On Web Culture

Anil Dash:

Google’s announcement of Knol shows that they understand some of their key business drivers very well; With as much as 5% of the search result links for popular terms going to Wikipedia pages, a solution to capturing some of that traffic in an environment that Google can control and display ads on makes good business sense. The idea of sharing the earnings from that content with authors is also good business sense. But as with Google Pages (Page Creator), Blogger, Google Notebook, JotSpot, Google Docs/Writely and other tools, Google has not proven that it understands content creation and publishing as well as it understands its core businesses of search and advertising, or even its ancillary tools for communication and collaboration.

Worse, Knol shares with Google Book Search the problem of being both indexed by Google and hosted by Google. This presents inherent conflicts in the ranking of content, as well as disincentives for content creators to control the environment in which their content is published. This necessarily disadvantages competing search engines, but more importantly eliminates the ability for content creators to innovate in the area of content presentation or enhancement. Anything that is written in Knol cannot be presented any better than the best thing in Knol.

Danah Boyd:

…given that page rank algorithms are proprietary, I can’t wait to see what happens when Knol articles are “magically” higher in rank than the About and Wikipedia equivalents.

I just want to acknowledge that the Spice Girls reforming and playing to sold out shows goes well beyond beating a dead horse. This is kind of like hybrid cars: look, here’s something that is a bad thing dressed up to feel good in new marketing! New marketing! Oh man, now that makes it suddenly all better.

That the Spice Girls are playing a sold out 17 night run of shows at the O2 Arena in London speaks to the indoctrination of many young girls during the Spice Girls first run as living Barbie Dolls regurgitating manufactured production-line pop on demand. It was crap then and it is crap now. They are not important, useful or nostalgic. May they harvest the masses for their gullible dollars one last time and cease to exist.

Seeing the Spice Girls in their push-up bras singing about “girl power” is far from empowerment and much more about selling out all over again a generation of women to their right to liberation.

Source: Imeem.com

Source: Rolling Stone

LINKS
Photos from the Reunion Show and More [rollingstone.com]
Led Zeppelin Finds Its Old Power [nytimes.com]

BONUS
500 foot art installation at Tate Modern in London, NZ woman injures herself “I just didn’t see it” [nytimes.com]