media…

8.x) Democracy. It’s complicated.

————–

[1 week passes...]

Hmmm. Well in light of the fact that I haven’t managed to get back and actually finish this off, I think I’ll post it unfinished for your amusement. At least, I hope some of you will be amused. If there’s anything in there you’d like me to follow up on, let me know in the comments. I may come back and re-work this later, and add more links. I had at least a dozen more random threads to weave into the outline; here are the ones I’d actually started to write down:

The ongoing transition of power from Newspaper owners to aggregators, search engines, and now social media, why this matters

How I hadn’t seen so many people in the square since the funeral of Rod Donald, co-leader of the NZ Green party, a great man taken well before his time.  Of course, had he still been alive, Rod would have been a speaker at this event, and he ties into the themes of this blog post all the more greatly for his involvement with electoral reform and the nationwide MMP campaign, and also the transition to STV for our local government!

How a brilliant part of this particular protest was the cairn of rocks. What a great symbol. Top marks to whoever came up with that one.

The friend I came along with, who felt more strongly about the protest than I did, felt that she had let herself down by not wanting to go on the record (which is why I ended up on the record) out of (I think) concern for her current work in the public sector. Frankly I think she was doing more than her share  just by showing up, but there’s certainly a potential diversion there on the potentially chilling effects of a large public sector, and one might also be tempted to talk about the power of the public sector unions that are apparently now in negotiations around the entitlements that states in the USA can no longer afford…

Somewhere in the middle of writing this post I got a call from The Press’s tech reporter, clarifying a few details for an article mentioning my company’s products due to be published next week. So I was tempted to try and fit something in around chilling effects wrt work within the private sector as well – ie if a company director or CEO posts something that might be interpreted as critical a media organization (fortunately, in this case, The Press is a non-Murdoch owned newspaper!) , or any institution with the potential to affect the health of the company, are they in jeopardy of breaching legal or moral obligations to company stakeholders?

Social aspects of protest, why they’re important for reasons other than just the policy changes they seek to bring about…

Some other interesting protest examples:

* During the Bush years, whenever Bush spoke anywhere they set up “First Amendment Zones” - corrals where the police kept the protesters separated from the govt supporters and the media.

* Contrasted with: the people who showed up with guns to anti-Obama protests and were allowed to keep them because that’s the sort of state they were in.

* The protest Flotilla delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza suffered the tragic loss of 9 lives, but it caused a media storm world wide that might actually lead to the human rights being partially returned to 1.5m people living in poverty in the Gaza Strip

* The protests around the time of the Coalition negotiations where they were attempting to force Clegg to stay true to his word, how this may or may not have helped the LibDems get such a great deal in the negotiations, whether Sky News reporters berating the protestors in their interviews was appropriate….

* The photos of the Christian “million man march” that ended up being re-purposed by right wing blogs and media as supposed pictures of tea party protesters.

A rationale for protest:  Use it or lose it.

Representative Democracy has a lot of problems – the main one being that the public really only gets to hold their politicians accountable every 3 to 5 years.  In between elections, one of the few ways you can exercise your democratic rights is getting out on the street in a mass protest. Plenty of people will tell you that this is largely a waste of time – the media will downplay the incident and the government will ignore it. Millions of people out on the streets didn’t stop the Iraq War.

How important is being on the streets vs more modern forms of protest, eg, tweeting and blogging? You can of course, do both at the same time…just so long as they’re not jamming outgoing signals from the area as they tried to do with the #flotilla.

How the flotilla protest was an interesting case as it was international in nature and the resolution came in international waters, and without trying to get into the details of that particular case (which could be time consuming and potentially hazardous!), attempt to put in some points about how democracy is constrained or enhanced by international treaties, the role of the UN, and yada yada, and perhaps also mentioning Sir Geoffery Palmer, the rumour that he might be asked to head an international inquiry into the flotilla affair, and why he would be well qualified.

Here’s the (much) longer version of my three tweets from yesterday.

I have been watching the UK election with some fascination since the results indicated a “hung” parliament. My knowledge of British Politics is scant – it simply hasn’t been all that interesting up till now for those of us with no British heritage (unlike the majority of my countrymen, my closest non-Kiwi relatives are Americans). But things have become very interesting indeed now that there is chance for massive political reform in the oldest democracy in the world.

I speak, of course, of the potential for the Britain to switch to Proportional Representation, which is, to quote Joe Biden, a big f’king deal.

The difference between “First Past the Post” and true Proportional Representation is like Dawn and Day. The Tories are right to fear PR – it’s a massive step towards ending generations of electoral injustice that have traditionally worked in their favour, and will do so even more if they get a chance to re-gerrymander the electoral map (Note, the British gerrymandering in recent elections has been far less egregious than it used to be long ago, it’s not a super-partisan process as they have in  the USA). To do so is actually one of their election promises, although their phrasing of that particular promise is something along the lines of “cut the cost of Westminster on the ordinary citizen by reducing the number of MPs”.

Even if it is done 100% fairly, redrawing the electoral boundaries won’t end the structural unfairness for long, and neither will it end members of the Duopoly suppressing 3rd party chances in the more obvious way: by warning the voters that a vote for a 3rd party is effectively a vote in favor of the other half of the Duopoly – thus compelling voters to vote tactically for the lesser evil, rather than strategically for the party they actually want to support.

The LibDem leadership surely knows this. They are not stupid. In fact, although I’d never even heard of him before, five minutes of listening to Lord Menzies on the BBC website this morning was enough to convince me that he is probably one of the smartest guys in the house.

Meanwhile, their deputy leader, Vince Cable, appears to be an economics wizard – he probably has folks like Stiglitz, Roubini, Summers, Geithner and Volcker on his speed-dial already, just waiting for his chance to get stuck in and help save our global macro-economic petard from the misdeeds of the last decade (or arguably, the last century).

And of course, Clegg himself appears to be pretty sharp. I am going to go out on a limb here, and extrapolate that the rest of the LibDem front bench are also highly competent.

So, as I said, these guys are not dumb. They know that a Lab-Lib coalition is going to be best for their party and best for Britain, and hence their A-team is likely in the midst of negotiating as good a coalition deal they can get from Labour and the rest of a required “rainbow” / “traffic light” alliance/coalition, while their B-team also negotiates in good faith, for a Lib-Con deal they believe Cameron can never follow through on – because his party would rather hang *him* than accept it.

Cameron himself would probably give the LibDems almost anything they want in exchange for the keys to Number 10, and presumably his front-bench would too. Their problem is that if they give the LibDems too much they risk of being given the boot by their own caucus in very short order – perhaps before they even get to the Queens Speech bit (this is one of those areas where a days worth of surfing the UK intarwebs, interspersed with updating my about page, and believe it or not, some actual work, is quite inadequate, I have no idea how fast the Tories could stage a backbench revolt).

Anyway, and this is a guess, the Achilles heel that will keep Cameron from number 10 is this: the common or garden unreconstructed Tory backbencher has ideological blinders so big he can barely see his chauffeur if he sits on the wrong side of the Jag.

Furthermore, his core constituency is likely similarly impaired (minus the Jag…) – or they wouldn’t have elected him.

I could be wrong on both counts. Maybe Cameron can overcome his own party and come up with an acceptable deal. But I wouldn’t bet on it, because any deal is going to have to get past not just Clegg but *his* backbenchers, due to the triple lock clause.

This is the sort of situation you end up with in an FPP electoral system where the electoral lines are redrawn only rarely – or worse are redrawn by the legislatures, as in the US Congress (and State congress) redistricting, in which incumbents always seek to feather their nest with a few more acres that match their demographic niche, while trading away the acres that have switched sides to neighboring incumbents of the opposing party, who are usually only too happy to receive them.

In a properly designed PR system, this sort of thing just doesn’t happen – the parties can gerrymander all they want and it won’t change who gets into power the next time around, so they don’t even bother trying, and the electoral needles gravitate back towards the center, eventually resulting in honest, centrist MPs who really care for their electorate – partly because their electorate really has a shot at turfing them out the next time around.

Perpetuating FPP, along with slow or biased redistricting, and backroom deals done with the usual suspects, is how a two-party duopoly maintains its power – for decades or even centuries. Chances to overthrow such a Duopoly and introduce Proportional Representation (AKA: Actual Democracy) come along less than once in a generation – and this is Britain’s big opportunity.

The LibDems have waited 90 years for this moment, and I refuse to believe that Clegg’s team are going to risk waiting another decade or three before it comes along again – regardless of what Cameron offers them in “other” inducements. They also know that to accept a Tory offer will require overcoming the “triple lock” voting formula that gives their backbench, and members, even more power than the Tory equivalents.

They will negotiate in good faith regardless, it puts more pressure on the A-team and their counterparts to come to a deal quickly, and regardless, it’s keeping an election promise from Clegg, and it’s important to start building up trust with the electorate. But eventually they will almost certainly follow the logical path from here into….

…a Rainbow “alliance” comprising: (1) a Lab-Lib coalition, (2) “anyone but Brown” in Number 10, and (3) as many minor parties as possible providing confidence and supply (for which they will rightly demand concessions, but coalition partners in theory get to pick and choose between a few competing offers, and given the urgency of the moment, sane voters from minor parties are likely to understand that a bird in the hand as big as Proportional Representation is worth a dozen in the bush, and thus they should not risk overplaying their hands.

Ideally, the coalition should bring as many of them as possible into the “big tent” in order to ensure continuity in the event of by-elections and greater legitimacy in the eyes of the voters (and as they say, better that they’re in the tent, pissing out of it…)

That’s how it gets done in New Zealand, and so far, it’s actually worked out pretty well – even with the oddest of parliamentary bedfellows. Of course, there are extremists on all sides who will swear blind that it’s been a complete betrayal – which is how you know that they’ve done the right thing.

She’s everybody’s sister… she’s symbolic of our failure… she’s the one in fifteen million who can help us to be free.

“Watching TV”, from Roger Water’s amazing album “Amused to Death“, contains surely one of the more poignant statements of the value of mass media in evolving peaceful democracy that you’re ever going to hear. Given the events of the day, I suggest giving it a listen. (And if you haven’t already, you might want to buy the album, and listen to it on a good sound system, it really is awesome. )

Roger’s Yellow Rose was a student of philosophy. So was Neda Agha-Soltan. So was I.

And I grieve for my sisters.

Personally, I’d rather be waterboarded, despite having also recently read the harrowing tales of Mancow Muller and Christopher Hitchens, two pro-Iraq-war commentators who stepped up to the plate and found out for themselves exactly what Waterboarding is like, afterwards reluctantly declared they were in no doubt that it is torture, and although they certainly didn’t say it, effectively concluded that certain members of the Bush administration are liars and war criminals.

There are unlikely to be any conservative pundits imprisoned for life without the possibility for parole anytime soon, but I’m sure if there were, and they still had the ability to get published, they would be arguing just as vehemently that this much slower form of torture must also be abhorred and abolished by any decent and humane society.

The only good thing about LWPFP, vs actual executions, is that it leaves a small chance that these individuals may eventually be released and rehabilitated by a more enlightened America after a change in the law, which surely seems a little more likely now Obama is the one nominating replacements for the Supreme Court.

See the hint next to the magnify cursor you get when you mouseover a thumbnail in a the new clueviews? When you mouseover the comics in XKCD you can usually see a little in-joke in the title hint. Sometimes, the titles are pretty long, and Firefox the tooltips don’t wrap. This has been a subject of some complaint, but thankfully, with the landing of the infamous reflow branch (count the dependencies!), this will be resolved in Firefox 3.

Yep, in the 1.5 Clueviews, images of sufficient size are thumbnailed, you can click to see the image full size, and then click again to go back from there. It’s pretty cool, and we think it’s a good compromise to showing no images, or a full size window with all the images, like Cooliris does (frankly, if I wanted to see the whole page, I’d just open a new tab).

I love this cartoon, and I wish he’d put it on a T-shirt, because Turing featured in one of my favorite assignments [1] while I was at UC, where I majored in Philosophy and Computer Science.

I was never a great academic, far too scatterbrained most of the time, and being up till 3am most nights running my BBS, playing Civilization, or online backgammon (FIBS 1700+, back when that was actually pretty good), sure didn’t help, but I do have my name in the credits of one academic paper, “On Alan Turing’s Anticipation of Connectionism”, because our logic lecturer, who later went on to become co-director of the Turing Archive, discovered a mostly ignored paper by Turing from 1948, in which he definitely did anticipate “Neural Nets“, which is pretty amazing given that at the time there was only one non-specialized computing machine on the entire planet, ENIAC. [2]

Unfortunately, Jack couldn’t figure out how to make Turing’s “B Type” networks actually compute something, so in a brilliant combination of laziness, sadism and cunning, he gave his 3rd year students the option of skipping one our 20% take home assignments for the year, and instead figuring out how to make Turing’s type B networks work.

It was fun trying. In the end, I was one of about 3 students who instead succeeded in making a logical proof that these networks couldn’t work, (as specified by Turing, anyway). As I recall, I had to prove it 3 times, the last by structural induction, because Jack couldn’t accept that Turing might have got it wrong. He gave in eventually and I got full marks.

I put this achievement at the top of my list of 10 things I’ve done you probably haven’t, back in Feb 2005. Number 10 on that list was in fact Interclue, which was in the prototype stages even back then. It took a bit longer than expected to actually get it out, to same the least. I blame Hofstadter’s Law. But I’m really happy with the new beta so far, although it’s going to need some testing and tweaking, and we’d love your feedback. So if you’ve got firefox, go for it!

[1] And one of my favourite books, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

[2] Although others were under construction, and Turing had a hand in two of them – see Jack’s “A Brief History of Computing” for details).

It’s pretty impressive how you can drag the nodes around and actually do one or two things you can’t do with Freemind, but there are definitely a few kinks to be worked out, eg I had problems when one node was on top of another, and kept selecting the one underneath. Printing also wasn’t too flash.

It’s way too big to use as an embed really, but I can’t resist playing around, so here it is. You can zoom from the bottom left and click through to the larger version from the bottom right.

[update: removed it - slowing down the page a bit much, I should probably get in touch with them with performance tips for embedded javascript widgets... Here's a link to it tho - and if you haven't seen Mindmeister in action, seriously check it out. Most impressive Ajax I've seen in ages]

Actually I’ve thought of another thing I could say when people ask what Web 3.0 means….Wittgenstein says “Meaning is Use” (roughly speaking) and therefore Web 3.0’s meaning is bound to whatever use people put that phrase to. In general, I think they use it to mean “Some funky web stuff that supposedly wasn’t part of Web 2.0″

Unfortunately the meaning of Web 2.0 is vastly more complicated, because people use the phrase for all sorts of purposes.

Whereas if you have a comments policy that doesn’t apply to you or your blog posts, that somewhat lowers it.

And the ability to censor people who have got out of line is the point. If you have no code of conduct or comments policy, then what are you going to do when someone posts something appalling? You either engage in ad-hoc censorship or you make up a policy in the heat of the moment (looks bad!) or if you’ve totally rejected the idea of censoring comments and it’s gotten out of hand then you might have to shut the whole blog down (as happened with Meankids and unclebobisms, which started this whole mess).

In general I see no reason that there shouldn’t be some shared principles out there that I can point to rather than having to point to my own. If there’s a badge (but the sheriff’s badge is awful, Tim, sorry) that makes it easy for commenters to spot the principles of my blogging and comments section, then all the better – just like the Creative Commons for copyright. I’m not expecting anyone come in and *enforce* anything on me, but then I wouldn’t choose to subscribe to a set of principles that I disagreed with, so if I transgress then I’ll withdraw and apologise. There are people out there who refuse to apologise for anything they’ve said, but I’m not one of them – I think if you can’t admit when you’re wrong, then people aren’t going to trust you when you claim that you’re right. More importantly, how are you going to trust yourself?

The “code of conduct” that Tim O’Reilly is calling for does not cover disclosure, but the real question is whether linking to any shared codes of conduct is a good idea. To say the least, it’s somewhat controversial. I think that as posted, it’s impractical and doesn’t show the depth of thought I would expect from Tim, who’s one of the biggest blogospheric thinkers out there. Sadly he’s being more or less shredded in the comments of the assembled masses, who hate even a whiff of censorship far more than they respect Tim or Kathy, it would seem. Seth Finklestein is an anti-censorship crusader (who I generally have admired in the past when I’ve run across his writing), so it’s no wonder he’s one of the loudest critics, and he makes a valid point about enforcability. I think his comments insinuating this is designed to reinforce the tyranny of the supposed “A List” are dead wrong, however. [1]

In my case, I thought “good start, needs more work” and got stuck in over at the Wiki they set up. I think having a voluntary code of conduct that people can sign up to if they want is not a bad idea if it’s structured properly, which to me means it’s got variants and versions, and ideally you can fit it all in a microformat as well as link an online version that not only shows the code but links to the discussion regarding each point so that people can see why those points were arrived at. So if people want to allow anonymous posting, or what to play with their trolls, but still want some sort of set of declared principles to point to when they delete a comment for stepping over the line, then they can do that.

The alternative to a shared Code of Conduct is posting your own individual one, and I think it’d be very hard to go past borrowing and tweaking this one by Allen Jenkins, as Tyme did. Allen has is own wise words about all this.

If there was going to be a shared code of conduct, then you’d want it to be agreed as part of a shared process, not handed down by fiat. What an enormous number of Tim’s commenter seem to have missed is that this is exactly what Tim wanted to happen, and why there was a wiki and a mailing list set up to discuss it. But naturally enough everyone ignored those and fired away on their blogs or in comment sections.

[1] The problem of “enforcement” happens when someone who’s blog is wearing the badge ignores the code. Obviously it can’t be enforced on anyone who hasn’t signed up for it.

SethF appears to be arguing that an “A lister” involved in such a dispute would win any such arguments with the help of the “Pilot Fish” wanting to impress them and scared of being, ah, I don’t know, excluded? Called out? I’m not sure. I’m not buying it. Arguably being attacked by an A-lister is a great way to get noticed – and if they’re wrong to attack you then it’s going to be obvious to some of the other big guns, who will call out that A-lister, and bingo, you’re subscription count jumps up.

The moment another “A lister” comes in on the other side, then any “Pilot Fish effect” will pretty much evaporate because they wouldn’t know which way to turn. And I think it’s a delusion that the “A listers” somehow all conspire in some fashion to stay on top of any given argument. I also think calling the rest of the blogosphere “pilot fish” is pretty damned derogatory – certainly anyone who wants to gain an audience won’t want to be seen to be a slavering toadie, and anyone who doesn’t want to gain an audience is really unlikely to care what these supposed A listers think of them. So I just don’t buy that line of argument at all.

Besides, the reason these people are the “A list” is partly because they usually make a certain ammout of sense. I can only read so many feeds, and anyone who stops making sense just gets deleted.

Of course, the problem with wanting to engage in this particular conversation, which covers a topic of great interest to me (and was long before Kathy’s shock announcement), is that it’s taking time away from Interclue, which I will get back to forthwith!

To get an idea of how roiled up the blogosphere got about this PayPerPost “Payola” scheme, count the trackbacks to the original Techcrunch post. Mike has blogged about it about it serveral times since, and it’s a controversy that PPP definitely encourages (even to the point of paying payola for people to post their point of view), because as they know, it’s all about the PageRank.

This is a from from a comment I recently made on TechCrunch, in which I indulged in an awful lot of alliteration:

For those of you who simply think Arrington has an Agenda related to his Advertising, I think you’re wrong.

People, PPP = Paid Pagerank Pollution. That’s really what it’s all about so far as I can see. I’m stunned nobody has used the “P” word in this thread so far. I mean, that’s the Point of all this, isn’t it?

The Pagerank algorithm doesn’t care if the reviewer said something sucked or not. All links are good links, more or less, in the same way that all publicity is good publicity, more or less. So it makes perfect sense to allow bloggers to pan the product they’re linking too – just so long as they link to it.

I’m presuming that most of the PPP customers are being advised by their SEO people (or are in fact SEO people themselves) because PPP links seem like a perfect way to drum up pagerank in a way that must be very difficult for Google to defeat. Of course over time they will figure out some algorithm for detecting PPP shills, er, agents, er, whatever they’re called, and will mark down their pagerank accordingly, but there will always be more willing to play the game. (For those of you new to this game, your site’s pagerank depends strongly on incoming links, and it is the #1 traffic driver on the net)

Now, if everyone declared on their posts that they were PPP agents in a distinctive and clear way, then Google could automatically discount those links as meaningless for the purposes of pagerank calculation, which would mean that the smart SEO people would stop recommending PPP, and eventually advertisers would pay a lot less per post.

So, I don’t think PPP will do that.

But Google has so much data they could just work it out algorithmically. Ie if PPP got *too* popular Google might just start watching for where known PPP shills link to, and detect new shills based on noting which other blogs link to the same place at the same time. All known shills could them have their pagerank docked from then on (pagerank is transferable via links, so if a source is “tainted” the easiest way to tweak the results is probably to decrease the PR of the source). However I suspect it would have to be making a genuinely large distortion in the search results before Google would care, and in reality Google no longer cares so much about search quality since they probably sell more adword clicks against bad natural results, and they’re so far ahead of the others on search quality at the moment it’s not really to their advantage to “try harder” in this regard.

So if Google doesn’t really care, what’s The Problem?

The problem is the collateral damage. I consider a business to be morally wrong if it destroys more value than it creates. And paying others to do the destruction for you is even worse. Currently PPP is slowly dragging down the average value and pagerank of all blog content – blogs are becoming just that little bit less trusted as sources of unbiased information, which is what everyone is looking for. However, balanced against that are the PPP agents who actually put a bit of thought into their post, are honest about the fact that they are being paid (and being honest means saying so within the post, or right next to it – posting a policy somewhere no one looks does not cound), and create little nuggets of value.

My strong hunch is that at the moment PPP does more harm than good. If they forced their agents to be transparent then it would swing back the other way and on average they would be creating value, but then they would probably make less money. So let’s watch and see what they do.

But giving it some more thought, I’m going to be more condemnatory. Mr Arrington gets it exactly right when he says that “their disclosure policy is like the Tobacco Industry sponsoring tobacco research“. Essentially, they’re damning themselves with this dangerous “disclosure” duplicity.

Anway, what I admire about Soros as a philanthropist is that he has a great grasp of the complexity of human societies, just how hard it is to effect any significant change, and then he goes ahead and does his best anyway, without fear of the inevitable failures. He isn’t hoping to find easy answers or make flashy gestures, but he knows that there are things that can be done that definitely help – like investing in education and health, and monitoring government activity, that will gradually move a society in the right direction.

I think quoting Soros is the ultimate answer to naive libertarianism and free-market fanatics. It’s obvious that he has a very strong understanding of the world financial markets, from which he has made billions, but he is also very clear that markets are not enough on their own, and can do some serious damage if left unchecked.

“We need to maintain law and order. We need to maintain peace in the world. We need to protect the environment. We need to have some degree of social justice, equality of opportunity. The markets are not designed to take care of those needs. That’s a political process. And the market fundamentalists have managed to reduce providing those public goods.” – George Soros

He thinks very hard about some monstrously complicated issues, and he tries to share the benefit of his wisdom – not only through supporting changemakers in their own countries through his foundations, but also through writing books. I have to admit that I’ve been so busy in the time since I discovered that he was more than an ordinary billionaire that I haven’t had time to read any of his books, but they’re definitely on my amazon wishlist.

I’ll probably write more about Soros later. I really am a bit of a fan. He’s got some great stuff to say about the “war on terror” at the moment, so if you, like me, don’t have time to read the book, then at least catch some of the interviews linked from his homepage.

[1] On the matter of people who get their facts through other people, who thinks Ken Lay was as badly misinformed by his people as GWB usually is? Personally I think that like Bush, he was well aware that the information he got was being pre-laundered and pre-spun, but that was the way he liked it.

[I'm turning off comments for this post because it seems to be the one that gets the most spam comments for some reason.]