Recently in Definitions Category

I originally wrote this for my online "'zine" called Buzz, hosted on commons.somewhere.com. That was in November of 2000, right after the Florida election fiasco. Although the specifics of that election are dated, the general information is not. This is about polls, how newspapers report them, and how our need for instant results just makes things worse.

The other evening I added a few new people to the list of folks I was following on Twitter. It was one of those typical social networking things; checking your "friends" to see who they were tracking, and then adding the ones that looked interesting.

The result, oddly enough, was a late night conversation on the pros and cons of Welfare. It felt very much like those late night conversations I used to have in college; when everyone was full of ideas and eager to explore them. It was really quite enjoyable. And it certainly created a bump in my Twitter usage.

People who don't use Twitter often ask just what it's for. Why would you want to broadcast what you're doing to the world. That's partially the fault of the Twitter folks themselves, for that "What are you doing?" prompt. A better prompt might be "What do you want to do?" (although perhaps a bit too reminiscent of Babylon V :-). Adam Engst once called Twitter "iChat on shuffle," and it certainly can feel that way when you're carrying on several conversations at once. But Twitter isn't so much a piece of software that does something, as a medium through which software can do things. When the Telegraph and Phone were introduced, people certainly wondered why you'd want one, but people found interesting things to do with them, many of which had never been anticipated by their inventors. That's Twitter.

What's interesting to me is the relative pluses and minuses of having this type of discussion in Twitter. Andy Ihnatko recently pointed out the rather obvious (sorry Andy) fact that trying to express complete thoughts to their conclusion in 140 characters is rather difficult. You can of course just post a second message to finish the thought, but the delays in Twitter make it less natural to do so than it might be in a chat program. The performance of Twitter reinforces that 140 character limit, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing, because keeping points brief and concise may have the effect of equalizing the conversation. Nobody can dominate with a long exposition on a particular topic. Ratholes on side topics tend to be limited to pointers to URLs, not long conversations. You can use Twitter to espouse and justify an idea, but not to explain it in detail. But that's fine. We have other media that are better suited to that. That's not to say Twitter is perfect, separating incoming messages into categories (a New York Times news blast in the middle of a conversation is a bit distracting) and threading conversations (particularly when you aren't following all the participants) would be big pluses. But those are things that Twitter clients can do, they aren't necessarily drawbacks of Twitter itself.

Twitter's limitations might make it seem superficial and trivial. But that's like saying chatting around the water cooler is superficial. It can be, but it can also be a catalyst for new ideas that are followed up elsewhere. Andy's Twitter posting was the catalyst for my writing this blog posting. The discussion on Welfare was the catalyst for making new connections on other networks. Social interaction takes place on many different levels, all of which are necessary. What we are seeing online is people taking new tools and adapting them, consciously or unconsciously, to fit the interactions they feel they need in a virtual world. The companies that are succeeding in the social networking sphere are those that either identify those needs, or more likely, have the flexibility to be molded by their users. Flickr, FaceBook, Twitter... none of those companies are necessarily doing what they started out to do, but they were able to adapt to the way people used them. In Social Networking, you achieve success when you stop being an application and become a transparent part of people's interactions.

But enough of that. I need to go fix the Welfare System!

P.S. I've suddenly become very self-conscious about the fact that I seem to be very fond of semi-colons.

All I really wanted to do was find the most recent email address of a friend. It was a mere matter of checking for the most recent email message from him, but he has one of those random .signature generators, and it had this interesting little poem. An hour (at least) later, here we are.

My Spill Chequer
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect in it's weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
(Sauce unknown)

So I started searching to see who wrote it. I didn't find that, but I did come across a lovely word; "oronym". It isn't in my online dictionary (it's a relatively recent neologism (another lovely word), but the Wikipedia (of course) has it. It says:

This term was coined by Gyles Brandreth and first published in his book The Joy of Lex (1980), and it was used in the BBC programme Never Mind the Full Stops, which also featured Brandreth as a guest.

Oronyms are basically homophones which span words. They work in spoken English (and often depend on dialects) because we run all our words together. The above poem uses them of course, but there's a more famous example. (This version taken from Fun With Words.) I've heard this one before, although I'd forgotten it. Once upon a time :-) I had a friend who could recite the entire piece.

An Oronym Story – Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

Even more impressive in length is the following oronym story. It is the tale of Little Red Riding Hood... but not the famous version; this one is constructed entirely from homophones: Ladle Rat Rotten Hut. This curious version was written in 1940 by a professor of French named H. L. Chace. He wanted to show his students that intonation is an integral part of the meaning of language. Try reading it out loud (best in the accent of Southern/Central USA)!

Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage, honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.

Wan moaning, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut's murder colder inset. "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groinmurder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainers!"

"Hoe-cake, murder," resplendent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, an tickle ladle basking an stuttered oft. Honor wrote tutor cordage offer groin-murder, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut mitten anomalous woof. "Wail, wail, wail!" set disk wicket woof, "Evanescent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut! Wares are putty ladle gull goring wizard ladle basking?"

"Armor goring tumor groin-murder's," reprisal ladle gull. "Grammar's seeking bet. Armor ticking arson burden barter an shirker cockles."

"O hoe! Heifer gnats woke," setter wicket woof, butter taught tomb shelf, "Oil tickle shirt court tutor cordage offer groin-murder. Oil ketchup wetter letter, an den - O bore!"

Soda wicket woof tucker shirt court, an whinney retched a cordage offer groin-murder, picked inner windrow, an sore debtor pore oil worming worse lion inner bet. En inner flesh, disk abdominal woof lipped honor bet, paunched honor pore oil worming, an garbled erupt. Den disk ratchet ammonol pot honor groin-murder's nut cup an gnat-gun, any curdled ope inner bet.

Inner ladle wile, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut a raft attar cordage, an ranker dough ball. "Comb ink, sweat hard," setter wicket woof, disgracing is verse. Ladle Rat Rotten Hut entity betrum an stud buyer groin-murder's bet.

"O Grammar!" crater ladle gull historically, "Water bag icer gut! A nervous sausage bag ice!"

"Battered lucky chew whiff, sweat hard," setter bloat-Thursday woof, wetter wicket small honors phase.

"O Grammar, water bag noise! A nervous sore suture anomolous prognosis!"

"Battered small your whiff, doling," whiskered dole woof, ants mouse worse waddling.

"O Grammar, water bag mouser gut! A nervous sore suture bag mouse!"

Daze worry on-forger-nut ladle gull's lest warts. Oil offer sodden, caking offer carvers an sprinkling otter bet, disk hoard hoarded woof lipped own pore Ladle Rat Rotten Hut an garbled erupt.

Mural: Yonder nor sorghum stenches shut ladle gulls stopper torque wet strainers.

The same Fun With Words page also then references "mondegreens" (another new word!), which are misheard lyrics.

The term mondegreen was originally coined by author Sylvia Wright, and has come to be quite widely used. As a child, Wright heard the lyrics of The Bonny Earl of Murray(a Scottish ballad) as:

Ye highlands and ye lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
Thou hae slay the Earl of Murray
And Lady Mondegreen

It eventually transpired that Lady Mondegreen existed only in the mind of Sylvia Wright, for the actual lyrics said that they "slay the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green." And to this day Lady Mondegreen's name has been used to describe all mishearings of this type!

You see these a lot on the web, when people are writing down the lyrics to their favorite songs. I remember stumbling across this one. The song is Natasha Bedingfield's "These Words". The verse goes:

Read some Byron, Shelley and Keats,
recited it over a hip-hop beat
I'm havin trouble sayin what i mean,
with dead poets and a drum machine

But the first version I found online (on some poor girl's journal) was:

Written by Ricelli and Keys
Resided in over a heartbeat
I'm having trouble saying what I mean
With dead poets and drum machines

And now I think I better get back to sending my friend that email message!

It's early morning and the buzz on Google's Knol is already building fast. I'm not going to rehash what other's are saying, you can go read them for yourself.

Google calls a "knol" a unit of knowledge (this from the people who misspelled "googol"). Google says the goal is to "find a way to help people share their knowledge", and Google Knol is the place where they can do that; as authors, contributors and commenters. Everyone has jumped on this and said it's a Wikipedia competitor, and maybe in the long run that is true, but that ignores an important distinction; Knol is focused on highlighting authors. Google calls this the "key idea", and I think they are absolutely right.

Wikipedia leverages the wisdom of the crowd to build collaborative articles. It relies on multiple authors, many eyes, consensus and majority rule to get accuracy. In a lot of cases that works well. However, it suffers from all the usual problems of a democratic system. Backroom deals can skew the results. Controversial subjects can require special protection, which gives more control to the editors. And majority rule can stifle new ideas or legitimate criticism. Again, those in control of the overall system can exercise a great deal of power that isn't especially visible to the outside world. And of course, sometimes the things which "everybody knows" aren't always correct.

If Wikipedia is a communist democracy (and I mean that in a completely positive sense, you can't truly have the former without the latter), then Google Knol is a meritocracy. The key is something that has been talked about in social networking circles for several years. Knol depends on reputation. The author of the article is prominent. You see everything else they have written. You see what their peers think of them (and who their peers are). You see what commenters have said about them. Knol is blogging with a focus, and attempt to move beyond general topic pundits and bring in the specialists. The author of the article is a known identity which can be tied to other articles in the past and future. (Note that I don't say "person". It could be a group, and of course we don't necessarily have to know the physical identity. The key behind combining reputation and anonymity is the concept of a long term identity. In the ideal system, nobody knows that you're a dog, but they know that you're the same dog.) Knol attempts to ensure accuracy by assuming that a persistent identity (e.g. your Google account) will encourage you to try and maintain a good reputation. Your reputation in turn depends on how much support you can garner from your peers, contributors and commenters.

The usual problems with online reputation systems apply here of course. Online identities can be discarded when they become tarnished. In some cases that's a feature—there are certainly aspects of my past I'd love to discard that easily—but if identities are easy to come by it weakens the power of reputation. That is countered however, by the fact that it takes time to build a reputation, and discarded articles don't drive traffic. More worrisome is the degree to which people can jazz the system by creating multiple identities that work together to build a buzz and the appearance of consensus. But then, Wikipedia has the same weakness. Even real world systems are susceptible to fake groundswells.

In general, I think the idea has a lot of merit, and it's likely to result in a lot of in-depth and well organized articles (the current Knol screen shot shows a very professional looking page—much nicer than your typical wiki). The big question is whether it will gain the breadth that Wikipedia has, and how it will evolve over time? Who maintains articles when the author loses interest (or dies)? People can make contributions and comments, but they aren't directly editing (or will it allow edits, but with publication under control of the author?). I keep coming back to the first Wikipedia edit my daughter made. She was writing an article on the Oregon Trial (a mock tourism brochure, actually) and in the course of her research she discovered the Wikipedia had the length of the trail wrong—so she fixed it. How easy (and immediate) would that process be using Knol? And what happens when over time there are thirty different articles on the same subject? Have we just recreated the web? (Well, at least we know it won't do away with the need for Google's search engine :-).

Like most Google projects, Knol is starting out on an invitation basis, although in this case I suspect invitations will be a bit harder to get than usual. The initial focus will probably be more on quality than quantity. I think the idea of a reputation-based system, and the appeal of an author-centric system, will make it successful, but I don't see it replacing the Wikipedia. If anything, I think merging the two concepts would make more sense. Combining both authored and crowd-sourced systems into a single repository. It seems unlikely that Wikipedia would do anything so drastically different, and starting a "new" Wikipedia would be hard for anyone to do, so unfortunately it's not likely to happen. I guess we'll all have to get used to searching two locations and sending our edits to two different sites.