"Algorithmic Authority" (via Clay Shirky)

Clay Shirky recently wrote up some thoughts on algorithmic authority, well worth reading: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/11/a-speculative-post-on-the-idea-of-algorithmic-authority/. When you merge "publishers" and "readers" the People Formerly Known as the Audience are no longer a statistical mass of consumers, but are themselves producers of content with their own authority. This long tail of content production makes the ability to do personalized rankings and authoritativeness far more important. Back when there were three networks, you could rely on hearsay or statistical aggregation of authority to figure out which one had the 'best' news coverage. With a million or a billion, you need something much more fine-grained and low-overhead. Thus "algorithmic authority", though it also depends on user actions -- such as linking to and recommending someone else or their content.

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The problem with creation date metadata in PDF documents

Last night Rachel Maddow talked about an apparently fake NSA document "leaked" to her organization. There's a lot of info there, I suggest you listen to the whole thing:

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/maddow-to-news-orgs-heads-up-for-hoaxes-985491523709

There's a lot to unpack there but it looks like somebody tried to fool MSNBC into running with a fake accusation based on faked NSA documents, apparently based on cloning the document the Intercept published back on 6/5/2017, which to all appearances was itself a real NSA document in PDF form.

I think the main thrust of this story is chilling and really important to get straight -- some person or persons unknown is sending forged PDFs to news organization(s), apparently trying to get them to run stories based on forged documents. And I completely agree with Maddow that she was right to send up a "signal flare" to all the news organizations to look out for forgeries. Really, really, really import…

Personal Web Discovery (aka Webfinger)

There's a particular discovery problem for open and distributed protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and OpenSocial. It seems like a trivial problem, but it's one of the stumbling blocks that slows mass adoption. We need to fix it. So first, I'm going to name it:

The Personal Web Discovery Problem: Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses?
This does sound trivial, doesn't it? And it is easy as long as you're service-centric; if you're building on top of social network X, there is no discovery problem, or at least only a trivial one that can be solved with proprietary APIs. But what if you want to build on top of X,Y, and Z? Well, you write code to make the user log in to each one so you can call those proprietary APIs... which means the user has to tell you their identity (and probably password) on each one... and the user has already clicked the Back button because this is complicated and annoying.

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Twister is interesting. It's a decentralized "microblogging" system based on putting together existing protocols: Bitcoin, distributed hash tables, and Bittorrent. The most interesting part for me is using Bitcoin for user registration and spam control. Federated systems handle this with federated trust, which is at least conceptually simple. The Twister/Bitcoin mechanism looks intriguing though I don't know enough about Bitcoin to really comment. Need to read further.

Abstractioneer by John Panzer

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