Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It’s a historic statement – and nobody has yet grasped its significance.

Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that:

The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.

A few years ago, Google’s apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as the conduit for a new form of democracy. Google was only too pleased to encourage this view. It explained that its algorithm “relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. ”

That Google was impartial was one of the articles of faith. For if Google was ever to be found to be applying subjective human judgment directly on the process, it would be akin to the voting machines being rigged.

For these soothsayers of the Hive Mind, the years ahead looked prosperous. As blog-aware marketing and media consultants, they saw a lucrative future in explaining the New Emergent World Order to the uninitiated. (That part has come true – Web 2.0 “gurus” now advise large media companies).

It wasn’t surprising, then, that when five years ago I described how a small, self-selected number of people could rig Google’s search results, the reaction from the people doing the rigging was violently antagonistic. Who lifted that rock? they cried.

But what was once Googlewashing by a select few now has Google’s active participation. This week Marissa Meyer explained that editorial judgments will play a key role in Google searches.

It was reported by Tech Crunch proprietor Michael Arrington – who Nick Carr called the “Madam of the Web 2.0 Brothel” – but its significance wasn’t noted. The irony flew safely over his head at 30,000 feet. Arrington observed:

Mayer also talked about Google’s use of user data created by actions on Wiki search to improve search results on Google in general. For now that data is not being used to change overall search results, she said. But in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change.

Now what, you may be thinking, is an “obvious change”? Is it one that is frivolous? (Thereby introducing a Google Frivolitimeter™ [Beta]). Or is it one that goes against the grain of the consensus? If so, then who decides what the consensus must be? Make no mistake, Google is moving into new territory: not only making arbitrary, editorial choices – really no different to Fox News, say, or any other media organization. It’s now in the business of validating and manufacturing consent: not only reporting what people say, but how you should think.

Who’s hand is upon the wheel, here? None of this would matter, if it wasn’t for one other trend: a paralysing loss of confidence in media companies.

Old media is hooked on the drug that kills it

Today, the media organisations look to Google to explain what is really happening in the world. Convinced that they can’t lead, the only option left is to follow. So they reflect ourselves – or more accurately, they reflect the unstinting efforts of small self-selecting pockets of activists – back at us. In the absence of editorial confidence, Google – the Monster that threatens to Eat The Media – now defines the purpose of the media. All media companies need do is “tap into the zeitgeist” – Google Zeitgeist™!

Take this example from a quality British broadsheet.

One journalist on the paper lamented that:

…it’s becoming all too clear at The Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centred on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in.

The digital director of the Telegraph recently suggested the newspaper could work even closer with Google… by subsuming its identity into the Ad Giant. Why couldn’t The Telegraph run off a telegraph.google.com domain and allow Google to take care of all the technology? he mused.

Not all companies have the same suicidal lack of foresight as The Telegraph’s resident guru – but many share the same apocalyptic conclusion.

Today, Google’s cute little explanation of being “uniquely democratic” is no longer present on that page. A subtly different explanation has taken its place – one which acknowledges that in the new democracy of Web 2.0, some votes are more equal than others.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

“The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population”
– Joi Ito

“Igor, to the machines – we have a sample”

One thing seems to have been forgotten following AOL’s careless, but quite magnificent data dump of the internet’s “hive mind” at play this week.

AOL’s assiduous documentation of the private thoughts of over 600,000 web searchers has certainly added some much needed sparkle to a public internet that of late, has been in dire need of a tonic. Now, internet users’ most private thoughts are revealed, in all their banality and creepiness, and we must count ourselves fortunate.

“AOL’s data sketch sometimes scary picture of personalities searching Net,” was the headline USA Today newspaper chose, but this barely conveyed the voyeuristic frisson, or glee we felt as the AOL database made its way across the net.

Nothing in recent months has made the net come alive quite like these queries, and it’s not hard to see why. Recently, the net has been drowning in banality. Billions of identical blogs – some human generated, some machine generated – spring up every day, with identical opinions to match the identical templates each blog hoster seems to provide. This outpouring of new recorded writing has been trumpeted as a new era in human expression. But the truth is, in practice, the consequence of all this is that it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell which is which. Human, or machine?

But let’s focus on an aspect lost in the “scandal”. The thing that everyone has overlooked is that this wasn’t an accidental or negligent data loss by AOL. The search query data was sincerely released in the name of science.

Boffins at AOL Labs published the data for boffins at similar “labs” to peruse.

That’s strange enough in itself, and it should make you yearn for white-coated frontiersmen of yore. Things have changed a bit since then and now.

Behold: the Mighty Atom
Fifty years ago, scientists did things like, oh… split the atom, and deduce the shape of the DNA double helix. Today, working off the hottest and freshest evidence available, scientists proclaim breakthroughs such as “People get more drunk at weekends”.

Once upon a time scientists set out to describe the unknown, and make it understood in
mechanical terms. But now, like a group of well meaning, but slightly simple lifelong in-patients making their first tentative steps into the real world, they venture out to find what’s on their doorsteps.

Now, if science is to have any useful purpose in society, it’s in describing the unknown, not the bleeding obvious. No wonder it has gotten such a bad name recently.

How much easier it would have been, we suggest, if internet companies had from the outset sought what they would eventually publish anyway: the boring and creepy things that people type into their computers.

If good jokes can tell us truths that are otherwise unmentionable, then perhaps satire can offer us a glimpse of the future that futurologists dare not mention.

In fact, it just has.

AOL’s privacy fiasco was foretold by a splendid prank some Register readers will recall from a few years ago, which looks even better this week than it did at the time.

Brian Del Vecchio created a spoof site called AIMSearch, announcing it with the following:

“In November of 2001 AOL Time Warner, responding to a subpoena from Attorney General John Ashcroft, made available to the Justice Department a complete archive of all private conversations held over AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). Through the power of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Google was able to obtain a copy of this entire logfile, totaling over 2 terabytes of conversations previously thought to be private.”

Then came the kicker:

“This unique resource provides insight into the minds of potential anti-American terrorists, cheating spouses, and countless computer neophytes.”

And so we have it. Within a fortnight, Google had objected to the misuse of its trademark, and the prank ceased.

But how much easier it would have been, for this new generation of “scientific” sociologists, who thanks to data sets like AOL’s query database claim to know so much more than we do about ourselves, and who place so much value on the internet’s “hive mind”, (cf. technology utopian Joi Ito) if it had been clear at the time who was speaking to whom.

The author of the prank, Del Vecchio told us, today -

“Back in 2002, just a few months after 9/11, we wondered how people would react if AOL were to cave to demands from the government and massively betray user privacy. We wanted them to feel that betrayal like a kick in the gut, even if just for a brief second,” he wrote.

“Four years later, there is still a huge gap between the privacy that users imagine they have, and the laxity with which service providers like AOL guard that privacy. I think users like 711391 may be feeling that kick in the gut right now.”

Indeed. We all are.

On the other hand, user 711391 (“christian women caught in extramarital affairs”) really needs help.

And spare a thought for the fellow who typed in “how to murder your wife” dozens and dozens of times. Surely, by now, he’ll be feeling some disappointment that the much vaunted internet, this fabled electronic communications medium, hasn’t yet conjured forth an elite squad of Ninja Assassins to finish her off.

People will always type dark and dirty thoughts into computers – we guess that’s why public, open computer networks were invented, as a kind of public sinkhole. But to turn these private writings into a basis for a new sociology seems to be a little presumptive.

In fact, taking anything that’s typed into the public sinkhole seriously ought to worry us. The “murder my wife” chap is a staple of Northern folklore – he may well one day die a peaceful death having done nothing more harmful than forget to feed his cat. Meanwhile, there are law enforcement agencies, who following the same scientific principles of guesswork and presumption as the “AOL scientists”, who may be keen to argue otherwise.

So if science is to devote itself to this collection of data, may we suggest it be careful. Or preferably, find more pressing issues with which to concern itself.

We have very little idea of how a hysteria can grip sensible, rational people – until it strikes. After Orson Welles’s War Of The Worlds radio broadcast, the public reported sightings of Martians. According to urban legend, a farmer’s water tower was peppered with small arms fire, in the belief that it was a Martian spaceship. During the McCarthyite Red Scare, the FBI’s snitch lines rang red hot with reports of suspected un-American activity. And in Hartlepool 200 years ago, the locals tried and hanged a monkey, suspecting it to be a Frenchman.

Here’s more evidence that the Net Neutrality scare is gripping otherwise rational people, presenting with two classic symptoms of mob-itis.

Professor Steven Bellovin of Columbia reported something strange with his Comcast router recently. Bellovin is a veteran crypto researcher with internet RFCs to his name – and not normally someone who needs attention. Last month he announceD:

“My cable modem service was out for eight hours yesterday. Tests I did – ICMP could get through to various destinations; TCP could not – make me believe that the problem is due to Comcast trying to treat p2p traffic differently.”

Of course. What else could it be?

But yesterday Steve noted -

“I’m happy to say I was wrong, to apologize to Comcast for speculating otherwise, and to thank them for discussing this with me further.

See his blog for details.

In fact it was accidental downtime, which is the usual cause of Things Not Working properly. As Comcast explained:

“We encountered a memory limitation on a handful of our core routers in the PA-NJ area triggered by an external routing event. The switching mode of the routers changed in that situation. In this new mode, subscriber traffic was subjected to an internal infrastructure security policy that permitted ping and traceroute but denied TCP traffic. This caused the discrepancy of website reachability based on subscriber location and the idiosyncratic ping and traceroute behavior.”

Patient abandons Occam’s Razor

So why wasn’t accidental downtime the first suspect? That’s the first sign that the mob is in charge. The most rational explanation becomes the least obvious. Occam’s Razor has been put away and forgotten.

The second is more troubling. Danny McPherson observed this week that:

“If Bellovin can make such a misplaced presumption, anyone can.”

Which if true, is even more profoundly disconcerting. Professor Bellovin knows networks inside out. As an AT&T veteran, he knows telco culture. So if this fellow is imagining monkeys to be Frenchmen, it’s another sign of hysteria.

The consequence is the devaluation of technical authority: we’re all as stupid as each other. But once you replace technical experts with competing, Google-powered flashmobs, each frantically emoting to get attention (one lot braying “open”, the other braying “freedom”) rather than using reason, then you’ve simply taken a short cut to an Idiocracy.

Was this one of the goals of the Net Neutrality campaign? Or is it just a by-product? Either way, they seem happy with it.

ISP CEO Brett Glass shared his experience of the Stanford Neutrality hearing last week, and what he describes is nothing if not an irrational mob:

“Most of the crowd that did attend was marshalled by a group called ‘Save the Internet’, which fed them talking points and much incorrect information. The crowd was uncivil and booed anyone who appeared not to favor an expansive and radical definition of Network Neutrality.”

The Neutrality “roadshow” is becoming a travelling circus. With its first stop at the techno-utopian think tank the Berkman Center, and last week at Lessig’s Google-sponsored law department on the West Coast. “Roll up and laugh at the freaks!” (Who think ISPs should be able to manage the networks…) “Throw things at them, too!”

(I experienced something similar at an event that the British Berkman-clone, the Oxford Internet Institute hosted last month at the LSE: it was remarkably boorish and one-sided, with a lynch mob jeering and interrupting speakers.)

I can see why neo-Luddites (like Lessig) have suddenly taken an interest in the issue. It’s good for Google, which loves Neutrality because it diverts the campaigners’ attention from the company’s dubious privacy practices, and its black box economics – both of which damage the internet far more than the PR blunders of clumsy cable companies.

But this cynical exercise in tin-rattling leaves us all a little more stupid.

After pressure over the weekend from Wikipedia’s Il Duce Jimmy Wales, the encyclopedia’s most illustrious fake professor Ryan Jordan has resigned his post at Wikia Inc.

An assiduous editor with the nickname “Essjay”, the 24-year old Jordan passed himself off as an older and more mature character: a Professor of Theology with two PhDs – these impressive credentials even winning him fame in a New Yorker feature. The deception did little to stop Jordan’s meteoric ascent. Wales appointed Jordan to “ArbCom”, Wikpedia’s Supreme Court, and even found him a position at his own commercial venture, Wikia Inc.

The deception was initially unearthed by Daniel Brandt in January, and has been simmering since early February, when Wikipedians themselves put two and two together: the Essjay that Wales had blessed couldn’t be the character that Essjay claimed to be. It breezed into public view last week, with a short disclaimer on the New Yorker’s website.

Wales initially said he was happy with Jordan’s deception, but changed his mind over the weekend, inviting Jordan to resign his positions of responsibility on Wikipedia. The 24-year quit Wikia Inc. yesterday.

(We don’t know if Jordan detached himself from the project completely, however – one blogger advised him to rejoin using a different pseudonym, and, presumably, a new fictional identity. What will it be this time?)

The incident raises more questions than it answers, as neither Wales, Jordan, nor the editors at the New Yorker appears to show a shred of regret for their behavior. And this is what turns a dull story about the procedures of a tediously procedural website into a kind of modern morality play.

We’re so busy being sorry, we’ve no time to apologize

It’s also one that’s thrown up some moments of comic relief.

In its account of the episode today, the New York Times cites Jordan, in his professorial disguise, defending his use of the seminal IDG philosophy textbook, Catholicism for Dummies, explaining —

“This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it’s [sic] credibility.”

(And er, we all know what that’s worth).

On Saturday, Wales said that the fictional persona Jordan had invented, had been used to deceive Wikipedians — a bad thing !

For Wales’ explanation to be plausible, we must therefore assume he hadn’t checked Essjay’s credentials when he promoted him to Arbitration Committee, and was ignorant of the background of his newest staffer when Jordan was employed by Wikia Inc. And he never read the New Yorker…

All these things are possible – but even with the presumption of innocence, it does leave you wondering what goes on in Jimbo’s head.

As for Jordan, he was anything but contrite. He expressed regret only for hurting his fellow Wikipedians’ feelings — not for doing anything wrong — which as Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger recounts, is a defiant non-apology.

And the New Yorker, after being alerted to the deception by Brandt, conducted a thorough investigation — which miraculously exonerated its internal fact-checker and star writer!

This sorry apology was produced:

“We were comfortable with the material we got from Essjay because of Wikipedia’s confirmation of his work and their endorsement of him.”

(In other words, the New Yorker found some fictional characters to endorse another fictional character — which made it all OK. You wonder why they didn’t just take the afternoon off and go and see Lord of the Rings).

The august weekly continued:

“In retrospect, we should have let our readers know that we had been unable to corroborate Essjay’s identity beyond what he told us.”

Ah, yes — wouldn’t that have rather spoiled the story?

So to sum up, everyone’s sorry, but no one owns up to doing anything wrong. There may be a parallel to be drawn with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair – who has apologized for many things in the course of his premiership, but nothing he actually did. It’s easy to emote, but hard to take responsibility, so we shouldn’t be surprised by the Wikipedians aping our ruling class, for whom anything goes, so long as it’s accompanied with a televised sniffle.

Does it matter?

The episode has been quite a calamity for the project: Wikipedia funders now regret their contributions, and senior Wikipedia editors regret their personal investment in the project. May we add three points that are in danger of being overlooked-

Firstly, there’s the issue of “deception” and the New Yorker. Pranking the media should not be considered a crime; it’s an honorable activity. Journalists are deceived on a daily basis — and should be more often, as it keeps us on our toes. When you hear journalists complaining about this onerous obligation — of sifting their sources, you know that privilege has won out over duty. Yet this is something the Pulitzer Prize winner commissioned to write the now notorious feature failed to do.

Make no mistake, Jordan’s appearance in the hallowed pages of the New Yorker was not due to his 16,000 edits on Wikipedia, or his natural charisma, or photogenic charms — it was because his sales blurb claimed that he was a Professor of Theology with four degrees. Who better to fulfill Stacy Schiff’s brief, to marvel at one of the Wonders of the Modern World? Schiff duly delivered what her editors required: a piece of advertising copy.

It stands as a a warning that evangelism and reporting don’t really mix.

Secondly, there’s the very elephant in the room that Schiff failed to mention: the cult-like aspect of Web 2.0-flavoured technology-evangelism that we see in projects like Wikipedia. What did the New Yorker miss? Only the obvious, as reader Michael Paxton pointed out via email:

“I know this will sound ridiculous, but it is beginning to seem that Wikiology is, more and more, taking on the form of the much maligned (pseudo)religion, Scientology.”

“The personality cult, the rejection of conventional truths and realities that challenge the core objectives, the once informal steering groups hardening into a shell of dogma that realises that rejection.

Hell, the moment I read ArbComm I immediately thought of the Scientology’s ‘Sea Org’. Both the role as upholders of the core objectives (on behalf of the leader) and the affected air of hand chosen adjudicators of martial law seem to simply add to the rather scarey similarity.”

Please, oh please, warn us if Jimmy Wales ever starts building a navy!”

Not all idealists on the Wikipedia cause are prepared to let this go. Here’s a crie de coeur from an editor in despair, spotted last week:

We’ve stopped being an encyclopedia. We’ve stopped using common sense. We’ve taken our eye of the big picture and focused on ourselves, our myopic power games, our petty process, and our internal need to keep every one in line. We count sources to determine notability — because we need objective rules. Never mind the fact it is absurd. We fight little wars with [[Daniel Brandt|monsters of out own imagination]]. Never mind the fact they cheapen us. We care not for the damage we do to the real world and its real people, or potential we miss, as long as we can make little rules and have little people follow them.

I’m sick of the little people and their little rules. For now, I want no part of them. I thought there were signs of hope. And I was wrong. + :If this is a direct or indirect result of [[List of Internet phenomena]], I feel some responsibility for the situation. Please e-mail me. [[User:Newyorkbrad|Newyorkbrad]] 18:00, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Which may be the last sound of any conscience the project had ebbing away.

Thirdly, and (almost) finally — there’s the question of what Wikipedia’s place in the world really is.

A few months ago at a social event, your reporter had an epiphany – but then we all need to get out more. A random stranger was expressing delight at finding “stuff” — information, factoids — on the internet, but couldn’t grasp that Wikipedia wasn’t owned by Google. When you type in a word, or question, doesn’t “stuff” just come out of the computer?

It was hard to explain that Wikipedia was a separate entity that wasn’t owned by Google, and even harder to explain — forgive me, dear readers, for I didn’t have the courage to explain this — that it was actually Wikipedia that now “owned” Google.

Here we must salute Shelley Powers, for adding a broader perspective:

I’ve recently stopped using Wikipedia, or stopped using it as an original source. I’ve found two things:

First, Google’s results have degraded in the last year or so. When one ignores Wikipedia in the results, on many subjects most of the results are placement by search engine optimization–typically garbage–or some form of comment or usenet group or some such that’s not especially helpful. Good results are now more likely found in the second or third pages.

Second, I find that I’m having to go to more than one page to find information, but when I do, I uncover all sorts of new and interesting goodies. That’s one of the most dangerous aspects of Wikipedia (aside from the whole ‘truth’ thing), or any single-source of information: we lose the ability to discover things on the net through sheer serendipity.

So the task of “organizing all the world’s information and making it useful” – Google’s mission statement, and the rod which broke its own back — is beyond the capability of the cleverest algorithms humans can devise.

In other words, the popular media conditions us to expect such wonders from technology, that when we type in a word or phrase, good honest wisdom pours out. But Google, with its insane mission to record everything that ever happened ever, can’t cope with this super-abundance of recorded material. So it falls back on the unpaid volunteers of Wikipedia to do its job for it.

But wait, it gets worse!

Where I find Wikipedia useful — and huge areas can be discarded as heresay, tedious arguments between pedants — is when some monomanic fan has lovingly assembled a list derived from his (or her, but it’s usually a him) area of expertise — and then fiercely defended that turf.

That’s sort of what we had with the Usenet FAQs, round about 1995 or 1996, if you want to look at the glass half full. They were often better written, better organized, and free of the banalities of prose that only committee-editing can generate: a kind of pseudo-authoritative waffle that is Wikipedia’s hallmark.

In other words, we’re just about back to where we started — and that’s the really scary thought.

So we can chuck away all the nonsense about “democratization of knowledge”, and “new forms of production”, and similar such drivel offered by the eggheads of Web 2.0 — and conclude that after millions of man hours effort, human volunteers can’t do a much better job than the algorithms, either.

History has its precedents, where human sacrifice prevailed: Stalin may have defeated Hitler by throwing 20 million bodies at the oncoming armies of the Reich, but no amount of volunteer Wikipedians will make the web “better”, by any measure, than it was a decade ago when no one used it.

We’re really back to square one.

Maybe this time, we can forget about such utopian dreams as an “information revolution”, and get some real information professionals involved, such as librarians and editors, to earn their keep. Maybe we can rid ourselves of the illusion that “everyone talking at once” will generate some kind of wisdom, when all Google and Wikipedia have demonstrated is that it’s a giant Tower of Babel. Everyone’s talking alright, but there’s nothing worth listening to.

One character who’s laughing all the way to the bank, though, is Wales himself. Having exhausted the expendable (and unpaid) human labour creating Wikipedia, his stealth project Wikia is set to cream the profits. Wikia already boasts three times the referrals Wikipedia ever had, and finally Jimbo has a success story to take back to his old bond trader pals.

More on this — which is the real deception behind the great Wikipedia adventure — in our next bulletin.

The Patient

A student, Robert Soave writing in The Michigan, the student paper at the University of Michigan.

Clinical Symptoms

The patient is fearful:

“The idea that information can be owned is quite terrifying”

He also fears a loss of identity. Once something is digitally encoded, all rights vanish, according the patient.

“How can one possibly lay claim to information?”

Soave says that creator’s rights are a philosophical impossibility.

“Critics might argue that musicians should be able to own their music because they created it and you should own anything that you create by default.

“Only with the government’s random mandates could anyone actually lay claim to something as abstract as information that is sent over the Internet.”

Soave also displays paranoid fantasies common to the digital utopian:

“Today, the government defends companies that claim to own music. Tomorrow, it may defend people who claim to have invented new feelings and emotions.”

“Such abstract claims of ownership may seem ridiculous, but the government has already stretched copyright laws past any definable form by criminalizing file sharing over the Internet.”

Prognosis

Not good.

(Thanks to Dean Kay for the tip.)

The blog posted a short piece by Le Guin, erroneously slapping a Creative Commons license on it.

“This is incorrect,” wrote her representative. “Ms. Le Guin has not placed this work under such a license and retains these rights. Ms. Le Guin has not given blanket permission for everyone to copy or create derivatives (which can include film, TV adaptations, etc.),” Andrew Burt told SF author Jerry Pournelle.

Robo-bloggers who act as repeaters of Boing Boing material – vital nodes in the Hive Mind, we like to think of them – added to the confusion.

“Numerous copies of her piece have been discovered on the web and attributed to boingboing, illustrating that many people are being mislead by this incorrect application of a Creative Commons license.”

“Given Doctorow’s intense interest in issues of copyright,” added Burt, “it is easy to imagine that he has let his wishes run ahead of reality, and so committed some serious ethical and legal errors, which he might wish to begin to redress by taking the Le Guin piece off his site and putting an apology in its place.”

Boing Boing has since truncated the excerpt, but declined to apologize or remove it. There’s more details on Pournelle’s letters page here.

It’s another example of the confusion generated by Creative Commons licenses – the autistic person’s answer to a problem that doesn’t really bother anyone. If even the most dedicated, foaming-at-the-mouth Commons evangelists can’t use it properly – what hope do us mortals have?

The license-abuser, Cory Doctorow, was recently a professor at the University of Southern California – where he was lecturing students about copyright.

In its first incarnation as a print ‘zine back in the late 1980s, “bOING bOING” (as it was) was one of the most highly regarded chroniclers of cyber culture. The title was revived in blog form as a self-promotional vehicle seven years ago.

This is how it looked before the Trotskyist-style takeover. And this is what it looks like now.

Quite a difference.

But when his obituaries appeared yesterday, there was an odd addition to Hazlehurst’s canon. Apparently he had emerged from retirement a few years ago to co-write the song ‘Reach’, a hit for Simon “Spice Girls” Fuller’s creation S Club 7.

“There could only be one source for this,” suggests Shaun Rolph, who tipped us off.

And yes – you can probably guess what it is:

A couple of seconds in Google takes you to a real, primary source, EMI Publishing, where the correct credit for ‘Reach’ is hidden in plain view: Cathy Dennis and Andrew Todd. The MCPS confirmed to us that the royalties are split 50:50 between the two composers.

So who fell for this?

Step forward BBC News, the Grauniad 2.0, the Independent, the Times, The Stage and Reuters – who all cut and pasted the phoney factoid from Wikipedia without a second thought. The Times‘ obituary writer professed to be surprised by Ronnie’s late-career comeback – but not so surprised he felt the need to check whether it was actually true.

Hats off to the Telegraph, however, for not supping from the poison cup of Web 2.0.

(For you trainspotters: an anonymous edit introduced the hoax into the entries for both Hazlehurst and the song last month; an editor spotted the hoax on the WWiki’s page about the song, but not the page for the composer. Subsequently, diligent Wikipedians even corrected the spelling of “Hazlehurst” – but not the false information itself.)

Recently, Tom Melly wrote here about how lazy hacks could look no further than Wikipedia for biographical information about his late father George – and rightly put the blame for the spread of misinformation on the journalists themselves.

But this is the first case of obituarists being hoaxed in such large numbers. It’s as well Wikipedia hasn’t branched out into the Funerals and Tombstones business.

Yet.

Adds Shaun:

“He was at the Beeb for 20 years and they clearly just spent five minutes on Wikipedia to prepare his obit. I’d feel happier if he had written Reach. I’d like to have seen S Club going through Hebden Bridge in a tin bath.”

With fantastic timing, the Guardian Arts blog asked yesterday, “Could the birth of literary software herald the rise of robotic authors?”.

Er… they’re working on it, folks. Starting with robotic reporters.

That’s if opposition leader David Cameron has his way. A Conservative Party task force examining democratic participation proposes that online petitions should help set the parliamentary agenda. The four proposals above are just some of the open petitions recently accepted by the No.10 Downing Street website. In other words, these are the sensible ones: over 10,000 have been rejected. (This one, for example, was quite inexplicably deemed to be outside the scope of Government.)

“I would like to see a system whereby, if enough people sign an online petition in favour of a particular motion, then a debate is held in Parliament, followed by a vote – so that the public know what their elected representatives actually think about the issues that matter to them,” said Cameron in a canned statement.

Gentlemen – start your scripting engines.

Cameron’s emphasis on the latest online gimmick overshadows the rest of the proposals in the paper Power To The People: Rebuilding Government, which involve checks and balances on an out of control executive. Rather generously, the paper absolves journalists of blaming for creating a culture in which people are bored with politics.

The suggestions from the task force, chaired by smoking hero Kenneth Clarke, won’t necessarily become official policy.

Cameron is the latest politician to use online to grab the healines. Identical clones George Osborne (Con., Google) and David Milliband (Lab., Google) appear to be locked in a private contest to see who can produce the most web-tastic gimmicks. Milliband is winning.

Few publications in the world take themselves as seriously as Time magazine, and Christmas each year finds it at its most unctuous and self-important, as Time chooses its “Person of the Year”. This year, the award for newsmaker of 2006 is given to “You” – the internet user.

But perhaps not you or me. The kind of internet user lauded by Time doesn’t do what most of us do – window shopping on eBay, adding bon mots to Popbitch or Something Awful, or grazing for free music. It has in mind a special idealised kind of “You” – the wiki-fiddling, bloggers of Web 2.0, or the “citizens of the new digital democracy” as Time editor Richard Stengler calls them.

We’ve noted before how the web hype causes people to lose their minds: creating a virtual parallel universe, complete with its own off-the-shelf belief system for the hard of thinking. People don’t pick and choose their causes here because Web 2.0 provides them with all the causes they need – as a pre-packaged slate. So someone who thinks blogs are “democratizing” media will also think Wikipedia is a splendid thing, that copyright is evil, that Wi-Fi will free the people, that Net Neutrality is something to worry about, that economics are being turned upside down by “the Long Tail”, and that mash-ups are inherently creative. In other words, it’s a cult – the latest in a long line of cults to emerge from Northern California.

And it’s a given that it’s all “revolutionary”.

“It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before, burbles Time’s Lev Grossman. “It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

(We doubt if Grossman would dare make such a claim in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward today; Katrina was a natural disaster and public scandal in which we owe the bloggers nothing.)

Even more improbably, Time claims that “you control the Information Age”. This, on the day that news broke of an identity theft involving more than 100 million Americans, and as citizens challenge the pervasive state monitoring by the unholy hairball of telecomms companies and state agencies.

Stengler admits it’s a cop-out. Previous winners have included Hitler and Stalin, but since 2001 Time feels it’s too troublesome to explain that “significant newsmaker” is not a moral endorsement, and so in 2001 shunned Osama Bin Laden for Mayor Guiliani. The most deserving conventional candidate this year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was denied, Stengler explained :

“It just felt to me a little off selecting him,” he said.

Almost alone in offering a note of dissent in the magazine itself is NBC anchor Brian Williams, who warns that the self-indulgence on offer with “personalized” media may result in people getting more stupid, not smarter.

“The danger just might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we fail to meet the next great challenge … because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart,” he writes.

We’ve been over this ground so many times repetition is surely pointless. But may we point out – again – that a “democracy” that excludes most of the population, and where a tiny number of people vote very often, but most don’t vote at all, isn’t really a model for anything.

The American obsession with therapy may almost be considered as a neurosis in its own right. But quacks see promising material in a growing number of internet addicts.

“6 percent to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction, and they are rushing to treat it,” reports the New York Times.

Staff at an Illinois hospital said they see similar signs of withdrawal in net addicts patients as in alcoholics or drug addicts, including “profuse sweating, severe anxiety and paranoid symptoms”.

But is it so harmful?

Something very strange is happening, to be sure. Consider the reaction around the web to a column in the Los Angeles Times this week by linguistics professor Naomi Baron. She expresses concern that the shallow nature of reading on the web diminished her students ability to reason.

She’s isn’t the first to observe this. Academic researchers have found that net use creates a “problem solving deficit disorder” amongst children, and cognitive scientists have discovered the bombardment of email depletes IQ “faster than marijuana”.

Baron wrote,

“If we approach the written word primarily through search-and-seizure rather than sustained encounter-and-contemplation, we risk losing a critical element of what it means to be an educated, literate society.”

Two years ago one would have expected bloggers to leap up on the Professor, admonish her for being a Luddite, and give her a generally thorough ‘Fisking’.

But instead her column provoked an outpouring of empathy.

“It actually destroys brain cells or something, because if I’ve been doing too much online reading, I lose the patience for following a sustained or subtle argument, or reading a complex novel,”

wrote Body and Soul blog’s ‘Jeanne D’arc’.

“As a fellow sufferer, lemme tell ya, the phenomenon that Jeanne D’arc is describing up there is real, and more than a little worrisome when you first notice it. It just feels so … organic, somehow, like you’ve damaged a part of the brain itself,”

sympathizes blogger Jack O’Toole.

” I’ll run into a sentence that suddenly reminds me of something — and then spend the next minute staring into space thinking of something entirely unrelated to the book at hand. Eventually I snap back, but obviously this behavior reduces both my reading rate and my reading comprehension,”

writes journalist and blogger Kevin Drum.

“Is this really because of blogging? I don’t know for sure, but it feels like it’s related to blogging, and it’s a real problem. As wonderful as blogs, magazines, and newspapers are, there’s simply no way to really learn about a subject except by reading a book – and the less I do that, the less I understand about the broader, deeper issues that go beyond merely the outrage of the day.”

To which one wag comments -

“I’m not sure if that argument really has any validity….Hey look, a bird!”

Ironically, in a recent survey, 48.7 per cent of bloggers cited ‘therapy’ as their primary reason for maintaing a weblog. So this is a ‘cure’ that’s turning out to be worse than the disease. Says Jeanne D’arc –

“I need to get away from the fast and facile and let my brain heal. It actually feels like recovering a bit of humanity that I forgot I had.”