February 2005 Archives
Apparently, some more definitiveness is required. Not only did I get another (email) response from Dave asking me to further clarify things, but several other smart people also seem to be touting the slippery slope argument as well as demanding that their content be delivered to the user's eyeballs unaltered. "We are on the first step down the road to madness!" they yell. "Where is the line to be drawn?" God knows, I've been aching to draw a line under this whole thing since it started (which was the point of my first post).
Dave specifically requested I answer his email publicly: I shall quote it in its entirety with my interspersed responses, and tackle Scoble, Calacanis, Rubel et al at the same time. While eating a banana. (Excellent value for your attention dollar, that's me.)
Dave: thank you for your response. And that's a genuine thank you, not a sarcastic thank you. That said, I had hoped that, despite the satirical tone, my previous post on this topic at least contained enough solid arguments to be considered slightly intelligent. But perhaps not. My tone (and use of the word "obsession", which I think is at least partially justified since you've been repeatedly focusing on this topic for over a week now) came from an exasperation at seeing you and many others drawn in to a pointless and potentially harmful battle.
Sarcasm and its problems aside, the point that I was trying to make was that (as you pointed out to me with the sentence starting "When you take that first step down the slope...") your prime argument against the AutoLink feature is a slippery slope fallacy. The Google AutoLink feature is a fundamentally useful one now. Since it must be directly activated on each page, it does not defraud the user into fooling them that the content they are seeing is as it was originally created. (Surely they would only press the button if the content was lacking in useful links) It does not remove or replace any existing links or ads. It only does something for which the user has specifically asked.
The argument that you raise in your response to me hinges on what Google/Microsoft/A.N.Other BigCo might do but haven't. To which I say: well, when they do something that actually is fraudulent or dangerous, we'll complain about it then. You are saying that AutoLink legitimises the wilful changing of content in its passage between creator and user; I say that it does nothing that the user has not specifically asked for. And if the user has asked for it, there is no reason why they should not have it; after all, they could save the HTML to their hard drive and edit it for exactly the same effect. (In fact, the user could do far more wilful damage to HTML than the AutoLink feature does.) Content creators should not have to provide specific opt-in permission; if they had to do this for every such feature out there, most of them would never work.
You say you care. I agree, you obviously care, and I don't dispute that. However, we clearly have very different ideas about what is good for the web. My argument is that AutoLink is both harmless to the web and good for users. It is a useful feature and I don't think it does anything worth pulling out of users' hands. You say that it breaks a taboo about content modification; I say that taboo has never existed, and useful content modification (by both clients and servers) has been happening since the web began. It is a vital feature of the web that has been implemented in a thousand different ways, most of them useful (pop-up blockers, screen readers and mobile-format filters are just some of the ones that immediately spring to mind). Please don't devalue this feature by saying that this one harmless user-invoked Google function will somehow lead the web to doom.
I'm not saying that harmful content filters will never appear; they have in the past and doubtless will do again. But, as Cory said, what makes them harmful is not content modification, it's fraud. This distinction must be made, or it may end up scaring people into disabling much of what makes the web great. And this is why I disagree with your fight: I don't think that, in this particular case, it's helping.
UPDATE: Yet another response. (Last one, honest. Really.)
Like many others, I had written off Dave Winer's recent obsession with the new Google toolbar. That was until I actually downloaded and installed the thing, and realised - oh my god! There are some really important points he's raised, and everyone needs to hear them right now!
In honour of the BAFTA award nomination for the BBC's new Internet edition of the classic Infocom computer game, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, we present two titans of the text adventure:
Steve Meretzky and Michael Bywater, in conversation
(on interactive fiction, Douglas Adams and other lost worlds)
As well as working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker's game in 1985, Steve Meretzky is responsible for such other classics of the genre as Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Zork Zero. In 1999 he was named one of the industry's 25 "Game Gods" by PC Gamer magazine. He currently holds the position of Principal Game Designer for WorldWinner, Inc.
Veteran writer and broadcaster Michael Bywater has been involved with interactive storytelling since the eighties, both with Douglas Adams on Infocom's Bureaucracy and the legendary British games company Magnetic Scrolls. He worked with Adams again in the mid-nineties on The Digital Village's Starship Titanic. His third book, Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost & Where Did It Go? (not, as previously suggested, a collection of his columns for The Independent On Sunday) is out now.
Date: Thursday 3rd March, 8:00pm
Price: £4 on the door - all proceeds go to Save The Rhino and The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
Venue: The Brockway Room, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL (map)
Any questions: yoz@yoz.com
Due to the BAFTA-nomination of the BBC's new version of the Hitchhiker's text adventure (as updated by Sean, Shim and Rod Lord), the guy who co-created the original game is coming to town next week.
We think it'd be fab if we could get him in conversation publically, you know, giving a talk about the games he's worked on (such as the legendary Planetfall and Leather Goddesses of Phobos), the history of Infocom, his work at WorldWinner and all that.
Except:
- We need to find a decent central London talk venue for 100-or-so people
- Once we have that venue, we need to announce it
The most suitable date for this is Thursday 3rd March. (There is a small but definite chance that it may be Tuesday 1st instead, but for now, it's the Thursday we're working on.) Obviously, final details will be posted here once I have them.
Can you help? Let us know.
UPDATE: All sorted. Big thanks to James Wallis for the venue suggestion and James Cronin for booking it!
For those of you who haven't yet heard (forgive me, I've been really disorganised and somewhat relying on network effects): The shortest audioblog post evar. (200k mp3)
