Wikipedia, Mitt, Barack, and a Hand Over the Heart

It was just a little skirmish, a mere tit-for-tat in the presidential race. It made headlines for a day and it also made Wikipedia just a little bit better.

To be sure, Romney and Obama infrequently appear in the same sentence as Wikipedia, so this is worth a look. How did the-encyclopedia-that-anyone-can-edit get mixed up with a verbal spit-spat between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama? More to the point, how does this little story illustrate why Wikipedia works, and why it works so well?

Ah, therein lies a tale.

The Grip of the Grid

The grid has a grip on the rhythms of my family. This is not news, really, but it took a new setting, a vacation, to make apparent what should have been obvious.

This August my wife and I went west for a vacation out west, in this case, to Lake Tahoe. It was a good vacation, but not an escape from the familiar. As with prior vacations, this one became a catalyst for reflecting on the role of information technology in our lives.

Perhaps resistance was futile, but mine was pathetic. I submitted my family to the grip of the grid almost from the outset, when I purposely rented a house with a broadband Internet connection. It even had a wireless modem.

This post will talk about how the grid took over our vacation. Ultimately, the grip of the grid never loosened completely. In retrospect, this was not all bad.

What do you mean it was Hiybbing?

I was sitting at my computer one afternoon several days ago staring at a blank screen, when the news walked in. If a computer screen could blare a headline, then it blared something incomprehensible.

Google accused Bing of copying its results, implying the hint of scandal. Google  uncovered the conduct through some clever sleuthing, and was proud of itself. Bing responded with indignity and complete disregard, accusing its rival of exaggerating.

Joshua Gans put his finger on one key aspect of this situation in a recent post, and I would like to take the spirit of his suggestion and push it further. Gans believes we need a new word to describe what happened. I concur.

To be frank, at first this was not obvious to me. With a few days gone, however, calm returned, I began to look back on this episode and grin. There is something rather amusing and absurd about this spat. In the first place, in the greater scheme of things the details behind this episode will not amount to much, so they did not deserve the hyperbole that either Google or Bing brought to their public pronouncements.

Yet, there is something rather engaging about the way Google set a little trap. They used a made-up word, Hiybbprqag, and planted it on the web to catch Microsoft imitating Google’s search results.  I cannot shake the amusing image. Twenty engineers sat in their homes, with instructions to enter some made up words, such as hiybbprqag, and then they anxiously waited two weeks to see if Bing would take the bait.

<sarcasm alert> Just think of what a good Hollywood script writer could do with this material. If you had asked me last year I would not have thought it was possible to make an entertaining Hollywood movie about a self-centered Harvard undergraduate who implements a social networking site more successfully than a few others classmates, but I was wrong. If that movie could work, then  Google’s antics have so much more potential. This is the fodder for a trilogy of movies about high-tech competitive intrigue. Nerd wars here we come. But I digress. <end of alert>

Anyway, let’s all lighten up. It is just a little spat between rivals.

Gans’ observation mixes a serious bit of analysis with tongue-in-cheek amusement (which is Gans usual disposition towards life, and the primary reason he is good for an extended conversation on any occasion. But I digress once again). He observes that our language for competitive rivalry is not appropriate for what we all observe in this spat. That is part of the problem with the news reports about the episode. What we observe is neither imitation in the usual sense, nor quality competition in the usual sense. It is something else, something slightly different, something in need of a new label.

Bravo, Joshua. The spirit of this observation is right. That said, I do not entirely agree with Gans’ implementation, and that is the point of this post. I would like to suggest a new word.

Bing imitates Google: Their conduct crosses a line.

Imitation happens. It is a part of competitive behavior. Sony brings out a new feature on its TV and Samsung does the same thing three months later. Slate.com installs a better tool for soliciting comments, and a month later the same feature shows up at the Huffington Post. Chrysler brings out a minivan and within a two product cycles every other auto assembler has one too. Nobody loses sleep over this.

Moreover, the Internet makes monitoring a rival easier, so imitation involves less hassle and far lower costs than it used to. So it should surprise nobody that imitation happens with some frequency, especially among online competitors, and more often than in competitive contests offline.

Yet, so why does Bing’s imitation of Google’s search results seem to cross some sort of ethical line? Why does Microsoft’s conduct leave me shaking my head, wondering why Bing’s management did not put its nerdy foot down and just say “That is shameful. Let’s not go there.”?

Let’s consider why.

On the Internet, nobody knows you shaved

Many years ago the New Yorker published what has now become a canonical cartoon. One dog sat in front of a computer and commented to another, “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”

I had never connected this simple cartoon to daily life, but that changed recently, when I scraped a razor across my face for the first time in over six years. That is the point of this post. As the post’s title says, on the Internet nobody knew I had a beardless face.

(BTW, in case you are curious…. The carton falls under fair use rules for academic discussion. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_dog.jpg.  But I digress…).

This observation sounds a bit like something Seinfeld would say, and at times this post will feel like an extended episode of Seinfeld. Nothing significant happened after I shaved and, in spite of that, the story kept going.

This story illustrates something elusive about the Internet. The Internet hides some physical traits, accentuates other facets at the same time, and altogether distorts  a person’s public appearance. It almost turns online participants into the online equivalent of a Picasso cubist image. This image resembles the person’s present physical appearance, but it also illuminates many aspects other than the current appearance.

Pass the password

In case you missed it, many passwords are not safe. Not just a little bit. It is a hacker’s paradise out there.

Recent headlines made the point ever so clear. The most popular password in America turns out to be “123456”. Might as well leave the keys to the automobile in the driver-side door, where a thief can easily find it. That is the sort of favor many users are doing for hackers.

This is what passes for news in the Internet today. If you read between the lines, very little about this fact is news. That is worth a comment or two.

More to the point, computer scientists like to observe that the Internet has scaled well. That is not exactly right, and they know it. The technology scaled well at the level of transport infrastructure, but not at the access layer, where most of the passwords are. Internet access is an example of a technology in which the very characteristics that make it popular at small scales are precisely those that make it ill suited to large scale use.

This will take some explaining.

The Internet and magic moments of parental middle age

What do light bulbs, iTunes, and printer cartridges have in common? These all relate to magic moments of parenthood. This requires explanation.

Look, there are many magic moments in middle aged parenthood. Today I would like to mention one type of such moment — call it a moment of “equal altitude.”

This label comes from an old school riddle: If one person starts at the top of a mountain and walks down while another starts at the bottom and walks up, will there ever be a moment in which both are at the same altitude? The answer is “yes”, as long as neither is too slow.

Parenting is full of such moments, that is, magic moments in which the parent’s and child’s skill reach the same altitude. This occurs when a child’s skill rises to just a place where it equals a parents skill, which has declined to the same place.

Credit for noticing this type of moment goes to my older brother. A few years ago he noticed that he and his son ran at the same speed. As my brother put it, his running skills deteriorated while his son’s improved. For a short time they could run together. Now his son is faster.

I see the same thing happening in my family. For the moment I remain faster than my son, but this surely will not last.

What does this have to do with IT? As it turns out, there are many magic moments of equal altitude in the modern Internet. This post highlights a few of them. Would you like to suggest more?

Lying and Tiger and Boors, Oh My! Privacy and Prudence Online.

The New York Times ran an article about careless text messaging by philanderers.  Recent news about Tiger Woods’ dalliances inspired the theme. In case you missed it, here is the article.

Here is my point: The article has one intriguing point, many salacious examples, and missed the big picture because it focused on sexual affairs, not human affairs.

The article starts with an intriguing point: text messages do not disappear easily, and that has consequences for those having an affair. The text messages can be used in a court of law, or in the court of public opinion. In short, text is evidence.

I am a frequent reader of online stories. This one caught my eye because of what it did not say next. It expressed no alarm about the erosion of privacy.  On the one hand, it is obvious why it did not explore that theme. On a deeper inspection, however, that silence is worth understanding and exploring. That is what this post will do.

Connectivity where the buffalo roam

Virtually every August my wife and I leave Illinois, head west, and take our children to places with little or no connectivity. Though lack of Internet and cell phone service, per se’, might attract some people, these do not motivate us to visit unconnected locations. Lack of connectivity just happens to come along with beautiful and remote natural beauty, such as found in mountains and national parks.

We took our first trip of this sort more than a decade ago, after the birth of our first child. The lack of connectivity hardly entered into our conscientiousness then. As I recall, we rented a house in Tahoe and it lacked Internet access. I just let the email pile up on a server at work. I do not recall if we even brought both cell phones with us. It was no big deal.

Things have changed. That goes for both the destination and the dependence on communication. That is the point of these musings. Our recent foibles illustrate how communications became embedded in every day patterns; it has risen far above “no big deal” and become an everyday priority. This post will illustrate how the lack of connectivity turned out to be central to this summer’s vacation experience.

Perhaps others will relate to this experience. I do not sense that our experience was unusual. My wife and I do not differ in many respects from others in our use of on-line and wireless services. The importance of communication just crept up on us.

More concretely, at first it did not matter. Then some years ago we began dialing in from wherever we happened to be on these trips. Then I began to search out cyber café’s. My kids grew accustomed to their father mysteriously leaving every couple of mornings to get a coffee and check his email. This year both my wife and I brought along mobile devices that have voice, email and web capabilities. In other words, demographically speaking, my wife and I are not frontier users of the Internet and cell phones, nor do we employ information technology as intensively as a teenager, but we are not laggards either.