BookBlog

One of the persistently frustrating things about Amazon’s reader reviews is that they don’t have permalinks. Reviewers can’t respond to other reviews, or even bring in references to reviews of other books. This prevents people from talking to each other. It prevents flamewars, and it prevents community.
Recently, Amazon has added several new “features” that borrow from the forms of social software. A “plog” looks like a weblog. It is a listing, in reverse chronological order, of posts about products you’ve seen or expressed an interest in. Unlike a “blog”, which consists of posts the author has written, a “plog” is a marketing newsletter, with messages from authors and others who are trying to sell you things. Apparently the right to write is bestowed by Amazon upon slected authors or marketers. The recipient of this unnatural hybrid has very little over the content. You can make a comment, and comments even have permalinks. But there is no venue inside the Amazon sprawl to use these links to write back. The user doesn’t have obvious ways to write or link. This is the opposite of user-generated content, it is content inflicted on the user.
In the same family of mutant social software is Amazon’s wiki feature. The so-called wikis appear near the bottom of a well-shaft-long scroll of various product description and review features. If you log in with a username and credit card (!), you can edit a page about that product. I need to upgrade my credit card, apparently, in order to see if the wiki even has a linking feature. It is clear from perusing the top wikis that linking isn’t part of the idiom. People who are writing collaborative commentary about, say, the XBOX, aren’t building a rich , interlinked history and knowledgebase of the games market, trends, and technology, unlike the WIkipedia entry. Instead, the Amazon “wiki” is a short and shallow review that happens to have been written by more than one person. The Amazon XBOX wiki doesn’t even have it’s own link as far as I can tell, all you can do is get to the xbox page and scroll all the way down. This is the opposite of the design pattern of atomic entries, identified by links, and interconnected by links, that allows the Wikipedia entry to grow and deepen with links to Microsoft, components, games, market trends, and related information.
The problem with Amazon’s reviews is that the absense of links inhibits the creation of community. The wikis are antithetical to the concept of building a rich knowledgebase using shared vocabulary as links. The plogs don’t allow user-generated content. In all of these “features”, Amazon’s interface designers have borrowed the appearance social software but missed the meaning and the social dynamic that makes the whole of blogs and wikis to be greater than the sum of the parts.

Here’s the anecdote that was most telling about the wrong track taken by Affective Computing, the book by MIT’s Rosalind Picard about the digitizing of emotion.
Picard writes about giving a lecture as part of an elearning program. She was troubled by the fact that she could not read the emotional responses of people in the audience, unlike a physical lecture hall, when you have visual signals of interest. Her suggestion was to wire the audience, and get a digital readout of the emotions.
In recent years, conferences and remote meetings have developed a different mechanism to read the response othe participants. A simple text chat enables people who are engaged to show and share emotions with smiles praise, questions, or heckling. In great presentations, the backchat is dead silent, as the audience is spell-bound.
Unlike a physical room, where even someone silent may reveal emotional signals through physical signs of boredeom, excitement, or anger, a backchat reveals nothing from someone who is silent. That’s not quite true – someone who wants to telegraph excitement or displeasure in a 3D meeting room will also use backchat signals. In small groups, silence in a teleconference and backchat is also revealing. A group leader can ask someone who is unusually silent to say what they are thinking.
Another big difference is that in a lecture hall, or a remote presentation with backchat, participants have substantial control over the emotions they display. Picard’s hypothetical mood thermometer might pick up on involuntary emotions, or emotions the participant might want to hide. A participant might be feeling angry at a family member, or lustful for a fellow member of the audience, or exhausted because of a small infant at home. Picard’s hypothetical mood-reader would transmit those emotions to the lecturer.
Picard herself notes that all known emotion-detecting technology can be fooled by skilled humans. So emotional surveillance in the virtual classroom would lead to unnatural emotional repression. what’s weirder, the mood thermometer is one-way — the lecturer can see the mood of the audience, but the audience can’t read each other. Backchat is very different from the mood thermometer. Like same-place emotions, backchat allows participants to feed on each other expicitly. This difference comes directly from Picard’s belief that affective computing is “personal” — her model doesn’t include the social aspects of much of human emotion.
The backchat model can be extended to include emoticons, color feedback, and other signals to share emotions with other participants and the leader. These nonverbal signals can complement text chat; allowing people to do the thing they’re good at, combining thoughts and emotions in communication.
Picard’s theories rely on complex tools to automate emotions, rather than on simpler tools that allow people to share thoughts and emotions with each other. I think her theories are misguided, in an interesting and revealing way.

I’ve found three slick websites supporting greenhouse gas policies. This Climate Choices site from the Union of Concerned Scientists, focused on the California Legislative session is nicely designed, links to the bills, has videos and action alerts. But no obvious people, and no direct feedback.
This national site from Environmental Defense focuses on getting signatures in support for the languishing McCain Lieberman bill in Congress. It has a petition and videos, as well as gizmos you can put on your site, including banners, instant message icons, and PC wallpaper. But no humans, no way to provide direct feedback, no obvious way to meet fellow activists. I can see that over 100,000 people have signed the petition in California. Uh, yay, I guess.
This National Resources Defence Council has an action alert, a postcard to send, and a place to sign in and see the history of actions you’ve taken. . But no humans, no way to provide direct feedback, no obvious way to meet fellow activists. I can see that over 100,000 people have signed the petition in California.
These campaigns use the internet as if it were a fancier form of direct mail. A beautiful brochure, with some more widgets and animation. No opportunity to take advantage of the ability to meet to the people behind the scenes and to talk to each other. None of the messy, potentially unpredictable consequences of actual political organizing.