Till Google Do We Part

Mitsu Hadeishi points out this blog posting that contrasts Google's fill-in-the-blank search boxes for "how can I get my husband to . . ." with "how can I get my wife to . . ." and points out how the rhetoric of the query can be aggregated in a way that is strongly gendered.

Out of the Fingers of Babes

"Google Seeks to Help Children Search Better" gets at a fundamental issue in digital parenting, now that so many children go to the Internet for schoolwork rather than for fun. It explains how search engines like Ask.com have some market advantages for a digital generation that is not actually so digital when it comes to Boolean searches with keywords. It also discusses how Google is developing the Google Wonder Wheel for simplifying and arranging results in formats other than the traditional results list, which has been the standard approach in digital libraries for decades.

Search and De-Story

One of Google's new advertising techniques is to plug their so called "search stories," which are now featured on their own YouTube channel. This strategy could represent a kind of electronic literature approach in which the world's largest search engine is used as the platform for unfolding the narrative. The Wall Street Journal's Kara Fisher argues that they might be "Anti-Bing Commercials in Disguise," because Google so rarely expends resources on advertising its own products despite their dizzying range. The videos use the automated phrase completion feature of Google's search box to create opportunities for both humor and suspense.

As a digital rhetoric person, what I find interesting is the fact that the work of social network sites is shown done by a solo computer user interacting with a search engine and how the montage of supposedly chronologically distinct searches is presented. For example, in "Parisian Love," below, the tool that supposedly brings the couple together is not an online dating site but an animated Google search box.



As Swisher notes of "Newbie," the ads even take a direct dig at MySpace and Facebook, in depicting a grandparent's initial attempts to connect with their much younger descendants that evolve into much more ambitious attempts at vlogging and viral video creation. (Wikipedia, in contrast, is depicted as a trustworthy site in these videos.)



The pathos of "High School" is perhaps the most striking in the group, since it shows the normal social processes that Mimi Ito's team describes in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out as solo ventures.



I would say that the logic of the participatory culture argument of "Potholes" seems to be the most mysterious, since it shows community organizing and leadership as merely a process of dogged research. The model of civic engagement in many-to-many modes of online sociality seems to be fundamentally lost.

"I Never Know What They Mean by 'Better Results'"

It’s odd to realize how many authors of Google-related books I know. In the last year I’ve shared a meal with Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Alex Halavais, and my prep school classmate John Battelle. And I’ve felt particularly fortunate in being able to read sections of Virtualpolitik pal Siva Vaidhyanathan’s forthcoming book The Googlization of Everything before it goes to press. Those who have pre-ordered on Amazon won’t be disappointed, given the book’s lively style and scope of argument.

Vaidhyanathan was the first keynote speaker at this year’s Association of Internet Researchers conference, where he gave a talk about “The Googlization of Everything and the Human Knowledge Project.” He opened by commenting on the folly of trying to publish accurate books about the fast-changing Internet, because in the time of the gestation cycle of an academic book, which is comparable to the time to give birth to a baby elephant, “four to five claims” become “no longer true or relevant.” He even jokingly swore that from now on he would “only write about dead people and poor companies.”

He said that he saw his project as a response to being “unsatisfied with the public rhetoric of Google” and wary of “uncritical veneration,” particularly since “knowing things and connecting with people” can have profound effects, many of them unintended. He described how his interest in Google grew during the Google Book Search project, when he saw the communities of librarians that he had come to know from books like The Anarchist in the Library and his book on intellectual property Copyrights and Copywrongs abandon projects of “confederation” that would facilitate large-scale book digitization projects without considering the “cost to libraries and the souls of libraries.” He didn’t express surprise when Internet enthusiasts like Kevin Kelly waxed ecstatic about Google Book Search, but he was surprised when Lawrence Lessig compared Google’s project to the donation of Jefferson’s library to Congress, a comparison that I argue has its ironies in the Virtualpolitik book. He argued that advocates for copyright liberalization were at first so “immersed in battles” that they were “happy to have a hero.” He also nodded that Google’s seemingly pro-digital rights stands on opening up mobile platforms and network neutrality also earned them considerable good will in his intellectual community.

Before the AoIR audience, he was modest about the rigor of his methodology. He explained that he would “never be able to do a deep ethnography” because of his “minimal access” to Google personnel. He wryly described his method as “sit back in a chair and pontificate.” However, he did describe the process of gathering stories of how people first discovered Google from those like Waldo Jaquith and Clay Shirky. (I first began using Google in the late nineties when I was developing research exercises like this one with university librarians.)

He oriented his talk in the affective dimension of computing by looking at our “agape love not eros love” for Google, which is based on being able to find the Starbucks “with a few clicks” and our thrill with the “collapse of inconvenience.” He also argued that Nicholas Carr was wrong to ask “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” when the key question was really “How are we making Google smarter?” He noted how their proliferation of free services and free software like Google docs, which can apparently finally do footnotes, may buy our loyalty despite a lack of obvious relation since no one ever actually writes “a check to Google.” As he observed, “We are not Google’s customers. We are Google’s products.” Rather than spend time on each one of Googles products, services, and projects, he explained his three areas of inquiry as 1) “the Googlization of communication,” 2) “the Googlization of knowledge,” and 3) “the Googlization of us.” He asked, “How are we sold by Google?”

In understanding what he has called the theological character of the Google mystique, he pointed to the mission statement of the company: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.” He also emphasized how Sergei Brin’s assertion that the perfect search engine would be “like the mind of God” indicates that Google often is presented and presents itself as “omnipresent,” “omniscient,” and “omnipotent.” However, he argues that this is not necessarily the benevolent deity presented by Google CEO Eric Schmidt to NPR listeners recently, who seems to direct a company that is magically without a profit motive, based on his professions to the media. "No company could exist without doing harm!" Vaidhyanathan asserts. The emphasis on "corporate responsibility" rather than "public responsibility" in our current set of cultural conversations indicates to him that these consumer choices are designed to "make us feel better" and mask the fact that "we have failed at politics for thirty years." Instead, he argues, we rely on marketing. (And I, as you can see in the sidebar of columns here, would agree.)

Like Fred Turner, Vaidhyanathan analyzes the language of Google exec Marissa Mayer in particular to understand how Google manages and hypes expectations. Vaidhyanathan looked at how she asserted that it is best to have a a simple interface mask complicated technology that engages 700-1000 computers with an everyday single search query. As Vaidhyanathan puts it, "Google execs say exactly what I want them to say" in plugging amusement, distraction, and entertainment and speaking of their users like children. In Google's pronouncements, he also finds what he calls the "hubris" of "technofundamentalism." At this point he allowed himself a theologicall disquisition about the Lucifer story and the fact that pride was the most serious of the Seven Deadly Sins. He even showed Google image results with "mind of God" and other deity-related searches.

Vaidhyanathan argues that we suffer from a "trust bias" and that surveys show that only 19% of Google users are skeptical of the veracity of the results and only 38% are aware of sponsored listings that they can pick out on the page.

Then he took a moment for a critique of Pragmatism. While acknowledging the philosophical contributions of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Richard Rorty to American thought, he argued that their emphasis on comfortable middles, consensus positions, and constant pressures for revising truth to accommodate a feedback loop of getting along validates verification not veracity. Their philosophical positions also underestimate the importance of power and bias in a given system. (This is also why I will often use the harsher word "Realpolitik" rather than "pragmatism" to explain why I try to engage with institutional ideologies.) This fandom for what is popular rewards the "geeky and webby and new and loud" rather than what might be genuinely significant.

He also argued that Google's rhetoric of the global is deceptive given how localized the search engine's results could be. A search for "God" in his home turf near the University of Virginia brings back information flavored by the Christian Protestantism that makes commercial sense for users to receive. As an example, he pointed to how Google.de has deleted results for "Jew Watch" under the search for "Jew" unlike its U.S. counterpart. Thus he points to the role of human intervention and the exercise of legal compliance and quality control in the quest for what the company calls "better results." "I never know what they mean by 'better results,'" Vaidhyanathan wryly observed.

In discussion with Ken Hillis afterwards, Vaidhyanathan picked up some aspects of his "seduction" argument and gently contested others as they both developed ways that this "universal index" of totality and monopoly might remind one of Plotinus more than William James. Given the NEH-funded project that I've been working on about the conflicting values expressed by government digital rhetoric, I found their argument about the opposition of "transparency" and "privacy" particularly interesting, since they argued that there is a significant difference between a "transparency of the personal" and a "transparency of the public."

Search Me

This list of the "funniest Google suggest results" from Mashable do seem to be particularly humorous examples of the search engine attempting to read its users minds. Based on the heterogeneous character of these results, it doesn't give one much hope for the semantic web.

Getting Construed Over Again

When my Facebook friend Peter M. Shane first pleaded with the Obama administration to "Keep Signing Statements Rare," I was surprised at the revelation that the new president was engaging in this practice, given his background as a professor of Constitutional Law and his public pronouncements in support of the balance of powers. During the Bush administration, these statements were tucked out of sight on the White House website, and it took familiarity with the peculiar verbiage of Executive Branch legalese to find them using the site's search engine. As I explain in "Word Search," the word "construe" could be used to flag the Bush signing statements, which were otherwise not locatable in a single location.

Imagine my horror when I performed the same search with the same keyword on the White House website, and I discovered that this same procedure worked in the Obama administration as well, although it doesn't pick up the first of the signing statements that Shane draws his readers' attention to. (See above. Click to enlarge.) Now notice how a search for the word "signing statement" wouldn't bring up anything at all for a concerned citizen, as if signing statements continued to not be a genre of presidential rhetoric. (See below. Click to enlarge.)

The Rhetoric of Overload

The authors of The Social Life of Information caution against the cynical use of a diagnosis of "information overload" as a way to justify presenting fewer user choices or a narrowed channel that transmits less information of the kind dictated by corporate interests. It is interesting to see how the rhetoric of information overload functions in this advertisement for Bing.com and how different this ad is from the rhetoric of Apple's 1984 ad, which seems to caution against overly homogenized sources of data.

I'll admit to trying out Bing for problem solving with a few sample searches and seeing that it did actually do a better job of getting answers for complex questions like "How do you get to the Bronx from JFK?" than its Mountain-View based rival. But -- much like a younger child -- it didn't know basic facts about relatedness that Google already knows, for example that "Liz Losh" and "Elizabeth Losh" are the same person. (This split personality was actually something that I used to exploit, before Google exposed my secret life as a digital rights activist and blogger to my academic colleagues.)

David Weinberger in a posting on "Bing, Google . . . and Kayak" points out that looking up "Bing" on Google and "Google" on Bing is a somewhat disingenous rhetorical exercise.

Has Amazon Looked Up the Word "Amazon" and Thought About It Just a Little

The big digital politics story of the day is without question Amazon's choice to remove the sales rank numbers from scores of well-regarded books with gay and lesbian themes on the grounds that they don't want "adult" content to be searchable and ranked side-by-side with supposedly wholesome (read hetero) offerings.

According to "Why Is Amazon Removing The Sales Rankings From Gay, Lesbian Books?," the titles even include the judiciously inoffensive children's book Heather Has Two Mommies. There's already a petition to sign and a Twitter hashtag, #amazonfail, which is certainly trending up in recent days. Annoyed digerati are also suggesting a Google bomb in response.

Mark R. Probst reports that he initially noted the omission in gay romance novels and reposted the bizarre bureaucratic e-mail that they received in response to his query about the stripping of the rank from his own work. One of the blogs from the Los Angeles Times notes the weird inequity in keeping American Psycho in their electronic ledger for publishing bean-counting.

As a new author ("only 1 left in stock!") warned about the danger of rank-watching obsessions by others less recently in print, I can attest to the importance of this kind of numeracy and the role of database thinking in writerly circles.

(Thanks to Siva Vaidhyanathan, Ted Striphas, McKenzie Wark, and Ellen Eades -- who points out that if you "type 'homosexuality' into the Amazon search bar, you get 'A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality' and 'You Don't Have To Be Gay' as two of the top three choices" -- for the links.)

Update: Apparently, Amazon is now describing it as a "glitch." Gawker, however, expresses doubt about this explanation.

Big Update: Even better, now the whole snafu appears to be a case of hacking designed to expose security flaws in Amazon's display of ranking algorithm.

Stop Searching Start Questioning

Appearing before UC Irvine's Workshop on Networking Knowledge, Geert Lovink asked if "networked knowledge was possible," since it might be "almost a contradiction," because "networks are eroding institutionalized knowledge production." Lovink also used the occasion to express a strong preference for the terms "information" or "data," on the grounds that he was "always skeptical about knowledge" and considered "access to information not calling for knowledge" fundamentally more democratic.

His official topic was Google, which he introduced by showing his article on "The society of the query and the Googlization of our lives: A tribute to Joseph Weizenbaum." I teach Weizenbaum, who I think tends to be undervalued despite the continuing relevance of his work, in my digital rhetoric classes. For example, his ideas about the shortcomings of automation and distance medicine, his reservations about forming emotional attachments to computational media, and his skepticism about emulating natural language all ring true today.

Lovink argued that the time had come for critique of the search engine from scholars who work on Wikipedia, search engines, and information visualization, and that this research effort needs to involve artists, activists, and designers. (The title of this blog entry comes from one of Lovink's calls to action.) He pointed to the work of his colleague Ned Rossiter, whose work also appears in the wonderful Lovink-edited collection Reformatting Politics, as a scholar "dealing with inherent instability and decline." To give some pre-history about how this area of inquiry formed, Lovink explained "The November Proposal" and showed the website for the Forum on Quaero, a public think tank on the politics of the search engine.

In many ways, Lovink insisted that the best work could only be done by Americans to avoid the appearance of another "Brussels tribunal against Google" and skirt the "danger of resentment and anti-Americanism" in response to a cultural paradigm. He cited Siva Vaidhyanathan's work on "The Googlization of Everything" pre-book book as an obvious example, but also mentioned a number of other writers: Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch and the blog Rough Type, which includes a posting on "The Great Library of Googleplex," the blog of Alex Halavais at a thaumaturgical compendium, and the work of Michael Zimmer.

And yet, Lovink argued, we need to go even farther into exploring the theoretical ramification of "search as the predominant activity" in Internet use. He explained that search engines have "become that banal," like his own laptop on the kitchen table "there to answer questions." However, Lovink affirmed the need for "looking at search as a cultural practice of everyday life" from "the perspective of mentality." "Search engine research remains obscure," he claimed, because search is taken as an "unconscious part" of average people's activities, who can't see it as a "distinct field of study." Ironically, Lovink said, "the importance is growing, but the reflection upon it is really lagging behind." With groups like the World-Information Institute pursuing "deep search" and the rise of the semantic web, he warned that it could be easy to miss a "pertinent crisis of Google algorithm itself." He cautioned that we are ignoring our "dependence on search engines" at our peril, since we no longer maintain the older Internet practices of a "sophisticated culture of linking any more."

He also showed a remarkable document outlining the following specific areas of research: Information Culture, Media Literacy, Politics and regulation, Interface Design and Data Presentation, and Alternative Search. Knowing that UCI would be hosting a panel on open access later that week, he argued that those who were advocates for open access had to become advocates for open search as well, since otherwise search outcomes could still be manipulated by Google, thus holding materials away from view. He argued that this was hardly a pipe dream and compared it to open API or open source blogging software. However, he made it clear that he was not talking about projects like the now practically defunct EU counter search engine, which he described as "absolutely political" and a "funny European drama" involving France and Germany that remained a dream that was to be like Airbus. The attention, Lovink emphasized, should be on "protocols, agreements, standards," because there was a "need for bottom up" consensus that should include "alliances with librarians."

A nice write up from Julia Lupton is here.

Borrowed Time

The New York Times describes the short-lived pardon of Isaac Toussie, when it was revealed that his father, Robert Toussie, had made substantial contributions to the Republican party and to the McCain campaign, the fact of which the Bush administration claimed to be unaware and quickly rescinded the pardon to avoid the appearance of impropriety. This gaffe is surprising, given the role that search engines for political contributions, such as NewsMeat, play in the vernacular data-mining practices of regular citizens, who may be nosy about the political giving habits of their friends and neighbors, and the relative rarity of the Toussie last name as a search term. It is likely that future pardon candidates will be vetted much more completely in this way to avoid future embarrassment to the Executive Branch.

Meat and Greet

Even though the election is over, many are still interested in data-mining activities involving the loyalties of friends and family members at NEWSMEAT, which describes itself as "America's Most Popular Campaign Donor Search Engine" and still shows information graphics such as Fundraising Advantage by State from the previous election and encourages visitors to also conduct research on the giving habits of celebrities.

All Eyes Upon You

In "Sharing Their Demons on the Web," a New York Times reporter describes how psychiatric patients who enter their delusions about "mind control" or "gang stalking" into a Google search window are likely to find those who share their paranoid view of the world and thus refuse medication and treatment for their mental disorders. Although the article compares these websites to those targeted to suicidal ideation, there have not been the same kinds of legal challenges to sites like Gang Stalking World that there have been to the alt.suicide.holiday Usenet newsgroup materials through legislation such as Suzy's Law.

It's important to note that the GSW site is remarkably slick rhetorically with stock photos, multilingual translations, online lectures by Naomi Wolf, and a number of technology-related plugs for using ubiquitous computing technologies against one's phantom persecutors.

Statutes of Liborty

Although Internet users are known for assuming that the state will wither away, given digital culture's predilection for libertarian or communitarian ideologies, the financial crisis of the last few weeks has made clear that nation-states continue to be important, even in the era of ludocapitalism and virtual economics.

At the same time netizens are trying to educate themselves about particular financial acronyms that have suddenly become more relevant to their personal lives, voting decisions, and home mortgages. One of these is the LIBOR or London Interbank Offered Rate, the interest rate that banks charge for borrowing among themselves, which was once considered a stable rate, since it went only to the most preferred lenders in the days before mass bank failures.

Although the LIBOR has gone down again somewhat, a period of skyrocketing numbers created more anxiety for those who now found themselves Googling the term. As this Bloomberg article points out, the search engine giant is noticing new interest in the term among its customers:

Hits on the Internet search engine Google show interest is increasing. In 2007, the U.S. wasn't in the top 10 countries where people searched for the term. Over the past 7 days, the U.S. has surged to No. 2, behind the Czech Republic, where Libor is a common first name. Worldwide, the number of hits rose tenfold from Sept. 7 to Sept. 30. Google Inc., based in Mountain View, California, won't disclose the total.

Chapel of Love

I thought that I would indulge in a little thought experiment: suppose I was a member of a gay couple seeking to wed in California. What could I learn about the process and its associated procedures and products from merely doing Google searches on the web. Of course, there is a certain amount of official information from the state authorities, such as these instructions for clerks, but it is surprising how little how-to advice there is to be had on the web, given the DIY culture that the Internet promulgates.

The search engine results from "gay marriage California" and "gay wedding California" obviously carry different connotations, but the emphasis in both sets of web pages suggested by the Google algorithm is frequently on policy rather than ceremony. For example, although there are many wedding planner sites on the web for straight couples, there are surprisingly few matrimony mavens proffering their services for gay intendeds. Sites like "Plan Your Gay Wedding" offer little more than bullet points, and there are still just about as many results for "gay wedding Canada" as there are for "gay wedding California," despite the state's draw to out-of-state tourists.

Lincoln Logs

Internet search engines are used by many households to locate the exact origins of common or at least memorable quotations, although the presence of sizable amounts of misinformation about the authorship of well-known texts can make these exercises in drawing upon the resources of collective intelligence subject to mistaken attributions. Those who follow the trajectories of such urban legends may be interested in the current debate about the citation of Lincoln by Sarah Palin to explain her prior comments about God's will and the war in Iraq. David Emery presents all the sides weighing in at "Did Palin misquote Lincoln?" from historians to television pundits.

Thanks to Vivian Folkenflik for the link.

"Little More Than a Google Internet Search"

Online research can often be tricky for my students, but I would expect more from experienced political operatives. But according to today's Los Angeles Times in "With Palin revelations, McCain's gamble is clearer" remarkably little checking for breadth and credibility of sources took place within the McCain campaign when they chose VP candidate Sarah Palin.

One Republican strategist with close ties to the campaign described the candidate's closest supporters as "keeping their fingers crossed" in hopes that additional information does not force McCain to revisit the decision. According to this Republican, who would discuss internal campaign strategizing only on condition of anonymity, the McCain team used little more than a Google Internet search as part of a rushed effort to review Palin's potential pitfalls. Just over a week ago, Palin was not on McCain's short list of potential running mates, the Republican said.

Palin has been learning the hard way about Internet "spoilers" who invest large amounts of time studying video, photographs, and documents in meticulous detail to try to prove that events depicted represent a cover-up or staged representation. Palin was forced to publicly acknowledge that her unmarried teenage daughter was pregnant after rumors circulated in the blogosphere that Palin's fifth pregnancy was merely a ruse to obscure her daughters, which reached all the way to an Andrew Sullivan posting, although this mega-blogger later spoiled his own spoiler-dom by providing photos that seemed to indicate that the Republican Alaska governor's version of the story was true. Wonkette has observed a flood of Photoshopped Juno/Juneau parody posters about the McCain campaign, including this one, which they posted.

(Heavenspot Creative Director Chevon Hicks created the image above as a parody/homage to Shepard Fairey's iconic Obama image. He is encouraging people to propagate the image through Facebook.)

Update: It's hard to keep up with the Palin parodies, but comedian Sara Benincasa is using her YouTube channel to be the conduit of the potential Vice President's vlog on subjects such as "CATS!" and "PURSE!"

Selling the Sizzle Not the Steak

There's been a lot of news about new music distribution models this month. Google announced a fully developed mp3 search functionality for Chinese customers. (Screenshots are here, since the site itself seems to be down.) As the Wall Street Journal explains in "Google Aims to Crack China with Music Push," the corporation is trying to gain market share from the more popular Baidu search engine in a venture that would be capitalized by ad revenue and would promise to promote "legal" downloading with the cooperative Top100.cn music vendor.
At the same time Microsoft and Federated Media are touting the launch of CrowdFire in the United States to figure out an economic model for skimming profit from fan culture in a post-song-sale music marketing era. CrowdFire describes itself as a "celebration of live music" that is "built by you." It claims that its platform is designed for "uploading, sharing, and producing" music, as well as for "mixing, mashing, and melding." All around San Francisco, billboards trumpet the first event, OutsideLands in Golden Gate Park.
See John Battelle for more.

Spare Parts Store

My other tourist stop in Northern California required a visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. (I, of course, also had to stop by the corporate headquarters of Google while I was there.) My primary destination was the model of the Babbage Difference Engine, which I had seen on video here.

The heart of the collection centered on the collection of old computers in its Visible Storage exhibit. As a feminist who has written about gender and computing, I appreciated seeing the prototype of what Julia and Ellen Lupton have characterized as an early "computer in the kitchen." The museum explains in its caption, however, that not a single one of the $10,000 kitchen computers advertised in the 1969 Neiman Marcus catalog was ever sold, partly because the interface was apparently so user-unfriendly.

If I had a criticism to make of their museum curation, it would be the tendency to emphasize a history of male accomplishment while ignoring the role that large staffs of exclusively female operators and often programmers played, particularly during the war era for targeting computers, such as the one depicted below.

Graphics software pioneer Peter Samson (shown above, next to a tray taken from the original Google server system) was our host for the afternoon. He argued that -- like radio for a previous generation of consumers -- kit technology that appealed to DIY enthusiasts was critical for eventual large-scale adoption of digital computers, as this early Apple computer indicates.

Samson also emphasized the ironies of the way that innovations in human-computer interaction that were developed at Xerox PARC were traded away in characteristic "fumbling the future" style for the corporation, even though they produced models with document-friendly screens and mouse technologies, such as on the system below. (As regular readers know, my father was a Senior Systems Analyst at Xerox for decades and a witness to these debacles. Sadly my early Xerox 820 personal computer wasn't on display in the museum.)

Apples and Oranges

To illustrate a point about how the Chinese world view may be shaped by search engines from proprietary software companies that are cooperating with the government by filtering results, the classic example is Figure A and Figure B, which show competing visions for the term Tiananmen Square. This rhetorical device was used most recently in a blog at the New York Times. It's interesting to note that even the screened results bring up some potentially subversive content, however.

Watch Words

Any blog with the word "watch" in it -- other than one intended for timepiece fanciers -- sends a clear rhetorical signal from the title at the top of the page. It lets readers know that the author is putting forward a blog of single-minded scrutiny and critique, which can be a dangerous bid if visitors to the site assume that an overly narrow focus compromises objectivity and therefore credibility.

It seems that most "watch" blogs are devoted to corporations (Google Watch, Microsoft Watch, etc.), media organizations (Times Watch, Chicago Media Watch, etc.), or ideological orientations (Fundie Watch, Far Left Watch, etc.). To have a blog devoted to the name of a specific individual is, of course, a form of cultural flattery as well, since it occupies the opposite side of the same coin of cultural celebrity as fandom. For instance, there is a Hitchens Watch, which tells its readers in its banner that "We watch Hitchens, so you don't have to" (much as another "watch" oriented blog, News Hounds, says, "We watch FOX so you don't have to) and two different blogs for one right-wing commentator: Malkin Watch and Michelle Malkin Watch.

So it's interesting to look at Battelle Watch, which is devoted exclusively to Federated Media's John Battelle as an example of the genre. At the top of the page, we see the subject of the blog in an unflattering pose, displaying his middle finger, and the banner reads "because one fucking Internet bubble collapse just wasn't enough." The prose that follows is devoted exclusively to savaging Battelle by claiming that he is a huckster promoting a false economy and his own achievements. Its detail-oriented obsessiveness and spoiler mentality is clearly often off-base: for example, its ah ha moment with a broken link to a Berkeley faculty webpage hardly shows that Battelle is lying about past affiliations. Besides, reporters get information about academic positions wrong all the time; they certainly have in my case. There is also some irony to the fact that the author uses the same type of metric tools that his nemesis claims are important for monetizing the Internet economy, since the Battelle Watch blogroll includes sitemeter, Technorati, and Digg logos, and the HTML page contains metadata for collecting data about readership.

Certainly, there's a critique to be made against Battelle's would-be online media empire that has nothing to do with its economic viability. Although many of the digital rights activists that Battelle supports as bloggers and cites as sources are concerned about citizens' privacy and corporate incursions into the public sphere, it is the promise of deeply troubling information-gathering practices that attracts capital to Battelle's enterprises and by extension to these seemingly alternative media outlets. And Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz have written about other forms of implicit coercion of Internet culture by global finance in The Art of Free Cooperation.

My fear is that what Battelle is talking about isn't actually huckerism or vaporware. There really is a new entertainment and information economy in which people are unwilling to pay directly for content and so will pay indirectly. In Los Angeles, journalists and writers for television and film that I know are only just beginning to realize this. People's individual private search habits and social media profiles already have definite dollar value to marketers, although I always laugh at the targeted ads I see, since I claim to be born in 1910. As search, mail, online video, blogging, social networking, and document sharing becomes absorbed by a limited number of companies, the aggregation of data will only become more totalizing.

However, to think that you can seriously engage in debate by creating one of these "watch"-themed blogs is sort of ridiculous, so I'm not surprised that the author of Battelle Watch eventually gave up on the axe that he was grinding so that now the site has been relegated to the realm of abandoned blogs.

(Thanks to fellow Polytechnic alum Elizabeth Jeffer Anerousis for the link. She -- like me -- went to prep school with Battelle. In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably admit that Battelle also teased me mercilessly as an adolescent -- even though I owned this awesome early PC -- but bought me drinks to make up for it as an adult.)