Log has written
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2009

Ninja: Yes. And this actually gets me back to that notion that the mere act of aggregation is creation. In our very early days exactly the kinds of human conflicts that you are raising were the kinds of things that I would sleep over and my team would sleep over and that we would have healthy and long debates about how best to handle that and how best to play a useful role. A useful role in providing the context without trying to answer the questions that we have no business to answer. We are not an international diplomacy entity to determine where exactly in the hierarchy of things the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus should sit. However, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of having to place it in a hierarchy, in a categorization scheme. So that people can find that information when they are looking for it. The purpose of the directory structure from the start -- it wasn’t to classify all of human knowledge. It wasn’t to document everything out there. It was to connect people to what they found interesting. And so the reason for the categorization system was to try to make sure that things that are like each other are near each other, and things that are unlike each other are somewhere else. So that in your travels, in your browsing around the information space as you hone in on things that you like you can find more things that you like and that you can sufficiently, you can safely stop wasting time on the stuff that was irrelevant. So bringing that back to the issue of conflicts that drove us to create some basic common sense rules just like call a thing what it calls itself. You know if it’s a group of people, if it’s a state, call people what they call themselves, all else being equal. We want to use accessible terms, we want to use terms at a glance, and most people will say I know what that is so that I can either-

Kamla: Give me an example to illustrate the point that you are talking.

Ninja: So they are all really only fond of a lot of groups, individuals, political parties that shared something that most human beings will agree as a common ideology around the white race being in some way superior to other races. And whether it was the skin heads or the White National Pride party or the KKK. We knew that these things go in the same category and then the question becomes what you call that category.

Kamla: So what do you call that category?

Ninja: And we came to White Power. And, why White Power? Because when you really read the-what these people say this is how they describe themselves, these are the kinds of terms that they use to talk about themselves. Because we feel that our role is to provide context and to help people connect with what they are interested in and then to leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions rather then sort of exercising a heavy hand and pre-processing the information through our own lens. Now that said, the beauty of the Internet, the beauty of the web is that we can always juxtapose opposing views. We might have a category for Holocaust revisionism and in within that category is a category called opposing views, which gives again context to say, I am looking at a piece of information where that piece of information never lives in a vacuum. There are always other points of view.

Kamla: There must have been issues where people must have rallied around your categorization and said we disagree with the way you have categorized the content.

Ninja: Yes.

Kamla: How do you deal with it and put a label?

Ninja: Yes.

Kamla: And then people have to agree to that label?

1 2 3 4  5 6 
Tags - Find More Articles On:
READ MORE ARTICLES BY: