"Zope-certified Python Engineers" [was: Java and Python]

[Laura Creighton]

> Andrew Kuchling wrote:
> In article <mailman.1016822075.17058.python-list at python.org>, 
> 	Laura Creighton wrote:
> > One days reading of your weeks spam will yield you many offers of
> > programs and advice on how to make your website rise in the Google
> > ranking.  This reflects the reality that once you have made it to the
> 
> Rule #1 when dealing with spam: Spammers lie.  I doubt any of those
> offers would actually result in any useful information or visible
> effect on your ranking.  Absent Scientology-scale creation of fake
> links, the only way is to update your site often and to get other
> people to link to you.

Er, I wasn't commenting on the technical feasibility of the solutiuons
offered by the Spammers -- though my current crop of spam which just
made mailman blow up appears to include a fake-link generation software --
just the fact that google leaders are even harder to replace than politicians.
Incumbancy counts.
> 
> > EBay has one sort of approach.  So does Advogato (see http://advogato.org )
> .
> > It is a real problem and one that interests me a lot.
> 
> At the Web services panel at Python10, Tim Berners-Lee mourned that
> third-party Web annotation tools such as crit.org or the commercial
> Third Voice have never really caught on.  Probably this is because, as
> he suggested, the UI would be really complicated, because we already
> have the technical pieces needed.

I tink the problem has more to do with political will and lack of order in
the www than the UI.

> 
> Consider your example of a buggy formula on a Web page.  Perhaps
> someone has noted this error on some annotation service, but on which
> one?  The W3C's?  crit.org?  The American Mathematical Society?  You
> probably can't just pick one for the whole Web, because the AMS
> annotations probably don't comment on X-Files Web pages much (or
> particularly well).  Instead you'd need a complex set of preferences
> -- use the AMS for mathematical pages, use the MEMS Exchange for
> MEMS-related pages, and so forth.  

This is Google-Next-Generation's problem. When they see a bad AMS or
MEMs rating, they quickly deprecate the webpage, informing the page's
owner why this happened.  The difficult part is getting the page 
reclassified when its owner fixes his typo and produces the correct
formula.  The AMS doesn't have time for everybody's typos.  But MEMS
might -- if you could charge for this service.  If getting a good MEMS
rating encouraged people to use the service, then you could afford to
hire people who were just concerned with maintaining MEMS' own standards.
If having a good MEMS rating was indispensible for credibility, and 
getting a good google ranking, then many useful things could be done.

> This quickly gets really messy.  Who annotates a finite-element
> analysis of a MEMS structure?  Both services, or just one?  

Anybody who cares to should be able to annotate a page.

> And how do
> you tell if a page is mathematical, anyway?  Or will I constantly
> telling my browser which service to use for each URL, in a
> never-ending task.  (You could have a annotation service that just
> classified pages, of course.) 

You would have to have this if people wished to browse the annotations.
But for a first pass all we need to do is to make _Google_ care.  If
unclassified, unranked web-pages got a poorer showing than those which
were classified as great by 'repuable authorities' but better than
those which were classified as garbage by the same authorities.  Then
you only have to rank the authorities.  And people could have their own
lists -- if you think that Google's default authority ranking is reflects
bourgeois American sensibilities, tell Google to use your list instead.

> 
> A widely adopted solution would bring us much closer to Ted Nelson's
> vision of a hyperlinked repository of all knowledge, but getting there
> seems very, very difficult.
> 
> --amk                                                             

Up until fairly recently, there were strong links between people who
wanted to share information and people who wanted to resist authority.
The web is anti-authoritarian in nature, which is a great thing when
you want to resist coercive political pressure, but a bad thing when
what you actually want is a guaranteed correct reference.  Countless
schemes have come and gone with the flaw in their makeup 'my opinion
is every bit as good as your opinion'.  It is too big now for that,
and Google is now the defacto authority for everything you want to
find on the web.

But putting Google out of business by producing a service that results
in better quality hits on your searches is still possible.  Finally,
out of the chaos, we have produced the social situation where order
beats freedom of expression hands-down.  And Google must be responsive
to it or risk going out of business.  Would you trade 'the freedom to
be different' for 'the choice to be excellent'?  Every new python
progrqammer who has given up on 'self-expression through my favourite
brace style' is making this choice.  The subversive message is 'order
is a lot of fun'.  I think that this message will finally produce
people who are brave enough to say that they want good authorities,
not the absence of all authorities.  But then I'm an Order-loving
Optimist.

Laura Creighton