Since Ms. Cross began writing for The Vines last August, she has
produced nearly 40,000 words about ancient Rome. Her nom de plume
is Heraklia Aelius and her lengthiest work to date, 18,000 words,
is a series on the life of Julius Caesar.
Ms. Cross knows her writing is valued highly by other members of
The Vines (www.thevines.com). In fact, she knows exactly how
highly she is prized, because they give her grades. They rate
each of her articles on a scale of 1 to 10. Ms. Cross
consistently scores above 9.5, which puts her articles at the top
of their category. As a result, she is featured more prominently
on the site than lower-scoring writers.
The Vines and similar sites for writers operate not as
conventional publications might, with dozens of editors deciding
what to publish. Everything that is submitted is published, and
then the members' tastes determine what articles you can actually
find without burrowing into the site in search of that 0.5
article on someone's theory about other universes.
"It's really hard to find the really bad stuff on The Vines,
said Eden Muir, a founder of the site. "It's designed to make
the bad stuff disappear. It will be up for a little while, then
it will sink like a stone."
On the other hand, articles with the highest ratings bubble to
the top, and aspiring writers like Ms. Cross, whose articles
have also attracted notice from the outside world, are enjoying
a level of recognition that might not have been possible without
the Web.
The Vines is an example of an emerging class of what are called
self-organizing Web sites. Such sites are demonstrating that with
a dab or two of well-written code and a bit of careful planning,
a site can take a random collection of links or posts and turn
them into a sophisticated, adaptive system.
Articles submitted to The Vines are read and rated by members.
Software handles the rest, putting the highest-rated articles at
the top of their respective categories. Royalties are based on
the popularity of the article. The Vines also holds periodic
contests and awards cash prizes to the writers with the highest
standing, using the automated ranking system.
"The Web in 1996 didn't need to organize itself," said Joey
Anuff, who is editor in chief of a new self-organizing site
called Plastic.com. "But we have a Web now that's measured in
billions of pages and millions of users, so any kind of mechanism
that automatically imposes order becomes more useful and
important."
Most efforts at self-organization so far have been fairly simple,
but effective. Several features on Amazon.com, like the list of
authors with books similar to the one being viewed, take what
could be a random database and develop relationships within it.
The search site Google, which ranks a site depending on how many
other sites have linked to it, is yet another example of
self-organization at work.
Sites for writers, like The Vines and others, are growing
quickly, largely because of people's pent-up urge to pepper the
world with their prose.
The writers certainly aren't driven by money. Contributors to The
Vines and other self-publishing sites are paid a nominal fee. Ms.
Cross has been paid $50 so far for roughly 40,000 words. "Maybe
someday it will amount to something," she said, "but I'm not
planning retirement. I'm not even planning a dinner."
More gratifying than the small payments is recognition from the
outside world. On the strength of her articles on The Vines, Ms.
Cross was recently asked to contribute a chapter to a book on
ancient Rome, to be published in the spring by ibooks, a new
imprint of Simon & Schuster.
Carol Skolnick, a 43-year-old copy writer in Manhattan who
focuses on spiritual topics, writes for ThemeStream
(www.themestream.com), another writers' site. Ms. Skolnick has
been asked to contribute four of her ThemeStream essays to the
"Chocolate for Women" series of inspirational books, published
by Simon & Schuster.
Another ThemeStream author, A. M. Benneter of Seattle, who writes
film reviews, noticed recently that her review of the Sylvester
Stallone film "Get Carter" had been quoted in national
advertising campaigns.
Yet another ThemeStream writer, Laura Shanley, of Boulder, Colo.,
who specializes in health and nutrition-related topics, recently
attracted the attention of television producers at work on a
medical series. The producers sent a film crew to interview Ms.
Shanley. They were especially interested in two of her articles,
"Cleanup on Aisle Nine: Woman Gives Birth in Grocery Store" and
"Milkmen: Fathers Who Breastfeed."
There is also plenty of potential for abuse on the writers'
sites. Recruit a group of friends to award your writing four
stars every 20 minutes or so for a few days, and your work is
bound to drift to the top of the heap.
But Themestream and other sites have developed methods for
identifying so-called click circles, which consist of people who
work to inflate one another's ratings. "We look for people who
exhibit certain characteristics," said Bill Turpin, a founder of
ThemeStream. "We measure the time between when you load the page
and when you rate it, and if you rate everything good, with no
variability in your ratings."
The reverse can happen, too. Richard Bossi, a 42-year-old
freelance writer and former chef in Folsom, Calif., contributes
food-related articles to The Vines under the name ChefCayenne.
His ratings are consistently high, but once in a while he will
see one of his articles come under attack by what some Web
writers call retalirators. "People will sink me to the bottom,"
Mr. Bossi said. "There's a lot of jealousy."
Another form of adaptive Web site assigns ratings not to
submissions themselves but to members' comments about the
submissions. Slashdot, a three-year-old site for computer
buffs that uses such a system, is the model for the new
site Plastic.com. Slashdot operates with a minimum of human
intervention yet gives visitors the opposite impression.
Articles sent to Slashdot (slashdot.org) are culled from the Web.
After passing an initial test of suitability, administered by a
Slashdot editor, a contribution is posted, followed by dozens,
sometimes hundreds, of comments from the site's 305,000 users.
Once you have established yourself as a seasoned Slashdot user,
the system will periodically assign you "moderator" status, a
temporary position that carries with it the right to rate other
members' comments on a scale of 0 to 5. Users can then browse
through Slashdot using a quality filter. With the filter set to
3, for example, a visitor will see only those comments with a
rating of 3 or higher.
Slashdot members who receive high ratings also earn special
privileges: their posts start out at a higher rating than usual,
and they are more likely to be chosen as a moderator in the
future.
"This last privilege is a brilliant example of metafeedback at
work," said Steven Johnson, the author of the forthcoming book
"Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and
Software" (Scribner, 2001) and a vice president of Automatic
Media, Plastic.com's parent company.
"It's the ratings snake devouring its own tail," Mr. Johnson
said. "Moderators rate posts, and those ratings are used to
select future moderators." The most impressive aspect of the
Slashdot system, Mr. Johnson said, is that it not only encourages
high quality in submissions to the site, but it also sets up an
environment where community leaders can naturally rise to the
top.
"It's interesting and powerful and it really works," Mr.
Johnson said, adding that only the Internet could give rise to
such a system. "It allows large groups of minds to get together
and interact in a way they could never do before, in any other
medium."
Another self-organizing aspect of Slashdot is the fact that
because nearly all of the site's content comes from its readers,
its emphasis changes according to contributors' interests. "The
subject matter we cover has changed over the last couple of years
because what our readers are interested in has changed," said
Jeff Bates, a Slashdot founder.
Now, for instance, Mr. Bates said, the site carries far more
articles about civil liberties than it did two years ago. "It's
not a decision we made by sitting down in a smoky room and
saying, 'All right, we're going to be all about civil liberties
now,' " Mr. Bates said. "But we all agreed, in some kind of
Jungian collective unconscious way, that that topic was a big
deal."
Plastic.com, which made its official debut earlier this week,
is very similar to Slashdot, but with a more general audience
in mind. While Slashdot advertises itself as "News for Nerds,"
Plastic.com will cover politics, movies, technology, games, music
and other topics.
"We're trying to develop a system that can take the whole
concept of news and figure out a way where the people who use the
system can themselves decide what's interesting or not," said
Mr. Anuff, who is also co-founder of Suck.com, a popular online
magazine. "The end result will be a community-defined front
page."
A still purer example of a self-organizing site is
Everything2.com, created a year ago by Nathan Oostendorp, 22, a
Slashdot founder. Unlike Slashdot and Plastic.com, which draw
heavily on news stories found on the Web, Everything2
(everything2.com) more closely resembles writers' sites like The
Vines, because it links only to other links within the site.
Yet Everything2 works far more autonomously than sites like The
Vines. The Everything2 software monitors traffic patterns and
modifies itself accordingly, assigning higher status to the more
popular links. Users can also collect "experience points" and
vote on one another's posts.
"It's this soup where people can drop in any little bit of
information they want, like their favorite movies or directors or
any other ideas," Mr. Anuff said, "and the only things they can
link it to is other people's ideas in the same soup."
At first glance, Everything2 appears to be a chaotic jumble of
random discourse. Look a little more closely, however, and you
will see an intricately interconnected conversation, touching on
topics as diverse as the languages of India, MTV and melanoma
treatments.
"It's not really about anything in particular," said Mr.
Oostendorp, whose site has about 2,000 users a day. "The only
thing that's there is the system. Here's an open database with
these rules functioning, and if you come in and spend time on
it, you can gain prestige and reputation within the system, and
that's an attractor to a lot of people."
Web sites with mechanisms for self-filtering, self-ranking and
self-organization are very likely to continue to grow in number.
"This is a fundamental shift in the Web's evolution," said Mr.
Johnson, at Automatic Media. "The first generation of the Web
was individual interactivity. And now, after a period of
distraction, it's getting back to the roots of the idea of
interactivity." But this time, he added, the interactivity is
collective.
Here are Web sites that publish readers' submissions and have
some form of self-organizing program that gives the most highly
rated contributions more prominence.
THE VINES NETWORK: www.thevines.com --
Started as a community site devoted to ancient Rome, a topic
still favored by many of its writers.
THEME STREAM: www.themestream.com --
A popular, well-run writers' site.
SUITE101.COM: www.suite101.com --
Bills itself as "an online publishing community of real people
helping real people."
WRITTENBYME: www.writtenbyme.com --
Pays its contributors in "Deweys," which are exchanged for gift
certificates to online merchants.
INSTANT AGORA: www.instantagora.com --
More commercial than other such sites.
Web Sites Begin to Get Organized, on Their Own
The New York Times - January 18, 2001
by Katie Hafner
Suzanne Cross, a 49-year-old paralegal in New Orleans with a
passion for history, is a prolific writer for a Web site called
The VinesNetwork, which bills itself as "the Encyclopedia of
Everything, Built by Everyone." Articles on the site, covering
dozens of different topics, are all written by members.
Site-Seeing: Rating the Writers
(End)
Copyright 2001, The New York Times Company