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.
