Poblish: crowdsourcing new policies, and why blogging has to change

This is the second in a series of posts on the subject of ‘How the semantic web can crowdsource high-quality judgment and improve policymaking’. Last week I made the case for using existing content – blog posts; Wikis, like Debatepedia; and visual debate-mapping tools, like Debategraph – as a knowledge base to drive new policy exercises, and introduced you to my new project, Poblish, which demonstrates this.

This time, I’m going to cover how existing content – the blogosphere, in particular – is currently used, and just how bad the situation is.

Blogging and personality

Individualistic political blogging dominates the collaborative alternatives because of its quantity rather than its quality, and because of personality rather than because of the arguments made. ‘Reputation’ within the blogging world is too often self-fulfilling, and technological limitations – combined with the laziness of politicians and the media – have created an oligarchy of ‘go to’ bloggers.

While the minds of journalists are not entirely closed to newcomers, it’s undeniable that the opinions of a couple of dozen ‘power bloggers’ carry more weight than all others put together. Where the strong preferences of a small minority dominate the weak preferences of the majority, democracy suffers.

Not only does this conceal the richness and diversity of the blogosphere in favour of accepted wisdom and conventional categories (‘Labour bloggers say…’), it corrupts both readers and writers. The priority of these bloggers gradually turns towards reportage – being ‘newsworthy’, breaking stories, filtering gossip, tracking trends, and developing their own ‘brand’ and influence. As their fame spreads, they draw traffic away from less well-connected blogs, encouraging readers to leave comments among a sea of others, rather than take the time to develop their thoughts more fully elsewhere.

While aggregators held out the possibility of providing readers with a single window onto a wide range of blogging opinion, the result has generally been to tie bloggers to their own political party.

Lack of interactivity

The level of interactivity on blogs has barely advanced during the past five years. Although all blogging platforms now offer a commenting facility, and some allow comments to be nested below others, comments continue to sit apart from the original article. They cannot refer to particular sections in the original, even though useful contributions are far more likely to relate to specific sections of the original rather than the generality. (Services like this do exist, but they are very far from mainstream blog tools.)

By being outside the context of the original, the mental pressure – to understand the original, and to constructively contribute – is taken off the contributor, but shifted onto the original blogger, who must attempt to understand and ‘re-contextualise’ the commenter’s addition before he can move his own argument on. What should be an interactive process becomes a sequential one, and all the slower and more time-consuming as a result.

Finally, the noise-to-signal ratio of comments can become enormous as a blog increases in popularity, unless strict controls or voluntary ‘codes of conduct’ are in place.

Lack of collaboration

Collaborative alternatives potentially provide more valuable content than blogs: more focus; less duplication; less pressure to be ‘journalistic’; a fairer balance between contributors; as well as a less ‘noisy’ experience. However, the very fact that they ask more of contributors makes them more expensive to create, and therefore thinner on the ground. This, in turn, can make collaborative editing seem a lonely experience. This situation will likely continue until there are efforts to break down barriers between the two types of content. Aggregators are of little help here, as they perpetuate the idea of a single time line of unrelated articles, in stark contrast to the ‘world wide web’.

Isolation and insulation

New blogs begin life in complete isolation and need to build connections with others if they are to keep their enthusiasm going. They need blogging friends, and they need encouragement. However, until a true blogging political hub appears, new bloggers often find themselves locked into political party silos, isolating themselves from the much wider external audience. A parallel incentive is for people to insulate themselves in order to avert the discomfort they feel when confronted with deeply contrary opinions and threats to their world-view. More often than not, it us unregulated comment-boxes that fuel this, rather than the behaviour of other bloggers.

Conclusion

When reputation becomes detached from quality; when friendship, like-mindedness, and convention determine the success of a blog and the popularity of its content; and when atomisation rather than interaction is the norm, the result must be a homogenisation of ideas, and a greater chance that rare but brilliant insights will be missed. This is the opposite of what we’re looking for.

In the next post I’ll be explaining how Poblish tries to address each of these problems, and how policy-making can be made more informed, more efficient, more constructive, and also more satisfying.