Did you ever hear that theory about how if you give a bunch of monkeys long enough on a keyboard they’ll eventually type Shakespeare? Well, it may not be Shakespeare, but the guys at StatSheet.com have found a way to give us in-depth sports coverage of hundreds of sports teams… sans writers.

How? According to a New York Times interview with founder Robbie Allen, the guys at StatSheet have developed a computer algorithm that can analyze statistical data on a game and turn it into charts and even articles, all in real time as a game is being played. The amazing thing about this model is just how productive it can be: the nine-person StatSheet staff claims to churn out articles at a rate of 10,000/month. Altogether this means up-to-date coverage on 347 teams, and still growing.

Why care? Well, while Mr. Allen touts the site’s ability to cover teams that have essentially never been covered before, I worry about the implications that this sort of human-less writing can have for our future. Wasn’t it only several years ago that Thomas Friedman was telling us in The Lexus and the Olive Tree the famous T.J. Rogers quote:

So, in the information age we’re supposed to get ahead by taking jobs that use our brainpower, but now sites like StatSheet.com have found ways to make one’s brainpower irrelevant, too? Yes I know that this technology will surely require programmers, and I do applaud Mr. Allen’s entrepreneurship, but how comfortable can we be with a new technology capable of edging out humans in a brainpower-intensive field? It may be limited to just sports today, but is it such a leap to imagine armies of computer journalists worldwide?

Just to be sure, I took the liberty of checking out StatSheet’s Yale “Handsome Nation” page. The verdict? Well, a quick preview of the Yale vs. Hartford basketball game yields a 138 word blurb that, while it definitely reads like human writing, comes off a bit stilted and with a series of too-short sentences. Phew. I guess it isn’t Shakespeare, yet.

Given the demonstrated benefits of collective collaboration and intelligence for everything from Wikipedia to Firefox, it seems that startups could benefit from more active feedback throughout their early stages. Websites like FeedbackArmy.com, Launchly.com, StartUpLift.com, and InviteShare.com are essentially startups to help startups startup by connecting entrepreneurs with potential users who provide advice, criticism, and general feedback (while also showcasing the sites). Enthusiasts get to view nascent startups develop and potentially adapt based on their responses, while entrepreneurs who take advantage of these services are able to get easy feedback and attention without adding staff or sacrificing equity.

In the secretive, NDA world of startups and venture capital, protecting intellectual property is key, but as Graham notes in this week’s reading, the execution is more important than the idea. In an era where both the most novice YouTube poster and the most acclaimed New York Times journalist now receive immediate feedback on their work through comments from many diverse users, why shouldn’t rapidly evolving businesses do the same? Ultimately, creating open source products will improve code and usability, but issues over how to monetize open source models are still too large. Until then, the increasing number of platforms for entrepreneurs to receive instantaneous reviews is a promising start.

Entrepreneurship is an invigorating profession in which one can foster an incredibly new and potentially useful idea for the betterment of all.  In regards to the virtual world, the possibilities in the professional seem endless and forever growing.  An entrepreneur has no limits to the ideas and projects waiting to be formed in their imaginations and produced for the public.  But, once made and created, not all start-ups and entrepreneurial projects survive.  The “Gobble Effect”, or the tendency for a large company to buy-out smaller start-ups and or ideas, is always on the horizon based on the successes and or failures of a start-up.

Conglomerates are always on the prowl waiting for a successful start-up to brainstorm an innovative idea and/or product in which they can acquire for themselves.  This is much the case for a large company such as Google.  There have been many instances in which Google, having such large teams to create failed products such as Google Wave, are unable to successfully create new and innovative products for users.  Google, being the conglomerate it is, has the ability to buy out other start-ups in order to acquire their product for themselves.  Although the example is somewhat dated, in February of 2010, Google bought the start-up company Aardvark for $50 million in order to acquire the innovative product.  Aardvark was a social search start-up company in which the creators were former employees for Google.  This begs the question, why can Google not create such innovative products themselves?  As stated, Google, like many conglomerates, have difficulty producing such new products because of their inability to agree and comply with their rules and regulations.  The large teams and regulations hinder the conglomerates abilities to innovate for themselves.  So, in turn, they “gobble” up the ideas and products of small companies by offering large buy-outs for the products.

Entrepreneurship is a rough and tumble game.  If one can make it big with their original ideas and products, the big fish come around ready to snag the prize.  With start-ups being bought out left and right, it seems as though the “Gobble Effect” makes the big fish grow more and more powerful.  Although Google has its competitors and problems, they are constantly growing with the acquisitions of vulnerable start-up companies.  The big fish of the Internet.

http://gigaom.com/2010/02/11/google-buys-aardvark-for-50m-report/

Entrepreneurship is completely based on modern day innovations.  These innovations are targeted and publicized, and usually created to have a long life.  But that isn’t always the case.  Aside from digital flops and entrepreneurship failures, many innovative companies and websites sell out in their economic prime.  For a variety of reasons, large digital business conglomerates purchase up-and-coming sites.  Such is the case with Amazon.

Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon, is a leader in business-oriented technology advancements.  He has transformed the American shopping experience.  Amazon is considered the ultimate megasite-superstore.   It’s where you go to get deals on books, clothes, cosmetics, televisions, instruments and more, in the click of a button.  Heeding his own tips on innovation and entrepreneurship, especially those geared towards customers, Bezos grew his start-up from the ground up.  In the process of developing into its current enormity, Amazon had to overtake tons of other innovative start-ups.  One such company is Zappos.

Zappos acquiesced to Amazon for a variety of economic reasons, many of them still unknown.  But the easy mergence raises questions about the stability of digital entrepreneurship.  The Internet is intended to be a free space, filled with endless possibilities, easy access, and an open market.  This atmosphere is what ultimately allows for “entrepreneurship in the digital economy.”  But, with conglomerates so easily consuming the smaller, although still successful startups, tradeoffs unwarranted by the consumer are made.  Although access is made easier, the unique retail experience was jeopardized.  Jeff Bezos reigns over America’s online shopping experience.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100607/0014299706.shtml

Seventeen months after Google submitted its Voice application to Apple’s app store it was finally approved for download.  If it takes over a year to have Apple approve an app from one of the world’s largest companies, with prodding from the FCC, I can’t imagine how long it could take to have an app of my own approved that Apple didn’t like.  Without working for Apple it is hard to say why the app wasn’t approved until now, In Apple’s written response to the FCC, they give some reasons (at the time) why they had not approved the Google Voice app. What seems strange to me today, now that the application has been approved, is that I can’t imagine Google has substantially changed anything in the time since they first submitted the app.

In the first section of Apple’s response to the FCC they claim that “Apple’s innovation has also fostered competition as other companies … seek to develop their own mobile platforms…”  However, one of the reasons Apple gives for why the Google Voice application was not approved yet was because it “appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience,”  I guess what Apple is really trying to say is that as long as their own innovations push other companies to improve it is okay, but if other companies try to improve on their own products that won’t be allowed.  While I don’t have an iPhone or the Google Voice application, if I did have an iPhone and then installed the Google Voice application and suddenly I hated the way my phone now worked, to me at least I would get rid of the Voice app. 

The entire meaning of innovation is to renew something and to build upon something that already exists.  If the public, or users of Apple’s iPhone to be precise feel that the Voice application is a worthwhile improvement that builds upon their phone, more than likely it will push Apple towards the next step.  AOL and CompuServe are perfect examples why a closed box doesn’t last, it becomes outdated and stagnant.

 As a counter example to extremely long road to publication for the iPhone version of Google Voice take LimeWire Pirate Edition.  In late October the recording industry was able to finally obtain an injunction against LimeWire that basically forced it to stop operating and for it to attempt to stop everything related to LimeWire that it could.  But because of the openness of the internet and of the platforms that LimeWire runs on, in less than a month a group of programmers was able to build upon the existing code and modify it to be able to run as a new version and without the ability for LimeWire LLC to shut it down.  I’m sure that no one who downloads and uses this new version of LimeWire is doing so only to share public domain material, but most likely to share copyrighted material. Regardless of the legality of the uses the stark contrast is a perfect example to the differences between a platform that is very locked down and one that is completely open and fosters innovation.  So many of the technologies that are used widely on the internet today, P2P for example, were developed for purposes that weren’t legal but today have many valuable and legal uses.

This past summer, conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart thought he had a big scoop on his site, BigGovernment.com.  What he had instead was a media firestorm in the making.

The story began when Breitbart posted a video in which Shirley Sherrod, a black, Obama-appointed executive in the Georgia state USDA office, was giving a speech at a local NAACP dinner:

“You know, the first time I was faced with helping a white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing. But he had come to me for help. What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland. And here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do.”

Almost immediately, news reports began popping up, in both “new media” sites online and on traditional news outlets, speaking about this reverse-racist Obama nominee.  Drudge Report, Fox News, and conservative blogs ran the story with particular fervor.  Secretary of Agriculture Vilsak essentially demanded that she resign, which she did within hours of the story leaking.

The one hiccup in all of this:  the accusations were false.  The speech was slyly edited to make it appear as if she was giving a different message than she was.  In fact, the story was about how she overcame certain implicit racial tendencies.  In the forty minutes of the speech that wasn’t distributed until days after the resignation, Ms. Sherrod stated:

“Working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who haven’t. They could be black, they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to help poor people – those who don’t have access the way others have.”

Whether the video was edited/misconstrued by Brietbart or his undisclosed source—he insists that it is the latter—this episode shows one of the dangers of “new journalism.”  While there are undoubtedly many of new journalists who hold themselves to traditional standards of integrity, there are no institutions to really enforce them.  Sure, institutions of old media don’t always enforce these standards either (conservatives would point to the Dan Rather affair during the 2000’s; liberals, anything owned by Rupert Murdoch), but at least there is some structure that tries (or pretends) to hold reporters responsible.  The only structural thing suppressing new journalists from leading with their biases or making sure they double check sources is the threat of readers leaving if they put out stories that aren’t up to par.  Sounds great, right?  Free market!  But an increasing number of media consumers today are focused less on true quality of the reporting, but on the ideological slant of the content.  Just ask the execs at Fox News and MSNBC.  It is this polarized media environment that will ensure that people will continue to get their “news” from people like Breitbart.

If you want more information, check these out:

Wiki article:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resignation_of_Shirley_Sherrod

Brietbart’s original story:  http://www.webcitation.org/5rbhsjhzR

Fox News’ coverage:  http://www.webcitation.org/5rQUyfera

The full video of the speech:  http://www.naacp.org/blog/entry/watch-the-shirley-sherrod-video-in-full/

Timeline of the affair:  http://mediamatters.org/research/201007220004

“The news is a form of collective thinking.” I am quoting Hong Eun-taek, the editor-in-chief of the biggest citizen-journalism site, Oh My News. I agree that there are many benefits to collective thinking. Every reader can be a writer, covering all sorts of stories that conventional media would not and could not cover. Every reader is a copy editor, checking facts and spelling errors. However, sometime I wonder if collective thinking can lead us to erroneous thinking.

Tablo (taken from http://www.soompi.com/news/the_end_of_the_tablo_controversy/page/3)

Tablo formed a band called Epikhigh and came out with their first album in 2003 in Korea. Even from debut, Tablo received much attention, not only because his music became very popular, but also because he had a BA and a MA from Stanford. Why would a musician’s academic credentials matter? I don’t know, but I guess it matters in a country where almost every year we hear the tragic news of high school seniors committing suicide over college admissions. However, his Stanford degree soon became the bane of his life.

Sometime this summer a few netizens raised doubts about Tablo’s academic credentials. Led by an internet café called Ta-jin-yo, meaning “We demand the Truth from Tablo”, the doubts spread like a wild-fire on the net. The story made the front page news on national newspapers and Tablo had to post his transcript and other legal documents to prove that he did graduate from Stanford. His friends from Stanford created a facebook page and posted their pictures from college. MBC, one of the three biggest TV stations in the nation even ran a two-part documentary with interviews with Stanford administrators and professors supporting Tablo’s claim. However, the Ta-jin-yo only grew in membership and according to Wikipedia members increase to as many as 190,000 in a few days. The controversy only stopped on October 9^th, when the police confirmed the authenticity of Tablo’s documents and filed an arrest warrant of “whatbecomes,” the manager of Ta-jin-yo. The whole nation was watching this story unfold. (Yes, even the president has been quoted expressing his sympathies to Tablo.)

Tablo’s transcript. The name on the transcript is his legal name. (taken from http://my.opera.com/add830330/blog/mysterious-and-weird-korean-alleged-genius-tablo)

I might be stretching the word a little bit if I were to call the members of Ta-jin-yo citizen journalists. But, the story does illustrate that the line between fact-checking and fact-making are thin. In theory, the wisdom of the crowd should create a self-correcting mechanism but sometimes it simply perpetuates self-fulfilling lies.

One of the strangest paradoxes of social networking is that, in my experience, the people who have nothing to hide are most often the ones who are scared of people finding their dirty laundry.

Okay, okay. I’m talking about myself. But I’m talking about other people too! I got rid of my Facebook for a lot of reasons but the main one is that I don’t want people snooping around in my business and I don’t want my embarrassing moments saved forever on the internet.

The kids who actually have dirty laundry are all over the internet. Most of that crowd from high school, the girls who took pictures of themselves in their underwear and the “rasta” boys smoking weed all plastered their faces and their problems all over the internet. Granted, I’m now at an age where none of that would be a problem (except maybe the weed part), but my dislike for Facebook started when it was. This actually became a problem in my high school because the Peer Leaders, many of whom smoked and drank, had friended the teacher who ran the program. When Mr. K, the advisor and enforcer, looked through their pictures, he found a lot of problems. This led to a lot of angry and hurt students who just didn’t realize that taking shots on camera would be a problem (after they signed a contract saying they wouldn’t drink).

Most of the kids who elected to stay off Facebook were the ones who wouldn’t have had these kinds of problems anyway.

So it’s established. I don’t have a Facebook. I’m a little bit scared of social networking and I like being contrary. Great. No Facebook (had one once). No Myspace. No Twitter. I had a Xanga and posted twice. I have a Linkedin (which is slowly becoming my surrogate Facebook). I have a CollegeOnly which I logged into exactly once and probably never will again. No Tumblr. No Foursquare. Etc.

That said, I have been known to use Google Latitude, which is maybe the scariest of all.

My phone, which is pretty new, keeps track of where I am at all times. AT ALL TIMES. It’s pretty cool though because if I eventually make a friend who also uses it (unlikely), we can keep track of each other. Instead of texting that girl that I’m crushing on (my limerent object if you will), I can just instantly check where she is. Awesome and not at all creepy.

Programs like Google Latitude are at once terrifying but also exciting (and useful, I imagine). In all honesty, I can’t imagine a use for it. If I’m on my phone anyway, why couldn’t I just call my friend to find out where (s)he is? Maybe it would be good if I get trapped under a tree or something and someone has the foresight to think, “Hmm, where is Adam right now? Probably somewhere zany.” And then he or she stared at my location for long enough to realize I was in a forest and not moving. This situation is starting to sound more and more ridiculous.

I do love the idea of being able to find other people, but I don’t love the idea of being found. This is why I have the passwords to my friends’ Facebooks but I don’t have my own. I like to have all the knowledge without having to make a contribution. I like to invade privacy (when that privacy is up for grabs).

Maybe everyone should go off of Facebook. Everyone would be safer (certainly) and happier (maybe, but actually, probably not noticeable so). After all, for the one attractive picture posted of me on Facebook (when I had one), there were maybe 12 absolutely hideous ones posted as well. It is as if people have an uncontrollable urge to post terrible photos.

Then again, how would I find out about dorm parties, house parties, and Toad’s parties? Good question. Maybe there is a safer way. Too bad I don’t have any ideas for what it is because then I’d probably be very wealthy very soon.

Internet privacy is a very controversial issue.  Is compiling already publically available information considered a violation of one’s rights? I would argue that this is not. However I also would argue that it is rather unnecessary to compile private information on individuals.

Lets take a look at the website Spokeo.com.  By typing in my uncle’s name I can find out where he lives, a photo of his house, how much his house is worth, his telephone number, his wife’s name, whether they have kids or not and lots of other seemingly personal information.

While one must realize that all of this information is public in one way or another, why is it necessary to compile it all into a single website? This allows an individual who simply knows another persons name to obtain information about their home and their family.

Consider an extreme example in which a child molester is seeking a future target.  A website like Spokeo.com could facilitate the child molester’s search.  While the issue is not that of invasion of privacy from a legal standpoint , the issue is why is it necessary to make it so easy for an individual to gain this information by simply searching one’s name.

Consider the real life example of the home invasion of the Petit Family in Cheshire, CT.  In this particular case the individuals responsible were looking for money. The two assailants had kidnapped the Petit family and forced Mrs. Petit to go to the bank and withdraw money from her bank account.  In addition the two assailants raped Mrs. Petit and her daughter.  A website like Spokeo.com could facilitate the horrible acts committed by these individuals by making it easier to obtain information.  An individual could identify someone within the community such as Dr. William Petit and suspect that he was wealthy.  Logging on to Spokeo.com would be able to confirm such a suspicion as information about one’s wealth is displayed.  Also an interactive picture of the house from Google Maps is provided that would allow an individual to plan a home invasion from the comfort of their home.

Scalia brings light to this point that despite being legal, it is unnecessary to provide a database that reveals private information. Scalia said, “It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible.”  Perhaps the concept of an individual’s privacy on the Internet should be considered from the perspective of the moral responsibility to protect an individual rather than the viewpoint of legality.

In tern we as users of the Internet must have an obligation to protecting ourselves to the best of our abilities.  Choosing to use social networking sites such as Facebook makes it rather easy to gain information about an individual if proper steps aren’t taken to make this information private. A website like Spokeo.com uses information that is publically available from websites such as Facebook to build an individuals Spokeo profile. As a user of the Internet it is important to read the privacy policies of the websites being used to understand if and how your individual information is protected.

The Internet has made our lives easier in many ways and more difficult in others. Internet security is one of the main problems with the Internet since its birth. Although websites take precautionary steps to protect our information it is important to also protect ourselves and not offer private information over the internet.

In the May 2005 issue of Vanity Fair, Mark Felt, former Associate Director of the FBI, revealed that over thirty years earlier, he provided Bob Woodward with information implicating President Richard Nixon in the notorious Watergate break-ins, finally revealing himself to be the infamously secretive whistleblower, “Deep Throat.” Woodward was completely tight-lipped about his informant’s identity, and Felt repeatedly denied any speculation directed his way. But what would have happened if “Deep Throat” revealed such explosive information not through a reliable journalist in 1972, but, say, on an anonymous Twitter feed in 2010?

One can’t say for sure – an FBI investigation was going on that would ultimately confirm Woodward’s claims, but initially, Nixon’s White House denied the allegations. Today, perhaps the White House would serve up a CyberSLAPP and sue Twitter, as Marty Thomas did on a much more minor scale for an anonymous STD allegation. Of course, for a real suit, the White House would have to prove “Deep Throat’s” allegations were slanderous or libelous in nature: but perhaps in the frantic cover-up that followed the break-ins, the White House would have been to able to put sufficient, convincing pressure on Twitter, and cause them to cave. Perhaps Mark Felt would have been uncovered, and made a scapegoat. Perhaps he would have been tried for perjury. Ironically, the anonymity of confiding face to face in another human being was safer for Felt than anonymously posting online might have been.

The rise of WikiLeaks has allowed for modern analogues of “Deep Throat” to do what they do with relatively little disturbance, but the question of online anonymity is still very much present for the rest of society. If someone had asked me a year ago if I thought anonymity on the web was positive, I would have said no: it allows for a faceless, filterless, cowardly mass of people to unflinchingly harm others. After seeing m00t of 4chan.org speak a few weeks ago, however, my thoughts have shifted: anonymity on the web is not necessarily good, but it is ultimately necessary. For better or for worse (and admittedly often for worse), people need that outlet. 4chan is built on anonymity, but as m00t said, in a handful of serious legal cases, they have had to step in and provide information on their posters. This, in many ways, reflects the way society so frequently works: networks of people often remain tightlipped about one another, unless legal circumstances strongly demand otherwise. Face-to-face human communication, as Felt experienced, is not dependent on a third party provider that may or may not protect you. While it may not keep everyone happy all the time, having anonymous outlets like 4chan on the web keeps the internet grounded in a real, human world.