About Alphapedia

The simple explanation.

Since it might be interesting to some curious mind (and perhaps crossword artists), the first role of Alphapedia is to provide extensive data on the 26 indivisible units of the written language. We'll soon add typographic and staistical information to complete our encyclopedia. If you think of anything that we whould add on the site, please let us know!

The post-modern, post-apocalyptic explanation.

Alphapedia highlights convergence by linking all letters to their respective page on the encyclopedia. It removes the context of the word and the idea at a point it become useless information. It doesn't integrate with any other websites or content. It runs a script on top of your browser that automatically links all others websites texts back to the encyclopedia pages.

We really think the internet is an amazing tool. But we also feel its currentstructure is vey limiting. Since this is hard to understand without a better implementation, we tought of illustrating the internet flaws with an extreme example. First, let's see why we think the internet is not exatly perfect.

The internet works simply. Online content is presented in a page format, identicaly to everyone at a given address (URL). When it's time for content provider to suggest additional content, they just link to the other provider's pages. It's like being able to precisely jump from one book to another.
The problem is now the internet is not only an online library anymore. Classic informational websites only account for a small portion of web-traffic. Users now manage their music, contacts, documents, events, much more using the internet. It's now much more a tool than a static content compilation. The page structure can hardly be used for personalized data. To work around it, website developpers coined the idea of user-accounts to better present customized content to their users.
While it's nice to be able to customize each user's view using accounts, it's also very limitating because content become harder to share (no more public URL) and is almost impossible to integrate somewhere else (a login is required to acces the content). On most social websites, some views exists to let others see relevant data on each users (ie. favourite images of a photo-community member), but it's far to be complete. Also, on top of the lack of visualization, almost no different data are aggreagated together to create advanced view that would make sense and tell something interesting to users.


Another great benefit of the internet everyone was exited about was the idea that the online world is all free and open. Maybe this was true at the times when most users were discussing on IRC, exchaning pop3 emails and checking static informational websites. However, today's user interact with the internet in a much more sophisticated way that wasn't part of the initial standard. Innovative companies explored the grounds and allowed news use of the internet. As much as we can love(or hate) google, facebook, yahoo or microsoft's products, we can hardly say we have control over it. These companies provide usefull service for cheap, but they algorithm and data is kept private on their server. While this is better than nothing, this also limit a lot the development and better integration of the internet. While we can grab some informations using API calls on some of the largest web players, they online share a small percentage of their data, and limit user's to really build on top of these datas.

Another amazing thing the internet brought us is the possibility for everyone to easily publish content online. Some might see it as being able to distribute their content on everyone bookshelf freely and without any intermediaries. Since everyone has a web-address, it may sounds like everyone is getting the same visibility.
This would be utopic to think that we can really work this way on such a large scale. We need ways to organie sort and filter content that matters and is relevant to us because we don't have time to go over all of it manually every time we're wondering someting. Search engines helps us to find text content in websites, but also sort the results to show the "most interesting" on top of the list. While this part would be viewed as very subjective in the real world, we're living with it without problem online. Robots analyse contents, check their popularity, and factor in the user appreciation in order to come up with an appropriated sorting.

The mass culture triuph in such algorithm. For a given search phrase on an online service, widely popular content tend to come before content greatly apprecated by fewers users. Our online lives are surveilled. Innapropriate contents are flagged to then be removed from the radar, but least popupar content just get forgotten at the profit of most popular one. Such effects is seen when seraching, but also when linking and aggregating content together. Some websites use rules to create links automatically ot just base their links on other services. For example, we link to maps using google maps, we link to definitions using wikipedia, and we link to concert tickets using ticket-pro. However, none of these links will include the original site context once oppened(the contextual use of a term will be lost in the full definition on wikipedia, the geographic location of the concert is not on ticket-pro but google-maps only, and music sample has to be stremed from mySpace or iTunes first. The precise, specefic content links back to a global theme page, while these gobalized pages doesn't link back to any precise content. They only offer links to other top-level content.

In this context, we think the mass-culture idea is used to surveil and conform users to global mass-rules. For instance, if a given popular blogger behave with dissent by linking and writing about to less commonly appreciated thigs, he runs the chance of being of automatically associated with such marginal activities and lose it's place on the public space. This obviously apply to all levels. On the more radical end, many sites are just eliminated of google search results while they are widely consulted by a marginal, but still large audience. While this is an extreme example of censorship, we can imagine tons of smaller possibilities where the linking and aggregations might works against user's interest. For instance it might workd against someone's applying for a job if he maintains a totally unprofessional online persona or has set "anarchist" as political view on his facebok profile. While it's still possible for users to actively manage their online life, data tend to be aggregated together. As an additianl proof, Facebook recently bought friendfeeds(aggregation of user online activity), and now offers webmasters to let their users login using their facebook account instead of a customly created account.

Conclusion
We think the internet currently doesn't serve its user at best because: