PG explains TED

At least, that's what I think he's doing...

Tree structure and comment threads (a brief observation)

It has been claimed that flat, linear presentation of comments appears to work better for humans than tree-structured comment threads. Without getting too deeply into whether this is true (and if so, why), I would like to offer an observation.

Conversation is never a tree; it is a general directed acyclic graph. In reality, in the commenter's mind, every comment potentially implicitly responds to an arbitrary subset of preceding comments, not to a unique parent and its chain of unique transitive ancestors.

Tree-structured threading — sometimes (erroneously!) called "true threading" — artificially imposes a tree structure on this graph. Flat, linear comment systems do not: each comment appears after all those that precede it topologically in the DAG, and it is up to the reader to reassemble the DAG based on the comments' contents.

It is true, of course, that flat comment systems fail to reify all DAG edges as explicit metadata. However, the nature of these edges is quite subtle and capturing them all explicitly is intractable. Often a comment "responds" to previous comments in indirect ways — for example, simply by omitting some aspect of the argument that has been covered by a previous comment.

(Prompted by a TC article linked off HN.)

Iranian elections (random thoughts prompted by)

I don't have much of value to add to what other, better-informed people are saying about the Iranian election, but I strongly recommend keeping your eye on this continuously-updated HuffPost roundup.

I also want to record some random thoughts that occurred to me as I was sitting at the coffeeshop waiting for my laundry —

1.

While watching the protest footage, I was suddenly reminded of a moment, long ago, while I was traveling in Greece with a bunch of college classmates. Our Greek tour guide was saying something along the lines of "Ancient Greece had the first democratic government. Of course, you may wonder how the birthplace of democracy could keep slaves, but..." etc. There was no hint of irony in her utterance of this sentence. One guy in our group leaned over to me and said, in a low voice, "Does she realize she's talking to Americans? Slavery at the birthplace of democracy? Isn't that how it's done?" I surmised later that the tour guide's patter was probably designed with pan-European audiences in mind.

I don't know what exactly about the Iranian elections made me think of this, except possibly that both remind me of how thoroughly imperfect real-world democracies are, and how many different pieces have to fit together just exactly right to make this form of social organization function to modern standards.

2.

I usually find Huffington Post annoying, but their post seems to be a better guide to what's going on than anything else I can find right now. This sort of real-time but human-curated index synthesizing links to news"paper" stories, blog posts, Twitter posts, and embeddable user-uploaded videos really does seem quite powerful.

It is also a type of media object which traditional outlets are currently ill-equipped to create (and possibly even ideologically opposed to creating). Compare the HuffPost article with the NYTimes equivalent: the latter has less variety, slower updates, and more focus on "official" sources. And this makes the NYTimes version worse, not better.

3.

If Obama determined American foreign policy by listening to everything Joe Lieberman says and making sure to never, ever do that, then he would have a pretty good foreign policy.

Against video

Is anyone else out there annoyed that an increasing proportion of web content — particularly on political blogs, although the disease seems to have spread more broadly — consists of embedded videos or links to video files?

As a communicative medium, video on the web:

• Runs on Flash, and therefore looks lousy.
• Runs on Flash, and therefore is flaky on any platform where Flash is flaky.
• Runs on Flash, and therefore cannot easily be saved offline for future reference.
• Cannot usually be watched muted (no subtitles).
• Cannot be easily quoted, re-edited, or linked-to. Note the large number of people who embed or link to a video and say "watch for 0:28" or "the relevant bit starts at 4:37" (argh). Again, this cuts against the spirit of the web. Video on the web — YouTube comments and "video replies" notwithstanding (har har) — is not a medium of conversation, the way that text or even images can be. We need the <blockquote> and <a href> tags to work with video.
• Cannot be scanned, skimmed, or watched at greater than 1x speed (again, usually no subtitles); so in order to watch a video, I have to sit there for however long the person responsible thought was an appropriate amount of time. This is perhaps the worst scourge of all. I probably read word-for-word no more than 10% of the stuff I look at on the web. On any given page of text, mostly I read the title and then skim for interesting phrases; I only Read The Whole Thing for the rare article that appears to be worth the time. Video makes this behavior impossible: the viewer has to suck the content through the narrow straw of the video player, one paltry second's worth of content in any given second. In three minutes I can read a 200-word blog post and skim 5 more; or in three minutes I can watch one video containing, often, about 200 words of contentful speech. What a waste of my time. (Audiocasts are no better.) To make things worse, many web videos are poorly and amateurishly edited. And those which are professionally edited are often no better, as they have often pointlessly long intros/outros (musical, animated, or both) which are frankly holdovers from a pre-Web era where video producers had to do all branding via interstitials instead of overlays or surrounding dressing (that is, time-division multiplexing branding with the content instead of space-division multiplexing). Just cut to the chase already!

Seriously, for any given video I run across on the web, there's roughly a 99% chance that I'd get just as much or more out of a textual transcript. But video seems to be so damn popular and honestly I don't understand it. Is it just because it's campaign season and everyone feels like reposting ads? Or is it something deeper? My previous post was about how video game fans mistakenly seem to think video games aspire to the condition of cinema. Is it possible that the web has the same mistaken inferiority complex with television? But television seems worse in almost every way. I mean, video's fine for carefully hewn narrative works of entertainment — I like The Wire as much as the next guy — but as a medium of online conversation I find video sorely lacking.