The CIA thinks the Pope is Fonzie

Most home connections to the Internet are anonymous. They're tied to an IP address, and that IP comes from a generic pool at your service provider. Without a court order (or the RIAA breathing down your neck), your activities on the web are pretty much private. If someone tells you they have your IP address and know who you are, they're lying, unless they're your ISP.

It's a little different with large organizations and businesses. They typically lease a big data pipe and the IP pool is tied to their organization. Sometimes when I write a blog post about a movie I saw I get a visit from some movie house, Paramount for example, probably checking to see if I'm trashing their movie. Not that my opinion matters much, but they keep stats on that sort of thing. Speaking of stats, that's how I know it's Paramount. The IP is tied to them and I can pull the company from the remote host in the server variables collection.

This is where it gets funny. Wikipedia edits not tied to a user account at Wikipedia are still labeled by the IP address that did the edit. IP addresses are public, and in the case of large organizations, so is the organization's name. Some clever programmer decided to catalog many of the IP address edits made at Wikipedia over the years and link them to their originating company. Some of these links are outright hilarious.

Random examples:
Someone with an IP address traced to the CIA apparently is interested in light sabers and thinks the Pope is Fonzie. Someone at Pepsi doesn't want you to read the long-term health effects of drinking Pepsi, or read any criticisms.

The list goes on and on. In fact, check out the full list here. Highly entertaining.

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Subtitle: A Limitation in Value Judgments

A computer system can only evaluate objective facts. They are currently unable to form a subjective opinion. However, a human/computer value ranking system is also limited in the types of value judgments it can make, despite the values of the human being involved.

All open value ranking systems on the web, whether they are purely algorithm controlled ranking systems, like Google's page ranking system, or human based ranking systems like Digg.com, etc. end up only ranking the popularity value. Other subjective human value judgments are lost in the shuffle. The reason is because informed opinion is overshadowed by uninformed opinion in an open system. Experts, by definition, are always the minority.

Take, for example, a system that ranks art. Typically what you may find in an online art ranking system is a thumbs up or thumbs down button. Like it, or don't like it? Unfortunately this only reflects the aesthetic appeal, and not the majority of values incorporated into art theory. Composition, context, meaning, all those values are overshadowed by the popularity value. If a lot of people really like the way a crappy piece of art looks, it has more value, despite this being a shallow judgment.

When you rank videos the stupid dog tricks videos will alway be more popular than a video with a social message.

What do we do ten years down the road when all knowledge is defined in terms of popularity? News is going that way, with even major networks latching on to the Digg.com model. Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of the Internet, is solely a popular treatment of a topic. Search engines rank by popularity. It feels a lot like high school : )

It's hard to say which model is better. In politics, this is the debate over representative democracy versus direct democracy. I don't personally trust the "wisdom of the crowds" because the crowd is an uninformed majority (not to say it's all bad). Philosophically I mistrust authority as well, but I think it's safe to say that something is lost in turning value ranking over to the crowds. The only real value that can be ranked that way is popularity. How bad that loss is, or the ramifications, won't be known for a few decades.

If you wanna make movies, join the crowd

When I was nine years old, I made a stop action movie with my dad's camcorder and couple of G.I. Joe action figures. Is nine too old to play with toys? Nevermind. Anyway, I made this movie and it totally rocked. My mom said so. I created a storyline where the Joes had to bust this guy out of a South American prison because he had key information on a cocaine drug lord or something. I even made this styrofoam prison with kabob stick bars and a breakaway wall (for when they busted him out). I carved the wall into tiny bricks of styrofoam and rigged it with thread so that when I pulled the string the whole wall came down. A puff of baby powder sealed the effect of C-4 demolitions.

I'd love to make a movie today, but unfortunately I'm lacking in time, money, and I also sort of don't have any talent for it : ) Maybe I could pull off a Clerks, but unfortunately as an adult you have to impress more people than your mom. Sounds like a broken dream, eh? Fear not my friends. Now I, you, or anyone with the mere desire can participate in a full-length feature film that will one day appear in actual theaters.

It's called A Swarm of Angels, and it is the first (that I'm aware of) open source movie project. Participants not only fund the movie collectively, but also participate in the creative process of writing it, filming it, and releasing it. It's the entire process of making a Hollywood film, but the tasks are crowd sourced to a global community of members. Right now A Swarm of Angels is moving into phase 3 of 5, producing the trailer for the movie and completing the development. Even if you don't get in on this one, I'm sure there's more to come.

Fulfill your childhood dream of making a movie. Check out A Swarm of Angels