The Chandra Levy series, on Page 1 for 13 days, has provoked these kinds of comments: Lurid! Appalling! A waste of time! And these: Fascinating! Totally hooked! Riveting!

- Washinton Post reader’s ombudsman Deborah Howell

I’ll stay out of the row over whether the 13-part epic was a wise or worthwhile move for the WaPo, largely because I can’t be bothered to trawl through the whole thing myself. But the description of the tone of the comments is instructive. From the comments on the piece itself, you’d think it was a disaster. But the comments on the reporter’s log were nicer, and those via email glowing.

The lesson? Knee-jerk comments are almost always nasty. Casual readers won’t generally bother to comment to say how much they liked a story or agreed with its view; only the enraged are engaged enough to click. Those who really like it are more likely to email in their praise. It’s sad, but most of us feel more comfortable slating something online - which makes us feel superior - than praising it, which feels a bit like weakness. If we have something nice to say, we prefer to say it in private.

Bloggers depressed at epic posts that generate nothing but sneering comments, take heart!

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1. “Add as acquaintance.” Or “limited friend,” which might be more acceptable. How many times have you grudgingly accepted someone you barely know, out of politeness, only to be subjected to their never-ending succession of zombie-throwings and hotness-testing in your news feed? You can set certain people so they don’t show up in your feed, but only 20 people and it’s a hassle. As well as setting friends so they can only see your limited profile, you should be able to set them so you only see limited stuff - pokes, messages and wall posts - from them.
2. Instant messaging. With Windows Live, Yahoo! and AOL still no closer to proper, easy interoperability, and IM moving more and more to the web, Facebook has a massive opportunity to enhance the user experience. A few applications have tried, but they all require both users to add the application before they can chat - a massive limitation. Built-in messaging, added by Facebook themselves, could quickly reach the critical mass needed to be useful: chat, and share files, with any friend online, live. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
3. Full mobile integration, now. Facebook’s mobile site is a joy to behold, but the real mobile killer app is text-message mailing, wall-posting, photo uploading and status-updating - the latter, in particular, to ensure Facebook can fend off the challenge from Twitter. Widely available in the US for years, text-control has finally come to the UK, but only for o2 users. Agreements with the other networks need to come fast.
4. Better real-name enforcement. Facebook’s attempts to police real identities have been controversial, but the real scandal is how little success they’ve had. Real identities are essential if Facebook is going to avoid becoming a messy hell of spammers and paedophiles like Myspace. With the advent of geographical networks millions-strong, the sense of community that made Facebook so vital in the early days has already severely eroded, but the fact that your friends’ friends all have real names and real pictures still makes it seem like a safe, sane place. But with more and more members like the several called “Sexy Man”, this is starting to break down.
5. Police applications - hard. The allowance of third-party applications, while allowing Facebook to gain new functions at a dizzying rate, has also made it a potential boon to spammers, fraudsters, and general net-nuisances. FunWall and SuperWall are particularly problematic on the spam front. I haven’t a clue how exactly they should fix it, but it’s a vital challenge.

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As vaguely-out-of-touch friends do, she tracked me down on Facebook and friend-ed me. Which is all fine, and perfectly normal, and no, don’t worry, this is not yet another merits-and-drawbacks-of-Facebook discussion (it’s been around three years, people! keep up!). What made me annoyed was Mandy’s name on Facebook. Not Amanda Abigail Davis. Not even Mandy Davis. Just Mandy D. Accompanied by a non-identifiying, artsy picture.

I was genuinely irritated. Facebook is for real life, I thought to myself. Use bloody Myspace if you want to call yourself a funny codename and have a picture of Brad Pitt as your avatar. That’s why it’s populated primarily by teenage girls. Facebook works because people are real on it - real names, regular photos, bewilderingly complete contact information. It’s official, it’s trustworthy. It doesn’t purport to be a gateway to some magical other cyber-life. It’s designed to fit in with your real one. This is why, for example, you won’t find the obscure picture on the front page of this site on my Facebook profile, but one where you can actually tell what I look like.

Mandy said, after I grilled her, that she doesn’t want her identity stolen. Fair enough, though why not just hide your profile from non-friends? But really, the point isn’t just about Facebook - it’s about a wider shift in what “social networking” sites are supposed to do.

In the first few years of the internet, there was much written and said about its potential to afford people new identities and new lives. You might be a teenage girl in Iowa, but there was nothing stopping you becoming a legendary gay man on the New York club scene, a successful share trader, or a respected philosopher on UseNet. And equally, of course, you might be a 40-year old man, but you can exist as a 14-yr old girl in chat rooms - for at least as long as it takes to groom a potential sexual victim. Many of the services central to social networking services on the internet from webmail to myspace - operate on essentially this anonymous basis. There’s essentially no restriction on who you can be - as long as you can keep up the pretence.

But here’s the thing: we don’t really want wild, additional e-personalities. In many cases, we really just want to be ourselves. I’ve always been suspicious of cute e-codenames, usually going for the unexciting ravcasleygera. Increasingly, I’m seeing everyone else do the same - not just my twentysomething friends, but the teenagers who have essentially grown up with the internet too. They may have an additional, “secret” identity for particular interests - so do I - but they’ll usually have a straightforward online identity to pin their cyber-ego on.

Why? Because you only need an additional identity if you want to meet people you wouldn’t meet in ordinary life. In fact, though, we mostly want the internet to be an extension of our “real” lives. If you look at the average, e-savvy teenager’s myspace friend list, there may be 3000 people on it. But if you look at who they’re actually in regular message contact with, it’ll be friends from school. Groups services like Yahoo! Groups do exist for topics and virtual collaborations, but the vast majority are a supplement to a real-life group. Skype has conference rooms you can go into to talk to strangers; but of all the millions of people of Skype, there’s usually only a handful in them. IM, email, VOIP, even themed services like Flickr: I bet the majority of people you communicate through these mediums are your actual real-life friends. And where new friendships do blossom on the internet, they usually turn into real-life relationships - or wither. I’ve met two new people through myspace; one I went on to meet in real life, the other I fell out of contact with.

This realness - the internet as an extension of real life - is the key to Facebook’s runaway success. Facebook famously didn’t start open to the whole world, like Myspace. It started within an already very closed community - Harvard students. And it grew incrementally, through other elite US universities, all world universities, and then finally to non-students just last year.

I was at Harvard when Facebook launched. I joined on the third day, and I must have been one of the last. People pounced on it, because they saw a clear reason for it. In a closed community like a university, there are tens of people you know - maybe you took a class with them, or shared an activity like a play or sports team - who you don’t see on a regular basis - the kind of people who, if the only means of contact were in person, phone calls and emails, you could lose touch with. People like Mandy Davis, in fact. With Facebook they remain tied to you, albeit lightly, just enough to maintain contact. And it worked. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, one Harvard senior told me last year, has “had a more profound effect on college life in America than anyone in the last twenty years.” People didn’t swarm all over Facebook to escape their humdrum day-to-day, but to improve it.

It’s easy to sniff and say, if you care about someone, you’ll stay friends with them no matter what. But this ignores psychological realities. Anthropologists have noted that, as hunter-gatherers, we used to travel in tribes of 150-200 people. Then, when we settled down to agriculture, our settlements were around this size. And even now, if you take the average person, and measure the number of people in their social network - from the lady behind the counter at the dry-cleaner they chat to every week, to their friend’s brother they occasionally meet up with - you’re looking at about, you guessed it, 200 people. These relationships are significant; we don’t live in tiny villages any more, but a sense of belonging to a community - or, rather, of wanting to - is still hard-wired into us. You may only need six people to carry your coffin, but we’d all like to imagine a hundred or so people turning up to the funeral.

In a village, or a university, you might see these people in the library or greengrocer. In a city, though, you can lose them as quickly as you got to know them. The greatness of Facebook is the way it helps with that. It’s become a ritual - after you meet new people, on a night out, a trip away, or through a friend - you trak them down on Facebook. It’s a way of securing a connection that might otherwise fall by the wayside.

So, I’m not dropping my militant stance when it comes to real names - and real photos - on Facebook. Facebook is for real life in the real world. With more and more of us living in cities, and greater and greater cultural diversity, it’s becoming easier and easier to meet like-minded people. But with our ever-busier and more mobile lives, the trouble is keeping in touch with them. The great potential of the internet isn’t so much its capacity to enable new friendships and relationships. It’s to help secure existing ones.

Yours,

Ravinder Madron Casley Gera

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You can’t show it on a screen, but the print version had a nifty mirror effect on the TV screen. Whether the grey-eyed executives picking up a copy at their local CVS feel like they’re reinventing the internet remains to be seen, but either way, user-generated content (UGC - not to be confused with the cinema chain) had well and truly arrived on the cultural map. As well as its Time cover, it had its coffee-shop friendly bible: Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, describing how a top-down model of media dominated by large producers was about to be supplemented - and usurped - by a near-endless supply of independent content. The difference, of course, was money. Letting people upload videos from their mobile phones had always seemed like a good idea. But not necessarily one with a lot of money to be paid. The moment Google dropped $1.65bn into Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s laps, that changed.

Now, no sooner has an internet trend reached cultural penetration, then traditional media begins hamfistedly to try to get in on it. Web 2.0 was to prove no different. Quickly, fevered speculation began about how best to bring UGC to TV. Never mind the fact that this had been happening ever since the popularisation of video cameras - think You’ve Been Framed! - now a new generation of UGC-TV cropped up, led in the UK by Trouble Homegrown, an offshoot of the teen cable channel.

Now Britain’s first entire channel focussed on, if not quite dedicated to, UGC, has launched. Named - slightly craply - Current TV, it’s been onscreen less than a month, and I just discovered it tonight lurking on Virgin Media channel 155 (it’s also on Sky 229). At first glance, it’s predictable YouTubeTV - a succession of three-to-five minute films, many made by viewers, strung together by pretty, dumb, mildly trendy young hosts. And it makes no attempt its internet-me-too roots, even calling its mini-shows “pods.”¹

But watch a few minutes of Current TV, and it’s clear this is a little more than bedroom video on the big screen. First of all, the quality - if not creatively, than at least in ambition and production values - of the content. In one hour, I saw a brief documentary about Glasgow’s “neds,” another comparing Iraqi opnions of the American occupation, and another on an American community gym, all slickly edited and complete with graphics. And the filmmakers weren’t all the 14-yr-old boys every user-centred website depends on. The “pod” showing when i first stumbled upon the channel featured a stocky, goateed man in sunglasses and a beanie hat doing martial arts on the beach. “Hang on,” I thought, “that looks like The Edge.” Of course, all goateed men in shades and beanie hats tend to look like The Edge. But, as it turns out, The Edge it was - in a four-pod day-in-the-life documentary made by bandmate Bono. Now, Bono hasn’t always been selective in his embrace of new media forms - think the ill-fated plans for a Zoo TV cable channel in the early 90’s. Nevertheless, it’s a big step up from films of people falling over drunk.

But it’s not just the production values that makes Current TV surprisingly impressive. It boasts something that’s inreasingly rare in mainstream new media: ideals. Current seem serious about political and news content, with an army of so-called “vanguard journalists” delivering quick-fire images and commentary from inside everything from China’s prostitution industry to African mineworking conditions. And the user-generated content, too, has real political bite. The aforementioned pod on Iraqi views of the occupation (made by Iraqi independent media group Iraq Eye) delivered more of an Iraqi perspective on the occupation in three minutes than I’ve seen in the mainstream news in the last year, while a brief introduction to the growing Nigerian film industry was a classic example of the kind of broader coverage of Africa - more than just starvation, war and misery - that many have been crying for more of in mainstream media.

It was clear that Current wasn’t just a low-budget startup. The tip-off came in the credits of Bono’s film: “thanks to Joel Hyatt and ‘Big’ Al Gore.”

Al Gore?

It turns out (praise be, Wikipedia!) that Current TV is, in fact, the invention of the world’s favourite loser himself. I do recall, after the 2000 election, Gore rumbling about the need for an independent new cable channel to challenge the conservative domination of the news media. It turns out Current is an evolved version of that idea. It also turns out it’s been onscreen over 18 months in the US. Think about that for a second - the pod-based format was invented before YouTube even launched. Far from a quick cash-in, Current seems to be the true TV equivalent of web 2.0, drawn from the same ideas but independently developed. What’s more, it trumps it on ideals. Gore’s plan from the beginning was to give space to independent voices. The YouTube founders just wanted somewhere to put videos to show to their friends.

Of course, ideals and TV are a difficult mix. This Nation article recounts the evolution of the concept - from a well-meaning grassroots network to the slick MTV-with-brains we see now. Being the Nation, of course, it goes way over the top.

“Less and less they’re trying to run a company with a social mission,” says Orville Schell, dean of the Berkeley School of Journalism and a member of Current’s board of directors. “They want something that’s new and interesting and economically viable.”

Interesting! Economically viable! The fascists! Current’s three-minute format certainly doesn’t allow for in-depth, nuanced reporting, and the previews of saw of “vanguard journalism” certainly privileged get-it-on-camera correspondence to proper reporting. But while I’m a huge fan of big-’n'-balanced documentary, it’s not the only way to expand the horizons of the traditional media. Rather than “MoveOn.org in prime time” - which, let’s be honest, sounds horrendous - Current has the potential to offer something much more powerful: a TV analogue to the blogosphere. The messages may be quick and simple, but they will hopefully come from a bewildering range of sources - providing a forum for, as Current put it, “any story that traditional news media won’t touch because it’s too big, too small, or too something.” The high standards required by TV transmission, as well as the quasi-democratic selection process (pods uploaded to the website are voted on by users, but it’s not clear how much influence this has on selection), will inevitably silence some voices. But given the number of 9/11 conspiracy movies on YouTube, it’s hard not to think, “good.”²

Current TV isn’t going to change the world, and it isn’t going to infiltrate everyday life to the staggering extent of YouTube. But perhaps that’s not the point. What it is is the first new TV channel I’ve seen in years that’s genuinely different. Isn’t that reason enough to be excited?

Current TV: www.current.com and www.uk.current.com; Sky 229; Virgin Media 155

1. You have to really think about this to see just how horrible it is. The “pod” in iPod means, essentially, what the word pod means - a small, cute vessel. For all the overuse of the suffix since - and I say this as the proud owner of a knackered Korean “GoGoPod” MP3 player - that sense has generally, until now, been retained. But if you apply the word to content, as Current have done, it becomes totally meaningless.
2. They will, of course, also face a host of potential problems over political evenhandedness or otherwise. Do they show the well-produced pod in favour of Palestinian terrorism? What about the one expressing sympathy with al-Qaeda?

Hat tip: Josh

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We think of the internet mostly as consumers - we read sites, use them, buy from them. But the internet started off as a community. The first websites were bulletin boards, designed to let academics share information. They didn’t have staff or managers, and they certainly wouldn’t get sold for millions of dollars. They belonged to the people who use them: they were democratic.

Wikipedia is the biggest democracy on the internet. It’s the 15th most-visited site on the web, and every one of its millions of users can take part in its decisions. Not only can anyone edit pages, but anyone can vote – or stand – in elections to its managing boards. One American academic thinks it might even be “the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration the world has ever known.”

But as Iraq is finding out, it isn’t easy maintaining order in a democracy of equals. Wikipedia has its own insurgents: vandals. It suffers thousands of vandal attacks every day – entries are deleted, defaced, or altered for political or personal reasons. “George W. Bush” is its most frequently edited pages. Politicians have admitted having campaign staff edit their pages to cover up criticism. And workers campaigning for better conditions have been known to alter their employer’s entries to put their points across.

In the early years of the project, such insurgencies plunged Wikipedia into civil war – between its co-founder and “chief organizer,” Larry Sanger, and a mysterious anarchist called “The Cunctator.” Sanger wanted a certain amount of authority to ensure the site’s quality; “Cunc” was in favour of total equality. After months of deleting each other’s edits to pages and sparring in the sites’ talk pages, the war ended with Sanger leaving the project.

Since then, Wikipedia’s reputation has been tested by the consequences of its democratic approach. In 2005, the American journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr. laid into the site, calling it “a flawed and irresponsible research tool,” after taking objection to a paragraph of his biography on the site that said he had briefly been linked to the murders of John and Robert Kennedy. Siegenthaler almost certainly overreacted - who hasn’t been linked to the Kennedy murders? - but a chorus of political and media concern blew up, alleging that Wikipedia was riddled with errors and unsafe. A study in the Journal Nature later in the year found that Wikipedia’s scientific articles were nearly as accurate as those in the professionally-edited Encyclopaedia Britannica, but Britannica hit back, calling the study “so error-laden that it was completely without merit.” (Nature’s response)

Is Wikipedia laden with errors and lies? It’s hard to tell, but Larry Sanger thinks it might be. And he’s proposing an alternative, Citizendium - a carbon-copy of Wikipedia’s database, but with expert editors who will have some authority to override regular users’ changes. Editors will appoint themselves, but be required to meet certain standards of expertise. And vandals and troublemakers will be barred from the site by “constables.” The aim, Sanger says, is to create a site that “John Seigenthaler could be comfortable with… not only enormous and free, but reliable.”

Sanger’s announcement has generated a mixture of delight and horror, with some Wikipedia users calling it “treason” (hey, if you thought Wikipedia was part of “the emergence of a new kind of person,” you’d take it pretty seriously too). But lovers of Wikipedia’s democratic ethos shouldn’t worry - this is a natural process for democracies to go through. In fact, it’s striking how internet history is mirroring real-world history when it comes to the development of democracy. After all, the first democracies - in Ancient Greece - were small city-states where every citizen - at least, every free male citizen - had a direct say in the affairs of state - not unlike Wikipedia’s founding all-are-equal ethos. As democracies have grown from cities to nations, populations have become too large for direct votes on every issue, and representative democracy has developed, with elected leaders making most decisions. Wikipedia has begun the same process - just like in growing democracies, pressure of numbers of participants has made ways of arbitrating disagreements essential.

As democracies have grown and the issues facing them have become more complex, their governments have needed to find ways to understand their tasks. But if the people won’t always vote for the most expert people, what to do? All democracies create ways of appointing experts to advise and even shape government, even if they’re not elected. In Britain, it’s the House of Lords. Of course, as Government gets further away from the people, the chance increases of people feeling free to disobey its laws. So democracies developed police forces, who are granted authority by the community to act against members of the community in ways regular members can’t.

So with its experts and constables, Citizendium, too, is just responding to the pressures of growth as many democracies have. In time, these safeguards may well see it overtake Wikipedia in popularity. But will self-appointing experts be reliable? Or will Citizendium have its own Cunctator, its own insurgents? There’s also a lot of fuzziness in Wikipedia’s system, with articles “generally recognized” to be reliable or neutral. Will Citizendium develop more specific processes? Will it need to? In real-world democracies, such fuzzy ideas tend to get sharpened by being tested in courts of law - think of phrases such as “cruel and unusual punishment,” incredibly vague at first, but gradually refined by the courts. Will our twin web democracies be forced to go through a similar process, in order to clarify their own procedures?

It’s too soon to tell, of course. But Citizendium needs to be recognised for what it is - not a threat to Wikipedia’s principles of democracy, but a refinement of them, just as real-world democracy has been refined over thousands of years. These kind of changes aren’t a sign of weakness, but of the flexibility needed to survive. Democracy was never easy, after all. Just ask the people of Iraq.

Citizendium founding essay

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I still think it’s very wierd that the world’s second-most popular online newspaper lets any user place unmoderated comments straight on the webpage of its leader articles, but it’s kind of fun, too…

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