WORDPRESS, POSSIBLY AN EDITOR

 

            The new ‘related posts’ feature on WordPress has placed my writing alongside a blog from Wired I consider kin and the post that relates to the pun I made in one headline slyly reinforces the pun. It almost seems as if a human editor, who, in an ideal world is the first, most careful reader of an article, has been creating the links. The service is offered by Sphere, which says the recommendations are generated by a “content genome” that doesn’t look at keywords or tags but assesses the whole article. Maybe it’s something like the grammar check function within Microsoft word, only better. It probably contains a collaborative filtering algorithm that learns from the way people click through to the recommendations and pass them on. A long time ago (I can’t remember when) I started noticing a Sphere widget at the conclusion of New York Times articles, recommending other articles that related to the same topic, some from the New York Times, some from other sources. I rarely clicked through. I’m wary of innovations if I’ve found out them first from them being used on a commercial site: I imagine it’s a commercial contract, something that’s been placed there to help sell me something, and I give it a wide berth. I also imagine that the sales and marketing division of the New York Times will always put monetary concerns before thinking about how readers actually use and respond to the articles on the website. This has been confirmed in the way that they’ve dropped the de.licio.us widget on the “share this” menu, in favour of a Yahoo! Buzz button. Yahoo! also owns de.licio.us, so it seems a purely commercial decision to make the article ranking service from Yahoo! popular, at the expense of de.licio.us. I’m annoyed enough to have gravitated towards the Google news service, and check the New York Times much less frequently than I used to.

            What Sphere gains from offering their service to WordPress’s free blogging community is the opportunity to test and develop its service without the dumbing down that occurs when its linked to marketing. The collaborative filtering service offered by Amazon.com is tightly linked to marketing keywords and obvious choices of what to buy next, it’s not in their best interests, sales wise, to pique your curiosity so much by its suggestions that you begin to question what you’ve bought or drift off into reverie. Ideally Amazon.com wants you to be so fascinated by what their predictive algorithms suggest that you have to have these objects, now!

            A more interesting question, and this ties with the ‘related posts’ function on WordPress, is what if a piece of software could make us think and lead us to the random wonders we find in everyday life, and lead us to the non-sequiturs that fascinate us? Ken Goldberg’s online projects Jester (which existed before Amazon’s prediction system went online) and the new Donation Dashboard seek to clarify what we’re thinking, with something as subjective and dependent on context as humour, and with the ethical dilemma of philanthropy: how do we decide what causes to give money to? These very personal, philosophically thorny questions – what’s funny/ and ‘what community service is so important that I’d pay to help it exist?’ – are able to be measured in an objective, neutral way when the community is unseen but identifiable.

 

THE FREEMIUM

 

What’s free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version.

This term, coined by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, is the basis of the subscription model of media and is one of the most common Web business models. It can take a range of forms: varying tiers of content, from free to expensive, or a premium “pro” version of some site or software with more features than the free version (think Flickr and the $25-a-year Flickr Pro).

 Again, this sounds familiar. Isn’t it just the free sample model found everywhere from perfume counters to street corners? Yes, but with a pretty significant twist. The traditional free sample is the promotional candy bar handout or the diapers mailed to a new mother. Since these samples have real costs, the manufacturer gives away only a tiny quantity — hoping to hook consumers and stimulate demand for many more.

But for digital products, this ratio of free to paid is reversed. A typical online site follows the 1 Percent Rule — 1 percent of users support all the rest. In the freemium model, that means for every user who pays for the premium version of the site, 99 others get the basic free version. The reason this works is that the cost of serving the 99 percent is close enough to zero to call it nothing.

“Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” By Chris Anderson  02.25.08. WIRED Magazine 

            Fred Wilson has written persuasively about the conversational nature of blogs and the value in the comments that they generate, building upon the initial post. It’s been inspirational as well to see him actually using and exploring widgets and making them work, tinkering with their capabilities to make them more fluidly social, and to make the different offerings from different companies work across platforms. His venture capital firm has invested in Disqus, a company seeking to classify and tag comments and give them a wider life in the way that posts themselves have found wider audiences. He was an investor in de.licio.us before it was sold to Yahoo! Invests in Outside.in, which is the internet application I most admire, a conceptually cool and sophisticated twenty-first century incarnation of the community newspaper. And Bug Labs, which allows software systems and tasks to be modelled and tinkered with easily. The wonder of all of these systems is their creative flexibility.

 

CUSTOM FREEMIUM?

           The technological systems that enthral me are mature, rich systems moving into their twilight. The closing years of the analog format made recording and pressing vinyl records so easy and cheap that punk rock bands could make their own records outside the music business, and made possible the Walkman, which put together high fidelity headphones and portable tape players to allow people to take their music with them, as a private experience. William Gibson said that the Walkman had a ‘revolutionary intimacy‘ that made music an extension of one‘s nervous system. Web services Now have a settled sense of heading into the sunset in their current form and I’m grateful for the subtle, semi-private scrapbook I’ve been able to create within WordPress blogs and Flickr and de.licio.us. It’s a logbook of my bookbinding experiments, a record of the books I’m reading, and clippings from magazines and newspapers. I was drawn to the manuscripts collection at the New York Public Library; the display cases of writers’ thoughts scribbled onto hotel letterhead, liens from poems written into notebooks, journals with descriptions of the cities or countryside the writers were living in. The blogs that interest me have this quality: I enjoy reading the articles Geoff Manaugh saves to Bldgblog’s de.licio.us file as much as the posts themselves.

            I’ve taken halting steps into the public arena of the internet. My writing and projects aren’t naturally gregarious and I don’t require a vast reading audience. I would pay a premium to extend the capabilities of Flickr, de.licio.us to be able to create templates to pull some of the articles I’ve bookmarked in de.licio.us and favourite photos in Flickr into a large format, through WordPress, so that I can read them as if in a magazine. Then today I read about the Monotone template in the WordPress forum and it feels as if my wishes are being granted.