a thaumaturgical compendium

I was curious what folks would make of a list of the “The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs.” KF writes about it here, and yes (phew!) I made the cut. But it seems to be the perfect mutual admiration society, and the only credence the list receives is in the quality of its in-links. Now, a fairly large number of reputable folks have linked to it, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A prophecy with ads.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m certainly happy to be included, just as I’m happy to be in Who’s Who, and the like. And having assembled lists of academic bloggers myself, I know someone had to put a bit of work into writing out the list. But the commercial nature of the list makes it suspect: or it least it would if those on the list didn’t seem to endorse it.

And I’m not against awards or top X lists. I’ve made the point before that indicating the good stuff is a worthwhile venture. It’s just that this serves as an example of when peer review can get to be a bit self-serving. I actually read a bunch of these blogs, and they are good stuff. Heck, most of them were on the Crooked Timber blogroll before they did some recent paring, and no one complained about that. So what’s the problem?

Maybe it’s a question of method. No one voted. There is no citation analysis. (Actually, it might be interesting to run this against Technorati. Or maybe create an index from this list that included who they linked most heavily.)

Overall, I get this uneasy feeling that this case says something about how online trust works, including in places like Wikipedia and in major journals. I’m not sure what it says, exactly. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that any one of the blogs on that list doesn’t deserve to be there. But it makes me a bit uneasy in a non-specified way. Maybe it’s no more than the suspicion that they are wheezing the Googlejuice.

I don’t think I can stay in Europe all of September and October without reinforcing the impression some of my colleagues have about my work ethic, which seems to be tied up with how many hours each faculty member spends in his or her office. However, if I could get away, I’d be winding my way to Graz for this workshop:

This workshop aims to develop and bring together a community of researchers interested in discussing the manifold challenges and potentials of knowledge acquisition from the social web.

With the advent of the “Social Web”, a new breed of web applications has enriched the social dimension of the web. On the social web, actors can be understood as social agents – technological or human entities – that collaborate, pursue goals, are autonomous, and are capable of exhibiting flexible problem solving and social behavior. By participating in the social web, both technological and human agents leave complex traces of social interactions and their motivations behind, which can be studied, analyzed and utilized for a range of different purposes. The broad availability and open accessibility of these traces in social web corpora, such as in del.icio.us, Wikipedia, weblogs and others, provides researchers with opportunities for, for example, novel knowledge acquisition techniques and strategies, as well as large scale, empirically coupled “in the field” studies of social processes and structures.

This workshop aims to develop and bring together a diverse community of researchers interested in the social web by seeking submissions that are focusing on understanding and evaluating the role of agents, goals, structures, concepts, context, knowledge and social interactions in a broad range of social web applications. Examples for such applications include, but are not limited to social authoring (e.g. wikis, weblogs), social sharing (e.g. del.icio.us, flickr), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) and social searching (e.g. wikia, eurekster, mahalo) applications.

Deadline has been extended to May 16. Hopefully folks will blog it!
(via Anjo)

Mark Cuban seems to like saying things that make no sense; it’s a good way of getting attention. Heck, here I am blogging about him.

The Dallas Mavericks have banned from the locker room any writer whose “primary purpose is to blog.” The problem is that this rule has been applied to only a single journalist, a blogger for the Dallas Morning News, who happened to also write an article critical of the coach the day he was booted from the locker room.

But Cuban defends his decision in a post that seems contradictory, to say the least. He starts out by saying:

A blogger, a beat writer, a columnists. The medium they use to deliver their content should be irrelevant. No question about it.

Right so far. The job of journalist has very little to do with where your story hits, and a lot more to do with the ways in which you gather it. If you are committing journalism, it doesn’t matter where you are doing it.

By the end of the same post, he not only has a question about it, he has completely contradicted himself:

Do they not know the difference between a blogger and someone who actually writes feature articles on a destination website?

Obviously, no they don’t. Unfortunately, he fails to explain the difference. I suppose he is suggesting that he will only allow people in the locker room who have a certain audience. By that measure, Howard Stearn gets a pass, for example. It seems pretty obvious that they limit access to the locker room to those who are full-time journalists, and probably not every full-time journalist who wants access gets it. The whole “blogging” think is a red herring.

As LAist points out, Cuban seems pretty clueless about the media environment, suggesting that if he lets one blogger in, every high schooler with a MySpace page will want to crowd into the locker room.

The banned journalist, Tim MacMahon, posts his own response, and once again showing Cuban’s perfidies (or at least churlishness) on the issue, brings up Cuban’s own argument against walled gardens expressed less that two years ago (during a talk in which he suggested that Google would be stupid to buy YouTube).

The question remains, though, how professional sports survives without the walled garden. Really, it remains the test case. Cuban, as with all owners, is in the business of selling first, the spectacle, and second, the brand. The only way to price out spectacles is to be exclusionary. But it’s also the best way to become irrelevant in a media environment rich with alternatives.

(via Aaron)

Kevin Lim is one of 20 bloggers up for a $10,000 annual blogging scholarship. Many of the other blogs are also quite good, but Kevin—who is a former student of mine—has the best one, and deserves to win. If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you know that I’m a regular reader of Kevin’s blog, and often find interesting stuff there that I wouldn’t otherwise find.

Unfortunately, it looks like they are deciding who to award it to based on the inherently flawed internet poll. Not only is the willingness to vote a bad indicator of real popularity (if popularity, rather than quality, is their major criterion), let alone quality, but there is far too much opportunity for fraud. Not that I am impugning any of the finalists, only indicating that it’s a bad way to judge things. Right now, for example, the number of votes cast for each blog has no relationship to the Technorati ranking or PageRank, which suggests something is fishy. Moreover, it’s clear that more popular topics are going to win out over more academic topics in broad popularity.

But, who am I to complain, since I encourage my students to court an audience. Good luck to Kevin, and to the other entrants. And bravo to Collegescholarships.org for offering money to student bloggers. Yes, it’s a commercial for them, but this is marketing I can get behind.

This blog is rated… PG?

That doesn’t quite explain why I’m blocked by major filters. The rating changes depending on what is on the main page. I have a feeling that if it slurped up my archives, it would get a different rating, but even my cyberporn category only gets us down to an R. I’m not sure that a blog that fails to reach NC-17 is really playing to its full potential. (via Froomkin)

Over the last several years, a number of researchers have written about the hyperlinked structure of the web and how it changes over time. It appears that the natural tendency of the web (and of many similar networks) is to link very heavily to a small number of sites; the web picks winners. Or, to be more accurate, the collective nature of our browsing picks winners. As users forage for information, they tend to follow paths that are, in the aggregate, predictable.

Huberman notes that not only are the surfing patterns of the web regular, the structure of the web itself exhibits a number of regularities, particularly in its distribution of features. The normal distribution of features found everywhere—the bell-shaped curve we are familiar with—is also found on the web, but for a number of features, the web demonstrates a “power law” distribution. George Kingsley Zipf described a similar sort of power law distribution (Zipf’s Law) among words in the English language, showing that the most frequently used English word (“the”) appears far more often than the second-most frequently used word (“a”), which appears far more often than the third-ranked word, and so on (Yes, yes, I know: Zipf is ranks and so it’s different, but not different enough to matter for this discussion.) This distribution—magnitude inversely proportionate to rank—has shown up in a number of places, from the size of earthquakes to city populations.

The number of “backlinks,” hyperlinks leading to a given page on the web, provides an example of such a distribution. If the number of backlinks were distributed normally, we would expect for there to be a large number of sites that had an average number of backlinks, and a relatively small number of sites that had very many or very few backlinks. For example, if the average page on the web has 2.1 backlinks, we might expect that a very large number of pages have about two backlinks, and a relatively small number to have one or zero backlinks. In practice, a very large number of pages have only a single backlinks, a much smaller number of two backlinks, and an again much smaller number have three backlinks. The average is as high as 2.1 because of the small number of sites that attract many millions of backlinks each. Were human height distributed in a similar fashion, with an average height of, say, 2.1 meters, we would find most of the globe’s population stood under a meter tall, except for a handful of giants who looked down at us from thousands of kilometers in the sky.

Huberman notes that this distribution is “scale-free”; that is, the general nature of the distribution looks the same whether you are examining the entire World Wide Web, or just a small subset of pages. I have been blogging for several years, and each blog entry ends up on its own page, often called a “permalink.” I took a look at the last 1,500 of my posts, to see how many backlinks each one received. The first figure to the right shows a ranked distribution of incoming links, not including the first-ranked posting. The vast majority (1,372) of these 1,500 pages do not have any incoming links at all. Despite this, the average number of backlinks (=”inlinks” in the figure) is 0.9, driven upward by the top-ranked posts. Incidentally, as the second graph shows, the number of comments on each of these entries follows a similar distribution, with a very large number of posts (882) receiving either a single comment or none at all. In order to make these figures more legible, I have omitted the most popular post, entitled “How to Cheat Good,” which was the target of 435 backlinks by August of 2007, and had collected 264 comments.

One reason to explain why such a distribution exists is to assume that there were a few pages at the beginning of the web, in the early 1990s, and each year these sites have grown by a certain percentage. Since the number of pages that were created has increased each year, we would assume that these older sites would have accumulated more links over time. Such an explanation is as unlikely on the web as it is among humans. We do not grow more popular with every year that passes; indeed, youth often garners more attention than age. There are pages that are established and quickly become “hits,” linked to from around the web. While it cannot explain the initial rise in popularity, many of these sites gain new backlinks because they have already received a large number of backlinks. Because of the structure of the web, and the normal browsing patterns, highly linked pages are likely to attract ever more links, a characteristic Huberman refers to as “preferential attachment.”

Take, for example, my most popular recent posting. The earliest comments and links came from friends and others who might regularly browse my blog. Some of those people linked to the site in their own blogs. Eventually, it came to the attention of several widely read and popular blogs, including Michael Froomkin’s “Discourse.net” and Bruce Schneier’s “Schneier on Security.” Someone noticed it on the latter blog, and a link was posted to it from “Boing Boing,” a very popular site with millions of readers. Naturally, many people saw it on Boing Boing and linked to it as well, from their blogs and gradually from other web sites. Eventually, I received emails telling me that the page had been cited in a European newspaper, and that a printed version of the posting had been distributed to a university department’s faculty.

It is impossible for me or anyone else to guess why this particular posting became especially popular, but every page on the web that becomes popular relies at least in part on its popularity for this to happen. The exact mechanism is unclear, but after some level of success, it appears that popularity in networked environments becomes “catching.” The language of epidemiology is intentional. Just as social networks transmit diseases, they can also transmit ideas, and the structures that support that distribution seem to be in many ways homologous.