I just finished reading Barry Schwartz’s book “the paradox of choice; why more is less“.

The author suggests, that the more choices people have the more complicated it becomes for them to make a choice.

The popular series of studies “When choice is demotivating” [downloadable as *.pdf here] speaks for Schwartz’s argumentation.

In one of these studies, the researchers set up a display featuring a line of high-quality jams for customers to taste. If a customer boughta jar she would receive an one dollar coupon. I one condition of the study, the display had a variety of only 6 jams while on another condition there was a set of 24 varieties available.

Although the large array attracted more customers it only convinced the 3% of the customers to actually buy a jar. On the contrary 30% of the customers bought a jar from the small array.

The explanations for the results of this and other similar studies vary:

• a large array of options may discourage consumers because it forces an increase in the effort in making a decision.

• a large array of options reduces the attractiveness of the product.

Barry Schwartz examines the subject of choice by concentrating on 4 major subjects:

1. What drives people to choose

2. How do people choose

3. Why do people suffer from vast options

4. How can people stop suffering from choice

Choosing not to choose

The paradox of choice can be applied to many fields of our life and the virtual world is also included.

The number of blogs and sites which constitute the web is certainly overloading people, which in the end conclude on reading the big hubs and refrain from searching and choosing.

It is a fact, that I also notice in the way I surf the web lately.

I have chosen 3 social sites and a small number of blogs to follow and am no longer interested in searching for new possibilities. I prefer to settle with lesser quality, than striving to find the perfect resources.

I guess I’m what Barry Schwartz describes as a satisficer:

If you’re a satisficer, the number of available options need not have a significant impact on your decision making. When you examine an object and its good enough to meet your standards, you look no further; thus, the countless other available choices become irrelevant.

On the other hand though, there are also the maximizers:

Maximizers need to be assured that every purchase or decision was the best that could be made. Maximizers seek and accept only the best.

Anyway, this subject has drawn my attention lately; I’ve already written a post at pandemicBlog inspired by the book and will return with at least one more.

Almost a week ago there was a great buzz about a relatively new wiki, called wikileaks. One of the reasons for this popularity burst was, that this wiki accepts submissions that are

classified, censored or otherwise restricted [...] of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. Wikileaks does not accept rumor, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available.

The emergence of a censorship issue about the content of wikileaks, boosted the wiki’s popularity even more. To summarize the story:

The case in San Francisco was brought by a Cayman Islands bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust. In court papers, the bank said that “a disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign” provided stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of a confidentiality agreement and banking laws.
According to Wikileaks, “the documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.” On Friday, Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the site’s domain name registrar, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name.

This case is not only interesting as one more censorship issue of the cyberspace but also as an example of the power and growth of the web. The indirect points that are raised are:

1. The decentralized nature of the web manages to overcome obstacles.
2. It seems that wikis are slowly evolving in authoritative resources.

Decentralization

The wikileaks domain was shut down, not allowing any users to visit the site. In any centralized network, shutting down the front door of a node would be enough to bring him down.
But the web’s decentralized nature, easily manages to overcome this issue. The wikileaks domain could be accessed

• by mirror sites across Europe [Wikileaks.be],
• the secure site of the wiki [http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks]
• and even by the sites IP Adress [http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks].

This proves the difficulty of local, real life laws to be applied in cyberspace. Internet has always been a self-organized place and efforts to control it haven’t brought any results until now.

Authority in Wikis

If we go back to December, we will find several discussions about the trustworthiness of wikis. The reason was Google’s announcement of their “unwiki” platform Knol.

The fact alone, that this wiki received such attention speaks for the role of wikis in knowledge and information.
If wikis were really not trustworthy sources, which provide unproved data then why did this Bank step up against wikileaks?

It seems to me, that this case shows the strength of wikis, the power of the collective intelligence and the decreased role of authority and authorship.

The result

Latest news say that wikileaks got its domain back. Not because the Julius Baer Bank found the wiki less trustworthy and decided to drop the case, but because of the hard work and engagement of several lawyers and institutions (Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

It seemed to be a lost case anyway.

We are all aware with Creative Commons. Flickr photos are under CC licences, web designs are licensed, blog posts have some rights reserved and even some wikis have licenses on them. Purpose of Creative Commons is to promote sharing of information and substitute the restrictions of current copyright laws.

Creators have several good reasons to publish their work under a Creative Commons license, but there are some negative implications of Creative Commons, that we don’t observe at first sight.

From new technologies emerge new restrictions

When new technologies emerge, new ways of protecting our work come long.

Before Copyright.
Marshall McLuhan said about copyright laws that

the invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public - a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. (from the medium is the massage).

Copyright.
So, before the absolute expansion of the Web, there was copyright. For an artist to put his/her work out to the public wasn’t as easy as it is today. There were no computers to produce cheap, quality work; there was no Web with its wide public.
Artists needed someone who would finance the whole production process. And even when they did find someone and although “all rights reserved” applied the moment a work was created, sometimes artist didn’t really care. The purpose wasn’t to protect their intellectual property, the purpose was artistic expression. So copyright protected the ones caring and run obsolete in any other case.

Creative Commons.
The explosion of the Web changed the scene. Production and publication were very easy and very fast. So was copying and distributing. Awareness of self-expression rose. Every producer - regardless what he/she produced - wanted to protect his work. This needed to be done in an obvious (the web is huge) and fast (the works produced are numerous) way. So Creative Commons emerged.

According to wikipedia’s description

Creative commons is a non-profit organization, which provides several free licenses for the owners to use when releasing their work on the Web.

The value of Creative Commons

• Free flow of information; It is true, that the minute you create a work, it is immediately copyrighted with an “all rights reserved” license. This means, that you are the sole owner controlling who may copy, adapt, redistribute, publish etc.
  Since this perspective can be very restrictive to sharing and providing information, Creative Commons comes as a new parameter, promoting innovation and free flow of information.Creative Commons, under that perspective, combines a moral with a legal objective (although it has been argued, that the moral objective of Creative Commons is of lesser priority - at least in comparison to the Free Software Movement).

• Choice; Creative Commons provides a wide variety of licenses. There are 4 major licenses, which can be mixed, producing 16 possible combinations.

• Ease of use; Licensing your work in Creative Commons is easy. Very easy. In one step you choose your license and in the next your work has “some rights reserved”.

Criticism on Creative Commons

Over time, Creative Commons has been considerably criticized.

• It has been argued, that the legal code of the CC licenses has additional information, that people don’t read - they stick only to the Commons Deed.
• There are still several misconceptions about Creative Commons and licensing in general.
• It has even been argumented, that Creative Commons is completely pointless - although I would not go that far.

The public’s sense of ownership

For me the value of Creative Commons is undisputable. The public is too vast and the need for the protection of intellectual property is very important. Creative Commons gave developers the option to keep their work more open, than traditional, standard copyright laws do.

But the ease of use and the wide popularity of Creative Commons has also increased the awareness of the our sense of ownership. Suddenly, everything we produce - may it be a funny 5minute sketch, a blog post, a program or a whole book - is subjected to licensing.
Why do we put everything under a Creative Commons license?

• Maybe we believe, that our work might some day achieve a great financial value and we don’t want to miss the opportunity.
• Or we believe, that the web is full of malevolent individuals wanting to take advantage of our work and republish and their own identity.

I don’t want to argument why or why not one should put his/her work under a license, this is a personal decision. But just let me point out, that

• giving something for free does not necessarily mean not having any gain
• if the web were full of copyists and thieves, it probably wouldn’t be that successful.

I am not putting my work under any license, firstly because I don’t mind if someone copies my content. Secondly, I have a lot to gain from the online community and maybe that’s my way of giving something back.

After all if we only take and don’t give something back we will end up exhausting the free resources as Garrett Hardin’s theory of “the tragedy of the Commons” explains.

Do you have your work under a Creative Commons License? Why or why not? I’m really interested in your opinions.

An interesting discussion started yesterday, if digg (and all similar networks) is a user generated content site.
Allen Stern argues, that

With Digg, you find a good piece of content, and then submit a link to that story on Digg. That’s it. The Digg submitter submits 250 characters to describe the story but 97.85% of the time, the submitter is pulling the description from your story.

Therefore the content of the submission is actually a link (disregarding the short description). If we compare Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit with Youtube and Wikipedia, User Generated Content has a completely different meaning.
So Allen considers digg a UGC aggregator.

On the other hand Josh Catone, relies on Wikipedia’s definition of UGC to say that:

Stern’s objection to Digg being a user generated content site seems to focus around the word “content” — as Stern argues, much of the submitted content is unorginal. But the comments on Digg, no matter how useless some might find them, are original media content provided by the users for publication on Digg — which is enough to fit the Wikipedia definition, at least (and this is why we might say the comments section on any media site are an example of user generated content).

Surely YouTube and Wikipedia are traditional UGC sites, but Digg is also one. At least it is “…a user something site”.

The eye of the beholder

Most of the comments in both posts agree with A. Stern, that Digg is not a UGC site. As I remarked in Stern’s post, I believe, that the definition is in the eyes of the beholder.

• You can say that the content OF Digg is generated by its users. Which is true. Everything you see on the digg site is uploaded by users. So it is a UGC site.

• But you can also say that the content ON Digg is actually the links pointing to the actual source. Which is also true. You cannot judge a post just by the short description on digg, you need to go to the actual source. So it is not a UGC site.

Emerging subjects

1. Semantics: as Sean Tierney and Tim Marman commented, the debate is based on the fine term of content. A similar debate could be started about blogging. If you have a link-blog (comments enabled and all the blog stuff), is your content generated by you, the user?
2. Hypertext: Roland Barthes has argued (and that in the late 60s), that “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.“ Which means, that the reader is the one who will actually combine all the hyperlinks/citations used in a text in order to comprehend the text as a whole. Content is all the links/references used in a text. Under that perspective, maybe digg is indeed a UGC site. The hyperlinked nature of the web constitutes almost every writting, user generated. You just have to follow the links.

Update 23.01.2008:

My question is: if digg is not a user generated site, why does google link to its content?

Blogging has enabled every John, Dick and Mary (I’m a John by the way) to write his/her personal thoughts, ideas or ambitions. Depending on the quality of the material some blogs get more readers, while others are lost in the sea.
There are many ways to improve the traffic of your blog, but in the end it always comes down to quality content. But quality content implies only the body of the text; how it is formulated, expressed, written.
What most of us usually forget to take into consideration is, that the structure of the content is also a fundamental key of the content itself.

3 Sad facts about web-content and how to overcome them

1. Sad Fact:
web-readers don’t actually read your content (sorry, but it’s true), they scan it. Many eyetracking researches have been conducted and all of them conclude, that online people scan the text by following an F-pattern. This means headline and sidebar get the most attention on a site.
Solution:
Chunking. A chunk may be a small paragraph, a bulleted list, a graphic, anything that will act as a landmark.

2. Sad Fact:
you may think of it as text, but it’s really hypertext. This means, that your text is from definition non-linear. Readers may click a link in the middle of your text and stop reading it.
Solution:
Coherence; each chunk of your text should make sense on its own.

3. Sad Fact:
chunking may bring attention to the text itself, and not to its subject. Images, banners, ads are ignored by the readers. Actually, they do not only ignore the graphics, they ignore the content all together.
Solution:
Use graphics, boldface, capitals, etc sparingly. Choose wisely, which part of the text you want to emphasize. Don’t emphasize the whole body!

Start a Meme

Can you imagine the difference between web-structured text and print text?

My first post ever was about social representations. A more or less scientifical approach on the subject; absolutely impossible for web-content. Today I edited the post and made it more web-friendly (as far as it was possible). So if you want to see the difference check out my very first post.

The readability and consequently the traffic of your blog will increase drastically, if you just pay attention to the structure of your posts.
To test this, find an old post of yours, which you think it could improve. Do the improvements you think necessary, without deleting your original post and trackback to this post here. I’ll make a list of all the posts, which improved their readability.

Additional Resources on the subject

• the writings of usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

• Imnakoya brings some interesting observation on the subject.

• Writing for effective web pages is aa post with some insightful points. (although I disagree with a couple of them).

• I have also written a short essay on the subject, which you can download here (pdf).
• and a site to check the readability of your  content

I read an interesting post from Andy Chiles about a ‘lecturer banning students from using google and wikipedia“.

Anyone who has been a student in the wiki age, knows that citing wikipedia (or any non-authoritative work) is a tabu.

Professor Tara Brabazon, after noticing that student research mostly relies on the first results in a search query, said:

Too many students don’t use their own brains enough. We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis.

Additionally, the professor commented:

I want students to sit down and read. It’s not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both, not one or the other, not a cheap solution.

I find it to be a very interesting subject, for two reasons:

• The lecturer supports that the students do not practice their interpretative skills, when citing the results of search engines. So what students do is just reconstruct the online sources. But couldn’t they do the same with analog books?

• The lecture doesn’t say anything about the trustworthiness of the sources. After the debate raised by the new Google Knol platform, I’m really curious if authoritative articles are also banned, or is it just collaborative works that are considered superficial.

But all in all, i find her remarks correct.

• She bans digital information, so that the students will also learn the analog process.

I want students to sit down and read. It’s not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both, not one or the other, not a cheap solution.

It is a process, that I find necessary in any type of research. It just widens the field of research and opinions.

• Using only websites and search engine results as a reference to a work, will probably provide an incomplete view of a subject.
  It is also a method, that most students are very well accustomed to. It’s time to try something new.

But I disagree with the view, that digitisation is to blame for students not using their brain anymore. If indeed students don’t use their brain, the problem is bad use of digitisation. The web provides a huge variety of resources and discussions. In fact the (social) web is a much more interactive medium than any book. If interaction is used correctly, it has the potential to provide better results than any single book.

Do you find the professor’s methodology of banning online resources productive? Should students be allowed to use online information?

I’ve been observing the evolution of the IpodLinux project for quite some time. Although I found it a great idea, I was completely satisfied with the Apple interface and found no reason to change to the IpodLinux one.

Until now.

How to install wikipedia on your ipod provides a step by step guide to (yes, you got it) install wikipedia on your ipod. Its size is only 1.7GB and every question you have can be accessed on the road. Pretty funky.

Imagine doing something like that with authoritative articles (see Google Knol). Debates like the ones we are now witnessing about copyright, RIAA, music labels, torrent downloading and so on could come forth about text as well. Of course not in such extent (noone is complaining about book torrents) but you get my point.

Such an initiative (wikipedia on your ipod) could not be possible (or much more difficult to realize).