evanmeagher

What is Truth on the Internet?

April 8, 2008 at 4:32 pm

This afternoon, The Next Web posted a compelling documentary that premiered on Friday at The Next Web Conference entitled The Truth According To Wikipedia. It’s discusses the importance and trustworthiness of Wikipedia and the Web 2.0 zeitgeist as a whole. It features interview segments with Wikipedia founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, and the firm anti-Web 2.0 rhetoric of Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur, among others.

The idea of truth on the internet fascinates me. Many of my instructors in school have tended to have a serious anti-Wikipedia bent. The majority of my peers fall on the other side of the issue. Can’t say whether this is because of an ingrained technologically progressive idealism or laziness with regard to citation, but the fact of the matter is that the age of collaboration, social-software and other buzzword worthy technologies is upon us. The real questions are how they’re affecting the idea of Truth, how we’re going to deal with them, and what the future holds.

In my opinion, a middle ground must be found. I’m all for the democratization of media to a point, as long as there are enough checks and balances in the system to maintain some semblance of credibility and reason.

Services like StumbleUpon, WordPress, and the sea of social networking websites are great, but the critics of Web 2.0 have a point. At the end of the day, the majority of media in a truly democratic system is noise. For every news-worthy article submitted to digg, there are 40 spam links, 20 dupes, and 10 links to Angelina Jolie photo archives.

If the ideas I’m talking about interest you in the least, definitely check out the documentary. The post on The Next Web features another documentary which I have not yet watched by the same director, IJsbrand van Veelen, about Google. If you happen to watch either, please comment with your thoughts. I’m always interested in what others think about stuff like this.

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Tags: Information, New Media

(Excess) Navigation is inherently bad

September 8, 2007 at 4:35 pm

After letting it sit in my downloads folder for many months after it was dugg, I finally got around to reading more of Bret Victor’s paper on information software design entitled Magic Ink. This thing is a beast of 73 pages and absolutely packed with well laid out information. That being said, I’ve barely read a quarter of it, so expect more posts referencing it.

One interesting point that Victor presents is the notion that interaction (i.e. navigation through a website or software) is in essence detrimental.

“Unless it is enjoyable or educational in and of itself, interaction is an essentially negative aspect of information software. There is a net positive benefit if it significantly expands the range of questions the user can ask, or improves the ease of locating answers, but there may be other roads to that benefit. Many questions can be answered simply through clever, information-rich graphic design. Interaction should be used judiciously and sparingly, only when the environment and history provide insufficient context to construct an acceptable graphic.”

This idea that navigation is inherently bad reminded me of a design trend among large-scale news websites that I find extremely irritating. You know how a lot of big old-media sites tend to break up articles into way more pages than are necessary? For example, sites that break up semi-long articles into half a dozen pages in order to display one viewport’s worth of text at a time and “Top n ” pages like this one.

I HATE that.

Pages like these are so tedious to navigate through that I usually don’t bother reading them. The amount of time and effort wasted by having to click and load separate pages containing little blurbs of information is much greater than the effort taken to scroll down. It’s time old-media websites realize this and stop frustratingly hand-feeding us content.

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Tags: Design, Design Trends, Information