what do people think about a mediated discussion list that is organised
this way?
ie the lurkers have a chance to vote for posts, the posters would then know
how much the list agrees or disagrees with what they say, rather than just
one or two pro-posters and anti-posters?
komninos



Web Sites Begin to Self Organize
By KATIE HAFNER

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SUZANNE CROSS, a 49-year-old paralegal in New Orleans with a passion for
history, is a prolific writer for a Web site called The VinesNetwork, which
bills itself as "the Encyclopedia of Everything, Built by Everyone."
Articles on the site, covering dozens of different topics, are all written
by members.

Since Ms. Cross began writing for The Vines last August, she has produced
nearly 40,000 words about ancient Rome. Her nom de plume is Heraklia Aelius
and her lengthiest work to date, 18,000 words, is a series on the life of
Julius Caesar.

Ms. Cross knows her writing is valued highly by other members of The Vines
(www.thevines.com). In fact, she knows exactly how highly she is prized,
because they give her grades. They rate each of her articles on a scale of 1
to 10. Ms. Cross consistently scores above 9.5, which puts her articles at
the top of their category. As a result, she is featured more prominently on
the site than lower-scoring writers.

The Vines and similar sites for writers operate not as conventional
publications might, with dozens of editors deciding what to publish.
Everything that is submitted is published, and then the members' tastes
determine what articles you can actually find without burrowing into the
site in search of that 0.5 article on someone's theory about other
universes.

"It's really hard to find the really bad stuff on The Vines, said Eden Muir,
a founder of the site. "It's designed to make the bad stuff disappear. It
will be up for a little while, then it will sink like a stone."

On the other hand, articles with the highest ratings bubble to the top, and
aspiring writers like Ms. Cross, whose articles have also attracted notice
from the outside world, are enjoying a level of recognition that might not
have been possible without the Web.

The Vines is an example of an emerging class of what are called
self-organizing Web sites. Such sites are demonstrating that with a dab or
two of well-written code and a bit of careful planning, a site can take a
random collection of links or posts and turn them into a sophisticated,
adaptive system.

Articles submitted to The Vines are read and rated by members. Software
handles the rest, putting the highest-rated articles at the top of their
respective categories. Royalties are based on the popularity of the article.
The Vines also holds periodic contests and awards cash prizes to the writers
with the highest standing, using the automated ranking system.

"The Web in 1996 didn't need to organize itself," said Joey Anuff, who is
editor in chief of a new self-organizing site called Plastic.com. "But we
have a Web now that's measured in billions of pages and millions of users,
so any kind of mechanism that automatically imposes order becomes more
useful and important."

Most efforts at self-organization so far have been fairly simple, but
effective. Several features on Amazon.com, like the list of authors with
books similar to the one being viewed, take what could be a random database
and develop relationships within it. The search site Google, which ranks a
site depending on how many other sites have linked to it, is yet another
example of self- organization at work.

Sites for writers, like The Vines and others, are growing quickly, largely
because of people's pent-up urge to pepper the world with their prose.

The writers certainly aren't driven by money. Contributors to The Vines and
other self-publishing sites are paid a nominal fee. Ms. Cross has been paid
$50 so far for roughly 40,000 words. "Maybe someday it will amount to
something," she said, "but I'm not planning retirement. I'm not even
planning a dinner."

More gratifying than the small payments is recognition from the outside
world. On the strength of her articles on The Vines, Ms. Cross was recently
asked to contribute a chapter to a book on ancient Rome, to be published in
the spring by ibooks, a new imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Carol Skolnick, a 43-year-old copy writer in Manhattan who focuses on
spiritual topics, writes for ThemeStream (www .themestream.com), another
writers' site. Ms. Skolnick has been asked to contribute four of her
ThemeStream essays to the "Chocolate for Women" series of inspirational
books, published by Simon & Schuster.

Another ThemeStream author, A. M. Benneter of Seattle, who writes film
reviews, noticed recently that her review of the Sylvester Stallone film
"Get Carter" had been quoted in national advertising campaigns.

Yet another ThemeStream writer, Laura Shanley, of Boulder, Colo., who
specializes in health and nutrition-related topics, recently attracted the
attention of television producers at work on a medical series. The producers
sent a film crew to interview Ms. Shanley. They were especially interested
in two of her articles, "Cleanup on Aisle Nine: Woman Gives Birth in Grocery
Store" and "Milkmen: Fathers Who Breastfeed."

There is also plenty of potential for abuse on the writers' sites. Recruit a
group of friends to award your writing four stars every 20 minutes or so for
a few days, and your work is bound to drift to the top of the heap.

But Themestream and other sites have developed methods for identifying
so-called click circles, which consist of people who work to inflate one
another's ratings. "We look for people who exhibit certain characteristics,"
said Bill Turpin, a founder of ThemeStream. "We measure the time between
when you load the page and when you rate it, and if you rate everything
good, with no variability in your ratings."

The reverse can happen, too. Richard Bossi, a 42-year-old freelance writer
and former chef in Folsom, Calif., contributes food-related articles to The
Vines under the name ChefCayenne. His ratings are consistently high, but
once in a while he will see one of his articles come under attack by what
some Web writers call retalirators. "People will sink me to the bottom," Mr.
Bossi said. "There's a lot of jealousy."

Another form of adaptive Web site assigns ratings not to submissions
themselves but to members' comments about the submissions. Slashdot, a
three-year-old site for computer buffs that uses such a system, is the model
for the new site Plastic.com. Slashdot operates with a minimum of human
intervention yet gives visitors the opposite impression.

Articles sent to Slashdot (slashdot.org) are culled from the Web. After
passing an initial test of suitability, administered by a Slashdot editor, a
contribution is posted, followed by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of comments
from the site's 305,000 users.

Once you have established yourself as a seasoned Slashdot user, the system
will periodically assign you "moderator" status, a temporary position that
carries with it the right to rate other members' comments on a scale of 0 to
5. Users can then browse through Slashdot using a quality filter. With the
filter set to 3, for example, a visitor will see only those comments with a
rating of 3 or higher.

Slashdot members who receive high ratings also earn special privileges:
their posts start out at a higher rating than usual, and they are more
likely to be chosen as a moderator in the future.

"This last privilege is a brilliant example of metafeedback at work," said
Steven Johnson, the author of the forthcoming book "Emergence: The Connected
Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" (Scribner, 2001) and a vice
president of Automatic Media, Plastic.com's parent company.

"It's the ratings snake devouring its own tail," Mr. Johnson said.
"Moderators rate posts, and those ratings are used to select future
moderators." The most impressive aspect of the Slashdot system, Mr. Johnson
said, is that it not only encourages high quality in submissions to the
site, but it also sets up an environment where community leaders can
naturally rise to the top.

"It's interesting and powerful and it really works," Mr. Johnson said,
adding that only the Internet could give rise to such a system. "It allows
large groups of minds to get together and interact in a way they could never
do before, in any other medium."

Another self-organizing aspect of Slashdot is the fact that because nearly
all of the site's content comes from its readers, its emphasis changes
according to contributors' interests. "The subject matter we cover has
changed over the last couple of years because what our readers are
interested in has changed," said Jeff Bates, a Slashdot founder.

Now, for instance, Mr. Bates said, the site carries far more articles about
civil liberties than it did two years ago. "It's not a decision we made by
sitting down in a smoky room and saying, `All right, we're going to be all
about civil liberties now,' " Mr. Bates said. "But we all agreed, in some
kind of Jungian collective unconscious way, that that topic was a big deal."

Plastic.com, which made its official debut earlier this week, is very
similar to Slashdot, but with a more general audience in mind. While
Slashdot advertises itself as "News for Nerds," Plastic.com will cover
politics, movies, technology, games, music and other topics.

"We're trying to develop a system that can take the whole concept of news
and figure out a way where the people who use the system can themselves
decide what's interesting or not," said Mr. Anuff, who is also co-founder of
Suck.com, a popular online magazine. "The end result will be a
community-defined front page."

A still purer example of a self-organizing site is Everything2.com, created
a year ago by Nathan Oostendorp, 22, a Slashdot founder. Unlike Slashdot and
Plastic.com, which draw heavily on news stories found on the Web,
Everything2 (everything2.com) more closely resembles writers' sites like The
Vines, because it links only to other links within the site.

Yet Everything2 works far more autonomously than sites like The Vines. The
Everything2 software monitors traffic patterns and modifies itself
accordingly, assigning higher status to the more popular links. Users can
also collect "experience points" and vote on one another's posts.

"It's this soup where people can drop in any little bit of information they
want, like their favorite movies or directors or any other ideas," Mr. Anuff
said, "and the only things they can link it to is other people's ideas in
the same soup."

At first glance, Everything2 appears to be a chaotic jumble of random
discourse. Look a little more closely, however, and you will see an
intricately interconnected conversation, touching on topics as diverse as
the languages of India, MTV and melanoma treatments.

"It's not really about anything in particular," said Mr. Oostendorp, whose
site has about 2,000 users a day. "The only thing that's there is the
system. Here's an open database with these rules functioning, and if you
come in and spend time on it, you can gain prestige and reputation within
the system, and that's an attractor to a lot of people."

Web sites with mechanisms for self-filtering, self-ranking and
self-organization are very likely to continue to grow in number. "This is a
fundamental shift in the Web's evolution," said Mr. Johnson, at Automatic
Media. "The first generation of the Web was individual interactivity. And
now, after a period of distraction, it's getting back to the roots of the
idea of interactivity." But this time, he added, the interactivity is
collective.





komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502
cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/
komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 5552 8872
lecturer in cyberStudies,
school of arts,
gold coast campus,
griffith university,
pmb 50, gold coast mail centre
queensland, 9726
australia.