Managing the Digital Hordes

A strength and a weakness of the Internet is the ability to have anyone comment on just about anything. Visitors to sites are a great repository of knowledge…and opinions…and weird attempts at humor…and vitriol.

Sometimes it seems like the chaff is obscuring the wheat.

Sites are adopting various strategies to try and improve the quality of the contributions from the site visitors.

POST MODERATION
Salon is probably best described as a political/life style publication. They publish articles, news items and opinion pieces, and allow readers to post “letters” in response. With politics and religion being two of the biggest flash points in any web community, it’s not surprising that they have run into their share of problems with posters.

In a post on February 27 titled Anonymous no more, Salon editor Joan Walsh wrote:

We have started moderating letters and comments even more aggressively, but we have also decided to end the option of posting letters signed only "Anonymous."
[…]A few people argued that we'd discourage whistleblowers and other tipsters from sharing information. Honestly, I'm not sure we've ever acquired information like that via letters; anyone wanting to contact us anonymously can do that through "readermail 'at' salon.com,"

Moderation of letters includes not just deleting or editing problem posts; they also categorize letters, letting the reader view All letters, or Editor’s Choice letters (though not in all cases; clearly it requires work to do this.)


In Joan’s letter, she notes that they are looking at other ways to rate/moderate posts:

We've also heard your advice about reader moderation tools that would let you rate posters and ignore those you are sick of, and we'll be rolling out some improvements to letters in the months to come, as well as new tools to encourage reader participation.

RANKING POSTS
Woot is a website that offers one day deals on various items. Visitors to the site can post comments about the item of the day (noting how good it is, or how good the price is, or asking questions about it’s use.) In addition, they do some moderation of this area, breaking out “Quality posts” in a special section at the top of the comments list.

This is possible one of the best features I've seen, and something I wish other sites (like Engadget and Gizmodo) would adopt.

The item of the day today, Myvu Personal Media Viewer Fully Loaded Edition for iPod, found 262 comments at 3:00PM EDT, and 14 of those flagged as Quality Posts. This included items such as links to reviews, and a PDF manual, and comments like:

* "I had a customer who bought one that was re-gifted over and over and over again in his office. Everyone who used it would get horrible headaches from the video."

* “But these glasses were more like holding an ipod screen and arms length away from you. Very small, surprisingly so. It's all about FOV (field of view) for these things, and resolution. Low res (320x240) wont matter as much with movies, but the size is MEIN LIEBEN!. I've yet to see a reasonably priced (300-400) SVGA resolution device available. Just think, you could use that to replace your laptop screen, and just have a small battery powered brick computer with a fold-out keyboard. Awesome."

This weeds out comments like:

* weird... Friend had one.

* Holy Moly!! It's Geordi La Forge's Visor!!

* Are you kidding me? Matrix reloaded!!

It’s unclear how Woot breaks these out, but it appears to be a manual process. There’s no rating system (readers rating comments) though there is a Report option to flag questionable posts.

Is our researchers smart?

Someone sent me a link to a synopsis of a study Does class size matter?New research in Elementary School Journal questions deeply held assumptions about the educational achievement gap



Evidently the report “explores the hard data and finds that some of our basic assumptions about class size may be incorrect” and though it “found, not surprisingly, that smaller class size is a better situation for the children at all achievement levels” it also found “that the children who are already high achievers benefited the most from the extra attention afforded by smaller classes.”

The study then goes on to note this startling problem:

[small classes] produced higher variability in achievement which indicates that the achievement gap between low and high achievers is larger in small classes than in regular size classes

But wait! They’re denigrating positive results because it skewed a metric which may be a fallacy to begin with - that everyone can reach the same level of achievement.

Do smaller classes help students" Yes...and no. Konstantopoulos finds that “although all types of students benefited from being in small classes, reductions in class size did not reduce the achievement gap between low and high achievers”

Actually, it did help all students….there’s no “yes…and no” about it. What it didn’t help was the achievement gap.

Put simply:

If low achievers improve their grades by 10%
and the high achievers improve their grades by 15%,
then SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS: the achievement gap has widened!!!

If reduction of achievement gap is the only goal, then stop teaching the high achievers. Achievement gap narrows, mission accomplished! But the goal should never be to make everyone the same. It should be to make everyone perform at their highest level.

With thinking like this, one day all students will be ABOVE average.

(thŭm)

That’s some contract you’ve got there…

Okay, so the format war is over. But it seems Dreamworks must have very poor lawyers; they still don’t know if they can release on Blu-ray.

You’d think that Toshiba pulling the plug on the format earlier this month would kind of negate any contract to release on that format, wouldn’t you? Someone must have put in a clause about that, surely?

But we may be overlooking something. Dreamworks is getting paid money to release on HD DVD ($100 million according to one source.) It sounds like Dreamworks might get more money from Toshiba for essentially not releasing the title, than they would if they released it on Blu-ray.

Toshiba probably guaranteed Dreamworks a given amount for each release. Gives you an idea of how much money the manufacturers were slinging around to entice the publishers - or maybe how little the studios are making on the HD releases (either format) at the moment.

Boy on a Missile

A friend sent me a picture of a kid hanging on to the front of a plane, which was particularly funny as I had already seen the same kid hanging on to the front of a car.

So here is the next chapter of his exploits:

Sortable isn't a word?

I was writing a description of a program today:

The list is sortable by class, assignment name and due date

And MS Word underlined sortable and suggested:

storable
sort able
portable
suitable
settable

What?!!

A search on dictionary.com revealed no definition for sortable under sort, yet a Google search returned 2,430,000 results for sortable! It's kind of odd to find that a word you assumed was a word, isn't really official. (Note: a search for lol on dictionary.com returned a result.)

We need to sort this out. If not sortable, then what? "can be sorted" seems so....blech.


P.S. A Google search for lol returned 540,000,000 results....but still...

The Ultimate Question Finder

In Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” the Earth turned out to be a giant computer built by the mice to answer the ultimate question. Well, actually, to find the ultimate question; they already had the answer: “42”

On the face of it, this seems ridiculous; how could mice afford the cost? But maybe Adams was closer to the truth than we realized.

When talking about intelligence, it’s nearly always been considered at an individual level. Einstein was brilliant, George is a ‘C’ student, and while we have SAT scores to compare students, we think little of the intelligence of a nation. If we do, it’s about whether Japanese kids are better at Math than their American counterparts.

But what happens when intelligence becomes massed together? When we become part of the Collective, and one with The Borg? What if the Internet becomes the expression of intelligence? We've collected intelligence together before - in places called libraries - but the Internet is much more than a library; it provides instant connections between diverse works.


IBM is taking its massive super-computer Blue Gene and looking at placing the entire internet on it. Apart from providing a dictionary of every sexual position, what will this accomplish? And is the intelligence of the internet the files it contains, or is it also the application of the intelligence behind it (i.e. the people who rate things on Amazon and respond to your web posts.)

IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet

Project Kittyhawk: building a global-scale computer: Blue Gene/P as a generic computing platform

Rules for Developers

If the fancy thing won't work - or is too difficult to implement - do the simple fix and pretend like that was all you had been planning to do anyway.