Author: Tom Slee

All this time I thought being unable to post frequently was a limitation, but now I find, thanks to the Sunday newspaper, that it is a virtue. In fact, I appear to be part of the slow blogging movement, which is why it took me two days from reading this to posting it.

Here is a quandary in three parts. I don't know how to think about it clearly, much less how to resolve it.

Part 1 is a letter in today's Globe and Mail from Charles Cook:

With a watchful eye on high-rise projects, I got wind of a new mega
condo to be built between me and this Toronto icon. When (or now, if)
it's completed, my iconic view will be gone. New condo buyers
everywhere should not be influenced by artists' impressions of the view
from an unbuilt living room. Marge Simpson may be their first guest.

The letter writer may suffer from Marge Simpson's towering blue hairdo in front of him, but he seems blind to the fact that he is a Marge Simpson in front of someone else. And the first condo building is probably more of an issue than the hundred and first. It's a vanguard of corruption.

Part 2 is the occasional appearance of groups called something like "Artists Against Gentrification" (for Detroit see here). It's a concept that is easy to mock. Seeking out cheap space in neighbourhoods that are not their own, yet which offer cultural novelty and distinctiveness, some artists like to think of themselves as champions of authentic neighbourhoods. Others cast them as the ground troops that come in first, paving the way for upscale developers.

But part 3 is more difficult for me to mock. The place I work is in a "Research and Technology Park" at the north end of the University of Waterloo (here). It's a recent development; it has a handful of new office buildings surrounded by empty fields and untended scrubland. Sometimes I walk to work through this scrub and it's amazing what you see. We have foxes, deer sometimes. The other day a hawk flew across the path ten feet in front of me at knee hight, driving a flock of pigeons into the air. There's sometimes a blue heron in a gravel pond, and a groundhog I see regularly as it watches the construction of a new building from just outside its hole.

All this wildlife in the middle of town would vanish, of course, if the R&T park gets more tenants, or if the scrubby landscape is manicured to look more attractive. I would miss it and something valuable would be lost.

Yet of course I'm only aware of these gems because I work in the first building to be built in the park. I'd like to think I'm a champion of authenticity, but I guess I'm just in the vanguard of corruption.

The quandary is obvious. There are parts of the world ("authentic" parts) that have value because they are different from their blander surroundings. And yet the value of those parts is largely invisible, and so they are vulnerable to the economic forces that would brush them aside. Preserving these authentic parts of the world requires that we know about them, and that requires someone from the outside to go in and tell us about them. So is that person then selfishly trying to preserve a private playground or nobly trying to preserve a valuable but vulnerable niche?

It's the problem with eco-tourism that the more it seeks to create awareness of the wilderness the more it damages that wilderness. From quaint pottery shops in  Burnsall and Grassington, to hippies in Goa, to Jane Goodall and David Attenborough, how do we distinguish the genuine champion from the tourist? And how do we preserve what needs to be preserved without pandering to the demands of those who want to just keep a new find all to themselves in the name of authenticity.

I can think of no general principle to tell one from the other. But if anyone has pointers to ways of thinking about authenticity I'd like to hear them.

iPhone application developer Craig Hockenberry writes an open letter to Steve Jobs here, featured in Fortune magazine here, pointing out very reasonably that the 10,000 iPhone applications are experiencing a race to the bottom in terms of price. Charles Teague has put together some great graphs describing the state of the AppStore here.

What Craig H sees is this:

and here is how:

Raising your price to help cover … costs makes it hard to get to
the top of the charts. (You’re competing against a lot of other titles
in the lower price tier.) You also have to come to terms with the fact
that you’re only going to be featured for a short time, so you have to
make the bulk of your revenue during this period.

This is why we’re going for simple and cheap instead of complex and
expensive. Not our preferred choice, but the one that’s fiscally
responsible.

The root cause of the low price is a classic market for lemons. Here is Craig H again:

I’ve been thinking about what’s causing this rush to the 99¢ price
point. From what I can tell, it’s because people are buying our
products sight unseen. I see customers complaining about how
“expensive” a $4.99 app is and that it should cost less. (Do they do
the same thing when they walk into Starbucks?) The only justification I
can find for these attitudes is that you only have a screenshot to
evaluate the quality of a product. A buck is easy to waste on an app
that looks great in iTunes but works poorly once you install it.

Our products are a joy to use: as you well know, customers are
willing to pay a premium for a quality products. This quality comes at
a cost—which we’re willing to incur. The issue is then getting people
to see that our $2.99 product really is worth three times the price of
a 99¢ piece of crapware.

This is, of course, the dilemma of the Internet. Publication is easy, even when Apple maintains the right to take your app off their store. This does not mean everyone benefits from the audience that "being published" used to bring with it. It just means that the roadblock to finding an audience is shifted further down the road – getting attention for your product. And asymmetric information is a major barrier in your way. How do you distinguish your shiny needle from the haystack in which it sits?

So where, he asks, are complex, high quality applications for the iPhone going to come from?

I can think of two ways forward for mobile apps in the absence of people being prepared to pay actual money.

One is that open source community-built applications will come along. But that's less likely on a brand new platform than it is on existing platforms where a broad agreement can be reached on what an application needs to do.

A second is that the successful applications (beyond Koi Pond) will be entry-points to some valuable service hosted elsewhere, for which someone can charge a subscription price. I'd bet on this second one. But applications for their own sake on mobile devices, it seems, will not be going far.

Pretentious enough title for you?

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Recommender systems – those algorithms that guess what you may be interested in as you browse Amazon or listen to last.fm – are commercially important. Netflix claims that 60% of its rentals are driven by its Cinematch recommender system [link]; that’s over half a billion dollars of business in 2008. As online commerce continues to grow, recommender systems will only get more important.

Recommender systems are culturally important too. As more of our culture moves online, they will be responsible for more of our cultural experiences, and will play an important role in shaping the creative parts of our societies.

Recommender systems will get better. Ten years ago they were largely improvised. Now you can do a Ph.D. in recommender systems and there are international academic conferences all about them [link]. The subject is ideal for academics – it is algorithmic and yet open ended, with many different approaches and criteria for success. It’s an endless playground for exploration and simulation.

Even though they will improve, there is no such thing as an optimal recommender system. Accuracy is insufficient. The interests of recommendees vary. Serendipity, intra-list variety, reliability and trust-generation are just a few other considerations [pdf link].

Don’t confuse the outcome of recommender systems with intrinsic merit. The recommendations are highly dependent on history and are the products of cumulative advantage. Many think that “if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will”. But hits cannot be reliably predicted because our choices and preferences are too inter-linked. Clive Thompson writes that companies with recommender systems can “track everything their customers do. Every page you visit, every purchase you make, every item you rate — it is all recorded.” [link] But other studies have shown the systems to be chaotic. Tiny, random fluctuations can lead to completely different outcomes. [link]

Recommender systems can easily reinforce inequalities among recommended items. A system that recommends popular items will increase those items’ popularity. Unpopular items will be left in the dust. Such systems can make big hits even bigger, and can lead to an overall decrease in cultural diversity.

Recommender systems can increase the experience of diversity. By drawing attention to items individuals have not found by themselves, they can lead to new experiences. But individual diversity is different from overall diversity. Some systems can increase both individual and overall diversity. Other systems increase individual diversity but, at the same time, prompt consumers to be increasingly similar to each other. Their selections then come from an increasingly narrow range of items [pdf link].

Ownership matters. Given the variety of approaches, outcomes, and absence of clear “best” alternatives, and given the ability of recommender systems to shape the experiences of their users, there is ample room for ulterior motives to become embodied in the system. The incentives for the recommender and the recommendee may be different. The incentives for Netflix in a regime where they deliver physical DVDs (of which they have limited stock) may be to promote the back catalogue. When they deliver movies digitally (as they are about to) there may be no such constraint and they may be more tempted to promote existing blockbusters. The most valuable recommender systems may be those that are independent of producers and vendors.

Transparency matters. The unmarked presence of sponsored items in a recommendation list would be widely viewed as a corrupt set of recommendations, but just as some bookstores charge for premium display sites within the store, so sites on recommendation lists may be sold. Recommendees have a right to know if payola is part of the system.

Recommender systems will displace the filtering role of both reviewers and of publishers. But while bad reviewers and publishers would not be missed, good reviewers and publishers are not only filters; they are also an active part of cultural creation. The impact of recommender systems on these members of creative communities is important.

The word “community” is widely used in conjunction with recommender systems, but they do little to build communities. Their use is essentially an individual, isolated act. Groups and networks are as important in the creation and experience of culture as individuals. Recommender systems will play a role in how culture is experienced, but they are not necessarily a strong force pushing us either towards or away from a healthy culture.

Recommender systems only filter culture, in various ways; the point is to create environments in which artists can prosper.