SCN: Self-organizing web sites

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

===========================

Web Sites Begin to Self Organize  

(Katie Hafner, NY Times, excerpts)---Suzanne Cross, a 49-year-old 
paralegal in New Orleans with a passion for history, is a prolific 
writer for a Web site called The VinesNetwork, which bills itself as 
"the Encyclopedia of Everything, Built by Everyone." Articles on the 
site, covering dozens of different topics, are all written by members. 
 
Ms. Cross knows her writing is valued highly by other members of 
The Vines (www.thevines.com). In fact, she knows exactly how 
highly she is prized, because they give her grades. They rate each 
of her articles on a scale of 1 to 10. Ms. Cross consistently scores 
above 9.5, which puts her articles at the top of their category. As a 
result, she is featured more prominently on the site than lower-
scoring writers.  

The Vines and similar sites for writers operate not as conventional 
publications might, with dozens of editors deciding what to publish. 
Everything that is submitted is published, and then the members' 
tastes determine what articles you can actually find without 
burrowing into the site in search of that 0.5 article on someone's 
theory about other universes.  

"It's really hard to find the really bad stuff on The Vines, said Eden 
Muir, a founder of the site. "It's designed to make the bad stuff 
disappear. It will be up for a little while, then it will sink like a stone." 

On the other hand, articles with the highest ratings bubble to the top, 
and aspiring writers like Ms. Cross, whose articles have also 
attracted notice from the outside world, are enjoying a level of 
recognition that might not have been possible without the Web.  

The Vines is an example of an emerging class of what are called 
self-organizing Web sites. Such sites are demonstrating that with a 
dab or two of well-written code and a bit of careful planning, a site 
can take a random collection of links or posts and turn them into a 
sophisticated, adaptive system.  

Articles submitted to The Vines are read and rated by members. 
Software handles the rest, putting the highest-rated articles at the 
top of their respective categories. Royalties are based on the 
popularity of the article. The Vines also holds periodic contests and 
awards cash prizes to the writers with the highest standing, using 
the automated ranking system.  

"The Web in 1996 didn't need to organize itself," said Joey Anuff, 
who is editor in chief of a new self-organizing site called 
Plastic.com. "But we have a Web now that's measured in billions of 
pages and millions of users, so any kind of mechanism that 
automatically imposes order becomes more useful and important."  

Most efforts at self-organization so far have been fairly simple, but 
effective. Several features on Amazon.com, like the list of authors 
with books similar to the one being viewed, take what could be a 
random database and develop relationships within it. The search 
site Google, which ranks a site depending on how many other sites 
have linked to it, is yet another example of self- organization at 
work.  

Sites for writers, like The Vines and others, are growing quickly, 
largely because of people's pent-up urge to pepper the world with 
their prose.  

The writers certainly aren't driven by money. Contributors to The 
Vines and other self-publishing sites are paid a nominal fee. Ms. 
Cross has been paid $50 so far for roughly 40,000 words. "Maybe 
someday it will amount to something," she said, "but I'm not 
planning retirement. I'm not even planning a dinner."  

More gratifying than the small payments is recognition from the 
outside world. On the strength of her articles on The Vines, Ms. 
Cross was recently asked to contribute a chapter to a book on 
ancient Rome, to be published in the spring by ibooks, a new imprint 
of Simon & Schuster.  

There is also plenty of potential for abuse on the writers' sites. 
Recruit a group of friends to award your writing four stars every 20 
minutes or so for a few days, and your work is bound to drift to the 
top of the heap.  

But Themestream and other sites have developed methods for 
identifying so-called click circles, which consist of people who work 
to inflate one another's ratings. "We look for people who exhibit 
certain characteristics," said Bill Turpin, a founder of ThemeStream. 
"We measure the time between when you load the page and when 
you rate it, and if you rate everything good, with no variability in 
your ratings."  

The reverse can happen, too. Richard Bossi, a 42-year-old freelance 
writer and former chef in Folsom, Calif., contributes food-related 
articles to The Vines under the name ChefCayenne. His ratings are 
consistently high, but once in a while he will see one of his articles 
come under attack by what some Web writers call retalirators. 
"People will sink me to the bottom," Mr. Bossi said. "There's a lot of 
jealousy."  

Another form of adaptive Web site assigns ratings not to 
submissions themselves but to members' comments about the 
submissions. Slashdot, a three-year-old site for computer buffs that 
uses such a system, is the model for the new site Plastic.com. 
Slashdot operates with a minimum of human intervention yet gives 
visitors the opposite impression.  

Articles sent to Slashdot (slashdot.org) are culled from the Web. 
After passing an initial test of suitability, administered by a Slashdot 
editor, a contribution is posted, followed by dozens, sometimes 
hundreds, of comments from the site's 305,000 users.  

Once you have established yourself as a seasoned Slashdot user, 
the system will periodically assign you "moderator" status, a 
temporary position that carries with it the right to rate other 
members' comments on a scale of 0 to 5. Users can then browse 
through Slashdot using a quality filter. With the filter set to 3, for 
example, a visitor will see only those comments with a rating of 3 or 
higher.  

Slashdot members who receive high ratings also earn special 
privileges: their posts start out at a higher rating than usual, and 
they are more likely to be chosen as a moderator in the future.  

"This last privilege is a brilliant example of metafeedback at work," 
said Steven Johnson, the author of the forthcoming book 
"Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and 
Software" (Scribner, 2001) and a vice president of Automatic Media, 
Plastic.com's parent company.  

"It's the ratings snake devouring its own tail," Mr. Johnson said. 
"Moderators rate posts, and those ratings are used to select future 
moderators." The most impressive aspect of the Slashdot system, 
Mr. Johnson said, is that it not only encourages high quality in 
submissions to the site, but it also sets up an environment where 
community leaders can naturally rise to the top.  

"It's interesting and powerful and it really works," Mr. Johnson said, 
adding that only the Internet could give rise to such a system. "It 
allows large groups of minds to get together and interact in a way 
they could never do before, in any other medium."  

Another self-organizing aspect of Slashdot is the fact that because 
nearly all of the site's content comes from its readers, its emphasis 
changes according to contributors' interests. "The subject matter we 
cover has changed over the last couple of years because what our 
readers are interested in has changed," said Jeff Bates, a Slashdot 
founder.  

Now, for instance, Mr. Bates said, the site carries far more articles 
about civil liberties than it did two years ago. "It's not a decision we 
made by sitting down in a smoky room and saying, `All right, we're 
going to be all about civil liberties now,' " Mr. Bates said. "But we 
all agreed, in some kind of Jungian collective unconscious way, that 
that topic was a big deal."  

Plastic.com, which made its official debut earlier this week, is very 
similar to Slashdot, but with a more general audience in mind. While 
Slashdot advertises itself as "News for Nerds," Plastic.com will 
cover politics, movies, technology, games, music and other topics.  

"We're trying to develop a system that can take the whole concept of 
news and figure out a way where the people who use the system 
can themselves decide what's interesting or not," said Mr. Anuff, 
who is also co-founder of Suck.com, a popular online magazine. 
"The end result will be a community-defined front page."  

A still purer example of a self-organizing site is Everything2.com, 
created a year ago by Nathan Oostendorp, 22, a Slashdot founder. 
Unlike Slashdot and Plastic.com, which draw heavily on news 
stories found on the Web, Everything2 more closely resembles 
writers' sites like The Vines, because it links only to other links 
within the site.  

Yet Everything2 works far more autonomously than sites like The 
Vines. The Everything2 software monitors traffic patterns and 
modifies itself accordingly, assigning higher status to the more 
popular links. Users can also collect "experience points" and vote 
on one another's posts.  

"It's this soup where people can drop in any little bit of information 
they want, like their favorite movies or directors or any other ideas," 
Mr. Anuff said, "and the only things they can link it to is other 
people's ideas in the same soup."  

At first glance, Everything2 appears to be a chaotic jumble of 
random discourse. Look a little more closely, however, and you will 
see an intricately interconnected conversation, touching on topics 
as diverse as the languages of India, MTV and melanoma 
treatments.  

"It's not really about anything in particular," said Mr. Oostendorp, 
whose site has about 2,000 users a day. "The only thing that's there 
is the system. Here's an open database with these rules 
functioning, and if you come in and spend time on it, you can gain 
prestige and reputation within the system, and that's an attractor to 
a lot of people."  

Web sites with mechanisms for self-filtering, self-ranking and self-
organization are very likely to continue to grow in number. "This is a 
fundamental shift in the Web's evolution," said Mr. Johnson, at 
Automatic Media. "The first generation of the Web was individual 
interactivity. And now, after a period of distraction, it's getting back 
to the roots of the idea of interactivity." But this time, he added, the 
interactivity is collective.  

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company





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