At Supernova 2007, several of us engaged Andrew Keen over his controversial book "The Cult of the Amateur." I will admit to not yet having read the book. Reviews in the blogosphere are scathing, but of course the book is entirely critical of the blogosphere so that's not too unexpected.
At the recent Supernova 2007 conference, they did a session where startups presented, and to mix things up, at the end they told us that one of the companies was fake. Most people clued in, because the presentation had been funny, and had a few obvious business mistakes, but at the same time many commented that it was chosen well, because they would like it to exist. The fake company, ZapMeals claimed it would let you order delivered food from quality at-home chefs and caterers, with a reputation system that helped you choose them by quality. GPS-enabled delivery companies would show you where your meal was as it drove to your home.
Whoops, sorry. I was playing around with a shared to-do list manager in drupal, the software that runs this web site, and it seems to have poorly configured security defaults, so the test entries showed up on the home page. I've made them unpublic now.
For some time I've been warning about a growing danger to the 4th amendment. The 4th amendment protects our "persons, houses, papers and effects" but police and some courts have been interpreting this to mean that our private records kept in the hands of 3rd parties -- such as E-mail on an ISP or webmail server -- are not protected because they are not papers and not in our houses. Or more to the point, that we do not have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when we leave our private data in the hands of 3rd parties.
Continuing our discussion of the goals of voting systems, today I want to write about ballots that let you vote for more than one candidate in the same race. Many people have seen Preferential voting where you rank the candidates in order of how much you like them. This is used in Australia, and many private elections such as for the Hugo Awards. The most widely known preferential ballot is Single Transferable Vote and its cousin the instant-runoff. Many election theorists, however view these as the worst possible system. I prefer the Condorcet method with the modification that the cases where it fails, it is declared a tie, or a second type of election is used to break the tie. While it has been demonstrated that all preferential ballots have failure modes where they choose somebody that seems illogical based on the voters' true desires, this does not have to be true when a tie is possible.
Multiple candidate votes would provide a dramatic improvement in the US -- they are already used in many other places. They would have entirely eliminated the question of minor candidates "splitting" or spoiling the vote. There would have been no question in Florida of 2000, with Al Gore defeating George W. Bush (and at least by the popular vote, some feel that Bill Clinton would have lost to George Bush the elder, and there's strong evidence the electoral margin would have at least been smaller.) This is in fact what prevents them from being used -- there is always somebody in power who is going to conclude they would have lost has there been a multi-candidate ballot in place. Such people will fight it harder than advocates push it.
Small party candidates want it because it gives them a chance to be heard. Voters who like them can safely express that preference without fear of "spoiling" the race among the frontrunners. Given that, small candidates can eventually become frontrunners. In the 2 party system, as we've seen, any time a minor candidate like Ralph Nader gets popular enough that he might actually make a difference, the result is cries of "Ralph, don't run" and a dropping of support from those who fear that problem.
Recently, Lauren Weinstein posted a query for a way to bring a certain type of commentary on web sites to the web. In particular, he's interested in giving people who are the subject of attack web sites, who may even have gotten court judgments against such web sites to inform people of the dispute by annotations that show up when they search in search engines.
I'm not sure this is a good idea for a number of reasons. I like the idea of being able to see 3rd party commentary on web sites (such as Third Voice and others have tried to do) and suspect the browser is a better place than the search engine for it. I don't like putting any duty upon people who simply link to web sites (which is what search engines do) because the sites are bad. They may want to provide extra info on what they link to as a service to users, but that's up to them and should be unless they are a monopoly.
In addition, putting messages with an agenda next to search results is what search engines do for a living. However, in that may be the answer.
From time to time I come up with ideas that are interesting but I can't advocate because they have overly negative consequences in other areas, like privacy. Nonetheless, they are worth talking about because we might find better ways to do them.
The radio had a tribute to Bob Barker, who retires today after 35 years hosting The Price is Right. I always admired the genius of that show in making product placement an essential part of the show -- the show was about the advertisers and made the audience think about how much the product was worth and remember it. I'm surprised we didn't see more copycat game shows. There's plenty of product placement today, but it's largely gratuitous, not integral as this was. The fans on the radio said that while the show was gone, they could always watch reruns.
In my series on the design of new voting systems, I would now like to discuss the question of high voter turnout as a goal for such systems.
Everybody agrees in enfranchisement as a goal for voting systems. Nobody eligible should find voting impossible, or even particularly hard. (And, while it may not be possible due to disabilities, it should be equally easy for a voters.)
However, there is less agreement about trading off other goals to make it trivial to vote. Some voting systems accept that there will be a certain bar of effort required to vote, and don't view it as a problem that those who will not make a certain minimum effort -- registering to vote, and coming down to a polling station -- don't vote. Other systems try to lower that bar as much as possible, with at-home voting by mail, or vote-by-internet and vote-by-phone in private elections. And many nations, such as Australia, even make voting compulsory, with fines if you don't vote.
What makes this question interesting is the numbers. With 50% voter turnouts, or even less if there is not an "interesting" race, not having trivial voting "disenfranchises" huge numbers of voters. The numbers dwarf any other number in election issues, be it more standard disenfranchisements of minorities or the disabled, or any election fraud I've ever heard about. A decision on this issue can be the most election-changing of any. Australia has 96% voter turnout, and it had 47% turnout before it passed the laws in 1924 compelling voting.
Everybody's been discovering things in Google Street View. While Microsoft and Amazon did this sort of thing much earlier, there's been a lot more publicity about Google doing it because it's Google, and it's much more high resolution among other things.
But now that it's out, I expect we'll see web sites pop up where people spot the Google camera-car and report on its location in real time. Allowing people to prepare for its passage.
I expect we'll see: