Year: 2007

Price of a right to vote

Slashdot quotes:

Two thirds of the students at NYU would give up their right to vote in the next election for a full scholarship. Some would be satisfied with an ipod. A few would be willing to give up the right for the rest of their lives for one million dollars.

With elections coming up in both Russia and USA, it’s interesting to see sometimes how similar a few things are.   I’ve heard something similar to the above quote about Russian youth too.  In fact, I have to say that I feel pretty much the same.  The simple reason for it is that my vote isn’t worth anything.  It affects nothing.  And eve if it did, I am to vote for one choice of those that I would rather not have at all.  And those for who I’d run to vote for either don’t make it to the candidate status or don’t even try to.

Slashdot discussion has a few insightful comments on the subject.  Here are some quotes:

 Theoretically, if we had candidates that represented us instead of the interests of corporations and special interest groups, our right to vote would be worth a great deal.

According to our forefathers, the right to vote is worth your life. My how times have slipped. But I do agree. I can’t blame the voter when you have the choices you have today.

Logically, you’re not capable of voting if you’re dead – your statement is patriotic but makes no sense.

 The article didn’t surprise me much either. I think many people feel the same way you do. Many people don’t use their right to vote, so they actually give it up for free, so why not give it up for an iPod?

 You could have far more influence over the government with that $1,000,000 than you ever will by voting.

Yes, I’ve heard it all before and it wasn’t always coming from the Americans…

Gmail language search

Via Google Blogoscoped post I learned it is possible to search for messages in Gmail based on what language they are written in.  The operator is called “lang” and can be used like so:   “lang:ru“  or “lang:russian“.  The operator can be used both in regular searches and in filter conditions.   As noted in the comments, this might be useful for sorting out spam messages (label with “Spam“) written in languages that you don’t understand (Chinese, for example, – “lang:zh“).

For me personally, this comes very useful, since most of my friends and family (at least those with who I communicate via email) speak both Russian and English, and sometimes it takes too much time going through all the messages instead of picking just those in one language (for those cases when I remember the language).

Insight into Google’s free expression decision making

I am fast to skip lengthy blog posts, but this one – “Free expression and controversial content on the web” – in the Official Google Blog somehow hooked me from the first sentence:

Our world would be a very boring place if we all agreed all the time.

What followed was a lengthy insight into what Google people have to deal with on an every day basis, how they have to balance between what they want, what their customers and users want, and what different governments want.

At Google we have a bias in favor of people’s right to free expression in everything we do. We are driven by a belief that more information generally means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. But we also recognize that freedom of expression can’t be — and shouldn’t be — without some limits. The difficulty is in deciding where those boundaries are drawn. For a company like Google with services in more than 100 countries – all with different national laws and cultural norms – it’s a challenge we face many times every day.
In a few cases it’s straightforward. For example, we have a global all-product ban against child pornography, which is illegal in virtually every country. But when it comes to political extremism it’s not as simple. Different countries have come to different conclusions about how to deal with this issue. In Germany there’s a ban on the promotion of Nazism — so we remove Nazi content on products on Google.de (our domain for German users) products. Other countries’ histories make commentary or criticism on certain topics especially sensitive. And still other countries believe that the best way to discredit extremists is to allow their arguments to be publicly exposed.

Google’s globalism (reminder: more than 100 countries), and the scale at which they work (for example, Google is often called the duct tape of the Web) are unprecedented.  Being a pioneer surely has its bright sides (like money and power), but it also brings a lot of responsibility and a total or partial lack of established practices.

Dealing with controversial content is one of the biggest challenges we face as a company. We don’t pretend to have all the right answers or necessarily to get every judgment right. But we do try hard to think things through from first principles, to be as transparent as possible about how we make decisions, and to keep reviewing and debating our policies. After all, the right to disagree is a sign of a healthy society.

One thing I’m glad about is that I don’t have to make decisions balancing between people of different cultural backgrounds.  As much as I want to be an all satisfying nice guy, the reality is that I see the world in black and white more often than I should or want to.  On more than one occasion I was very critical and practically insulting to a person who has a different point of view on some subject that I’m passionate about.

Learning to think

I am using this blog to learn the thinking process once again.  I believe I did it in the past a couple of times already, but somehow the skill vanishes and I have to redo the process.  These days I’m going through a lot of information and what I noticed is that I don’t spend enough time thinking about what I read.  It’s more like scrolling through, then a quick spark in my mind which I can’t even describe properly with words, then I think something like “Hold on a second… Hmm.. Oh, OK. Next!”, instead of “I agree with this because…”, or “I disagree because…”, or “I never thought of that this way. I better look into it more…”.  As  a result of this, I have a suspicion that I re-think the same things over and over without coming to any conclusions, researching the subject more, or simply dropping it as uninteresting.  This has to stop.

So, I started blogging more, putting my comments – no matter how silly or insignificant – around the things that I read about.  Hopefully these will get more interesting with time and practice.

Social network through the email

Slashdot runs the “Turning E-Mail into a Social Network” post, which links to this article about Google and Yahoo approach:

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.
Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

This feels very natural. Both Google and Yahoo indeed aggregate a lot of personal data and a lot of personal relationships (who knows who, who emails who and how often, etc). It’s logical to assume that they want to expand what they have, and social networks is one of the ways to go.

So, why email?  Email has a number of advantages over other media:

  • Everybody has an email account.  And everybody knows how to use one.  It’s almost as widely used as mobile telephony.
  • Email is very flexible – texts, HTML, attachments, links, etc.
  • Email is an open standard – there are many clients, servers, web services, plugins, etc.
  • Email is easy to convert to other media – IM chats, blogs, SMS, etc.
  • Email is often integrated with other tools, such as addressbooks, calendars, todo lists, reminders, etc.
  • Email supports both one-on-one and group communications (mailing lists).
  • Email is easy to remember (not like a phone number or ICQ UIN), lookup and share.
  • Social networks are often about messaging.

I wish email was better integrated with half of the social networks that I use.  Most of them use some sort of their own messaging system.  Some don’t even provide any messaging at all.  And all of them would have to do much less work if they relied more on email.   I’m glad to see that Google and Yahoo realize this.