Hacking Memeorandum 101 - the screencast
I've now created screencast- Hacking Memeorandum 101 trying to explain what is going on with this Hacking Memerorendum business.
Btw, two new posts out there since Tara's and mine. (more updates at the bottom of this post)
The first is from Ben Barren (I call him Ben Barry in the screencast, sorry Ben!):
"If newspapers and blogs can be manipulated, where does this stop... Blogging needs its own Kabbalah Red String bracelet me thinks... maybe to be different it could be on the ankle... unisex that is.."
The other is from my other blog with pics of the hacks end results:
But I do try to make a serious point both in the screencast and echoed in the other post:
"In case you are wondering, I do realise this is all very silly and I hope we don't get 'banned' in the future.
So I say in all seriousness - we should see the constructive side of this: that the algorithms can be easily hacked and than sooner or later the spammers will try this on themselves. So it might as well be us that tests the system before they spoil it all for us."
Update:
"The weblog system can have real effects on writers, and writers can have real effects on the system, and I'm not sure how much of it all we can take at face value anymore.... "
"This recent success in “hacking Memeorandum” confirms to me that we need some kind of human intervention in these systems. The answer may indeed lie with human annotation ala Wink.com, or it may be the case that entirely human systems (Digg, Reddit) are less prone to attack. Perhaps Google could send off its search results to be rated by the human minds at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk .
Either way, I don’t believe that algorithms can survive in their current form. Human judgement isn’t infallible, but it’s the best thing we’ve got."