Peter Reavy’s blog

I don’t like the way Amazon reviews become the property of Amazon. I would prefer if people visiting Amazon could see reviews on private blogs in some way. However, this is not going to happen soon.

Occasionally I would like to comment on a book publicly in a way that might help others to decide whether to buy the book. I’ve belatedly realised that I have no choice but to add my thoughts to Amazon’s site. So I’ve added a link to my Amazon reviews over at the right hand side.

Brian Micklethwait and Guido Fawkes discuss the rise of the Big Media blogs. Blogs at online versions of old media institutions like TV stations, magazines and newspapers. In particular, they speculate that such blogs will not prove economically viable.

I wasn’t aware that bloggers on the Spectator or the BBC or Sky were specifically paid for their blogs, over and above the other journalism or broadcasting they do.

Anyway, I can’t accept Brian’s idea that the penny will eventually drop with newspaper and magazine proprietors and the plug will be pulled on their paid bloggers.

Papers have always lost money and as for TV, the BBC and Sky are hell-bent on interactivity and their blogs must be a relatively cheap way to provide this.

Guido must be rather worried at big media moving on to his turf and he’s right to be.

Speaking personally, I’ve been surprised in 2007 at how my blog-reading has shifted away from the amateurs with an agenda I was reading before, and shifted towards the more objective and fact-checked blogs written by old-school journalists.

Alongside this there has been a growth in free newspaper content this year. More free stuff, and more hard facts to be had for nothing. It tends to push opinion-making further into the background.

The notion of the blogger as “citizen journalist” which circulated a few years back has never developed into anything concrete.

Blogging hasn’t developed the way most of us expected.

Very few important stories have been broken by blogs; they have caught the old media out on very few important issues; they haven’t had as much political impact as we might have thought.

There certainly is a sense of debate opening up due to the internet, but a lot of it is happening in the comments sections of sites run by old-fashioned media. Until a new way of compiling individual opinions arises, then unfortunately the BBC’s Have Your Say and the old media blogs’ comments boxes will rule the roost.

I feel less interested in the blogs I once read. At the end of 2007, it is Samizdata and Guido whose fixed agendas look out of touch rather than the Economist or Nick Robinson who they constantly swing at.

The old media was slow to adapt to the new world, but has now done so more successfully than anyone expected.

Tyler Cowan wonders whether blog comments will survive. Will another form of conversation replace them? He thinks not, but some time ago Technorati’s Dave Sifry predicted

conversations on the Internet would eventually all revolve around every individual having a blog, each individual posting her own thoughts on her own blog, and blogs cross-linking through mechanisms like trackbacks and blog search engines

Contrary to what Tyler implies, this model should allow for the same reading experience, with comments listed below the original post, even if the commentary comes from posts on other blogs.

Tagging is not necessary, as I understand it. Trackbacks (aka pingbacks or linkbacks) make it work.

Unfortunately, trackbacks don’t seem to have taken off, whether due to the technical problems of handling them or due to spamming.

I was going to add this as a comment on Tyler’s site, but will post it here instead as an experiment.

If anyone reading Tyler’s site ever reaches this post, I would appreciate a one-word comment, to prove that trackbacks, linkbacks or similar mechanisms work.

Tim Berners-Lee was in the Economist the other week (subscription is required for the article):

Analogies between the web and the brain have long played a profound role in Sir Tim’s thinking. He is the son of two mathematicians who worked on the team that developed the world’s first commercial, stored-program computer, the Manchester University Mark 1, which was commercialised by Ferranti, a British company, in the 1950s. He remembers his father reading books on the brain, looking for ways to make computers able to identify connections between things, as the brain does.

This line of thought has stuck with Sir Tim and is at the core of one of his most enduring passions, the semantic web. Whereas the web today provides links between documents which humans read and extract meaning from, the semantic web aims to provide computers with the means to extract useful information from data accessible on the internet, be it on web pages, in calendars or inside spreadsheets. Such data—much of it stored in databases that can be queried by humans via the web—is part of what is referred to as the “deep web”, and cannot be accessed by the web-crawler programs used by most search engines.

No one knows exactly how much information is in the deep web, but estimates range from hundreds to thousands of times more than in the “surface web” that search engines currently index, which is thought to contain over 10 billion pages. If semantic-web technology can help computers access even a fraction of this hidden data, and make sense of it, it could make possible new forms of searching and would even allow software to retrieve information and make deductions from it.

This is the clearest explanation of “semantic web” I’ve read.

We think of the internet as there to serve us, but it only works as well as it does because someone thought of a way to order information in a way that a machine can understand. In this view, improving machine comprehension is still the way forward, rather than a solved problem.