Official Google Blog: Finding more high-quality sites in search

change in Google algorithm

Official Google Blog: Finding more high-quality sites in search:

"Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does."

Terranova (concluding)

Network culture: abundance of information, acceleration of dynamics. Conceived as global culture in singular informational milieu traversed by multiple channels. To analyze, look for amplification or inhibition of commonalities and antagonisms.

Explore via:
1. Information theory (signal noise)
2. Network dynamics (ex. open architecture allows for autonomy, localization, differentiation that can generate incompatibilities, technically and politically)
3.  Free labor (digital economy; social factory--knowledge labor is inherently collective)

last two chapters:
4.  soft control/biological computing
5.  communication/mass and migrant

Martin Quigley Digital Networking: I Am Against Posting in the Facebook Group.

Martin Quigley Digital Networking: I Am Against Posting in the Facebook Group.: "Let me be the first to say ON RECORD that I have supported our computer overlords since before their rise to power."

Cellular automata (game of life)

The Cost of Free (Labor): Terranova and Anderson

The readings focus on what is "free" in the digital economy. Anderson thinks in terms of free products. Terranova focuses on free labor.

It might make sense to structure class through a debate between Terranova and Anderson, perhaps with groups coming up with points defending and criticizing their positions (from the perspective of each other, yet Lanier is also relevant here in that he talks about lords and peasants of the cloud and Terranova talks about netslaves--which suggests to me a likely paper topic for your papers that will be due on March 11; more on that later).

Reality is Broken: using games to improve the world - Boing Boing

From a review (by Cory Doctorow) of a new book on games:

McGonigal's Reality is Broken: using games to improve the world - Boing Boing: "Jane McGonigal is one of my favorite thinkers, and it's a delight to have her philosophy neatly distilled to a single book, her just-published debut Reality Is Broken. McGonigal is the leading practicioner in the use of games to motivate people to solve real problems with their lives and with the world.

McGonigal starts from the observation that games compel our attention in great sucking draughts, dropping us into flow-like states in which we compete against the machine and each other -- as well as collaborating -- with all the hours we can find. McGonigal takes us through mechanisms that make games so consuming: a series of tasks that increase in difficulty at a rate that keeps us fully engaged; failure modes that are fun and amusing; activities that feel epic in scale."

If anyone (or group) wants to do a presentation that uses this book and ties it directly to a or some games, let me know. We could eliminate one of the other presentation topics I've listed on the syllabus. Or you could do it for extra credit. Or you could do it instead of a paper. You'd need to let me know by the beginning of April so we can schedule a presentation time.

Can “Leaderless Revolutions” Stay Leaderless: Preferential Attachment, Iron Laws and Networks | technosociology

(This is an excerpt from an interesting piece on the Egyptian revolutions. The argument draws from the powerlaw distributions in complex network that we read about in Shirky.)

Can “Leaderless Revolutions” Stay Leaderless: Preferential Attachment, Iron Laws and Networks | technosociology:

"In fact, if anything, it is quite likely that preferential-attachment processes are part of the reason for the rise of oligarchies and charismatic authorities. Ironically, this effect is likely exacerbated in peer-to-peer media where everything is accessible to everybody. Since it is just as easy to look at one person’s twitter feed as another’s, no matter where you are or where the other person is, it is easier to draw more from the total pool and further entrenching an advantage compared to the offline world where there are more barriers to exposure and attachment. Thus, networks which start out as diffuse can and likely will quickly evolve into hierarchies not in spite but because of their open and flat nature."

Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge

Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge:

"'People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out,' Proctor says. 'But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not.'

After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution. The ur-example of what Proctor calls an agnotological campaign is the funding of bogus studies by cigarette companies trying to link lung cancer to baldness, viruses—anything but their product."