Text Books That Are Learning While You Read Them
Flag Lies And Propaganda On Web Pages For All To See
Web Annotation: World's Most Important Disruption

Textbooks That Learn At the Same Time We Are

Web annotation will change the world forever, and in positive ways. Web annotation is being able to look at a textbook or lecture which is being updated in the background with the newest information while you are reading it. Updates can be put on hold until you have studied the initial premise at a given date, and then an update switch can be used to give you the latest information on the subject you are studying, at the appropriate place in the original text. Think of the process as getting "late breaking knowledge" with the most up to date information possible.

Then, you flip a switch and the book suddenly opens up a window to the very item you are studying as if you are in a classroom full of people with the book's author, the teacher, professor, surrounded by experts and knowledgeable people, and you are in a live discussion about the topic. Your questions, comments and thoughts on the topic can now become part of the conversation.

An important aspect of annotation is that anyone can start a web annotation thread from anywhere on the web, and can create specific groups of interest and expertise to participate. If you want another viewpoint on the mainstream threads and updates, you can create another annotation thread on top of and invisible to the others, or you can overlay and look at them all. Think of it as overlaying all of the various streams of thought on a subject one atop another so that you can see the similarities, differences, and non-standard viewpoints without ever having to wait for a new textbook, which in the future will be as outdated as reading from a stone tablet. The tablets might be quaint but you can't educate billions of people with them quickly.

Online knowledge with the benefits of annotation and discussion is the future. Web annotation is a much faster way to assemble, create, distribute and curate information in real time than any other methodology. It does not require buildings, lecture halls, or classrooms and all of the inherent costs of travel to and from these facilities. The dynamic aspects of the information stream point to the likelihood that the entire approach offers a greater opportunity to inspire participation and exploration, although people need to learn how to kickstart and use it. 

Amazoning Education

It is one thing to read a book or listen to a lecture about a subject in a college or university with all of the cost and time limitations the current land and buildings delivery mechanisms impose on students, and quite another to see the world's knowledge and information assemble in real time with the latest thinking on the matter from a chair at home at whatever you use as your desk. There are no geographic limitations to participation other than time zones and a web connection, and there are no constraints on how fast you can learn when everything is dynamic and supported by groups of like minded people. 

One other critically important aspect of dynamic web annotation capabilities is the fact that they can eliminate the barrier to entry that land, buildings and institutional control over them provides. Think of it this way, if you are in a position to control the institution, which could be by virtue of your titled position, support of a board of directors, influence of donors and so on it is entirely possible to impact the curriculum and the people involved in delivering it. To illustrate this point in the extreme, what if this group was under the control of a Hitler like being and a few henchmen, or closer to home, members of the military industrial complex who profit from wars, disinformation, propagandizing the public, and who stack the curriculum with information with a calculated and deliberate bias towards their world view, and the members of the faculty are all supporters complicit in that world view. Two things happen as a result, one is the blocking of anyone who would teach information contrary to the stated mission of the institution, which is akin to sending gullible and innocent minds to the mental slaughterhouse. The second is the branding of the institution as holding some kind of revered position in society. Why is the branding issue important?

I had occasion to work with a senior executive of Coca Cola, Atlanta for a number of years. He told the story of internal meetings at Coke when Pepsi was killing them with the Pepsi Challenge. Coke was discussing suing Pepsi for some kind of defamation or false and misleading statements when their lawyers raised the question of was Pepsi telling the truth? The question apparently was shocking to loyalists, but in their own secret taste tests Coke found out Pepsi was preferred by a majority of customers. The discovery lead to the disastrous launch of New Coke. In blind taste tests the new Coke was preferable to customers over the original Coke, but public affinity to the original Coke brand overcame any concept of Coke changing the flavor associated with the brand and severely damaged new Coke's future. New coke was a better product, but perception killed it. So it is with knowledge. The idea that someone revered should know what they are talking about interferes with the reality that they don't.

Revered institutions have that very effect in their brand. Harvard for example is a revered institution, and graduation from their brand carries all kinds of social implications. A Harvard graduate is regarded as being more intelligent, better educated, a peer among peers, and the enormous cost of attending means that person was willing to invest heavily in getting the best education possible. Now if you look at the state of the world and the people ostensibly leading it, resulting in a situation in which a few hundred people control most of the wealth in world, and the companies with a large number of Harvard Alumni like Goldman Sachs, which Matt Taibbi describes as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," regularly fleecing the world, you could very easily come to the conclusion that Harvard is a training facility for conspirators to destroy the public interest, not all that different from other extremist groups, but well dressed, fawned over in the media and having a manufactured social cachet. Of course that statement will draw howls of protest, and challenging the elite nature of overpayment for education will draw all kinds of attacks. However the world is the way it is, and as Richard Feynman, one of the world's leading and practical scientists noted:


So if it works, it works and if not it is wrong. If Harvard's purpose is to educate people who will bring real value to the world and not steal the wealth of nations so that it can be concentrated in the hands of a few hundred people, then the Harvard experiment is an enormous failure. If not, it confirms the description of them at minimum as the creators of vultures.

Bricks to Tricks

The dynamic web portended by web annotation will eventually eliminate the land and buildings penalty institutions such as Harvard impose on education, in the same way online Amazon is killing bricks and mortar retail. Forbes speaks about bricks and mortar offering a shopping experience online cannot, such as trying on clothes. Perhaps, but paying $40,000 or more for the penalty of sitting in a lecture theater or classroom for the social experience of being with students and a professor slow learning knowledge cannot last forever, especially if it perpetuates the idea that graduates know what they are doing when the condition of the world tells a different story. 

Shopping will eventually have to become an extension of entertainment in the same way going to a university or college like Harvard will have to become a social club where the rich and privileged go to party, pat each other on the back, and concoct strategies to preserve the wealth of their graduates and families. Or they can change, which is much less likely. It takes an Amazon to wound them severely before that happens.

Bricks and mortar educational institutions may believe they are far more important than "shopping" and fail to equate what happened to retail with the advent of Amazon. Anyone who writes anything more than a page with a word processor already has experienced the primary step to transition knowledge to online, without having to spend one second traveling to school and paying entrance fees for the penalty of a bricks and mortar education. In fact, other than the social value of going to a university or college, I can't think of one good reason to make learning as slow and expensive as the current system does. The entire bricks and mortar educational system is a penalty on the poor and learning.

Here is one link to the group that set standards for annotation technology. I do it an injustice to describe it here and might limit your imagination on it, so use Startpage to search for "web annotation" which will give you thousands of results to look at. Do the search both as a web search and a video search and you will find hundreds of lectures and discussions about the emergent thinking on web annotation and its use. You are at the beginning stages of a revolution and if it peaks your interest, pursue it.

I envisioned online games in 1968, developed technology and filed patents on them in five countries, used the mouse and WYSIWYG screen interfaces at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ("PARC") years before Steve Jobs visited PARC and made some kind of agreement to use what he saw, and I owned the rights to companies with TVPhone and Videophone in their name as a result of working with AT&T Bell Labs on developing what I called a multimedia network years before the Web. AT&T Bell Labs had video telephony technology already, although for some reason they were not able to commercialize it.

What is important from my own experience is simply this. The world is an explosion of possibilities, emerging at tremendous speed. You only have to look around you to see the opportunity and gauge your own interest in it to catch the spark of your life's work or purpose. What interests you might not be that much different from millions of others like you, a built in audience for your interests if you act on them. 

The links below provide examples of several companies, although there are many more, using web annotation as a service, as a tool you can implement yourself, or a feature as part of their service:

• Annotate
• Hypothesis
• Genius
• diigo
  

Web Annotation, the Controlled Web, Knowledge Paywalls and Orphans

There are three areas in which web annotation could conceivably be limited. 

Controlled Web - Bandwidth Limitation and Site Filtering

One is of course the controlling of bandwidth and controlling of the information you get to see, a situation you can deal with and award severe consequences to the bandwidth limiter. Stay on your politician's back to ensure bandwidth throttling and web filtering are not applied to your web connections and at the community level make the companies’ lives hell that do it by lobbying for laws and ordinances to prevent such conduct. The web is a fundamental and essential knowledge delivery system, and is not about the services like entertainment, porn and fake news that can be found there. Annotation is the disruption that moves education from the dark ages of bricks and mortar to the enlightenment of continuously available, ever expanding knowledge delivered from the ether.  We just have to learn to use it.

To counter companies' proclivity to exploit the web as some private for profit scheme rather than among other things being an essential knowledge delivery system, one solution you can do is to create a group to deploy mesh networking, which is a wireless networking scheme developed by open source communities to solve the problem of non-availability, poor quality, bandwidth throttling, you name it. Internet service providers such as your local cable company have the infrastructure to deliver high speed information to your neighborhood, and the ownership and control of that infrastructure offers economic benefits and provides a barrier to entry to a less well financed competitor. In fact most have special agreements and easements onto your land that allow them to control access completely. Mesh is a way to jump over those limitations and create alternative ways to get the unregulated and bandwidth and content you need without the control of the gatekeepers. There are numerous carriers that can carry the fiber beyond the telcos. In addition, you can begin to spread the bandwidth you are paying for to others less fortunate who need it, by getting involved in the Open Wireless Movement.

Open source mesh networking technologies enable large groups, towns and indeed entire cities to set up their own wireless networks that are community owned. And there are open source versus private solutions. However, instead of thinking oh, an opportunity to get a community by the balls and charge what I want, think of being able to deliver the knowledge of the world to current and future generations, which is a critical and essential service and not an exploitable resource. It may be the only thing you can offer your children if vulture capitalists have their way and the bricks and mortar educators continue to price themselves out of reach of the average person.

If you want to exploit someone be a lawyer and follow ambulances, or find the most dangerous intersection in the community where people are injured regularly and stand there with your camera handy and pose as a professional witness for a fee. Or you can read this clown’s bio for a way to learn vulture capitalism in its crudest, of course with the permission directly or indirectly of government. Much of corporate America engages in vulture capitalism, they just add more icing to the poison to make it look like cupcakes.

Controlled Web - Hide Information Behind Paywalls

A second is the movement to knowledge/news paywalls. I raise news paywalls as an issue relative to the matter of good reporting being hidden behind a paywall  The idea is somewhat the same as controlling the web. News paywalls should eventually fail on their own, for the following reasons, and it has nothing to do with intellectual property rights. When news like the coverage of Watergate occurs, the story has significant importance to history, the conduct of the government, human nature, deceit, greed and ambition and social perception. All of these topics are essential to our understanding and development of deeper knowledge in these areas. Putting them behind paywalls effectively takes pieces of the experiment out of the real time living experiment. In many cases an item in the news leads to investigations of conduct and behavior that are important to analyze and understand at a much deeper level. 

If you create a song or a movie you thought up all on your own, you are the creator and have rights in the content. However if you are reporting on a car accident - a simple cars in intersection, cars crash, the owners of the vehicles are owners of the crash event information and media. The person who reports on the crash does not own the cars, the people involved, or the intersection even though the fact that it occurred on a public roadway gives them certain rights to describe the crash from their perspective. They certainly have no right to interview a private citizen and use their information unless the private citizen grants such permission.

In the accident the only thing that is subject to intellectual property rights is if the reporter or the news organization he or she, and now it works for writes some glowing prose about the crash and the company the reporter works for has some delivery agreement and infrastructure to deliver it to your TV, radio or phone. Sure, the reporter may own the embellishments, but the embellishments are not the accident. If you want to read embellishments read a novel.

More than likely, a person on the sidewalk saw the accident and captured it on their phone. So they are a reporter too, and their cost of gathering the video of the news is zero other than their time and energy. Secondly, as I point out in this article, there is nothing special about media. We live in an age where you can be the producer, reporter, and broadcaster, and if you are good at it you can command your own place in the world. Look at the Kardashians. They are simply famous for being famous. That is facetious, but if you look at YouTube there are millions of producers out there, and a lot of them produce great stuff worth watching, and their cost of production is their time, know how and imagination.

So news paywalls assume that the reporters who embellish the facts are content providers, which is nonsense. Their embellishments may be original, but the core details of the accident, or news like the Watergate papers are not. When they specialize in manipulating factual news and interpret it to give it a particular slant like CNN does constantly, then they are novelists like Steven King, describing real world events with the addition of fictional spin or opinion, and must be recognized as such.

Is any of that worth paying for? Perhaps as entertainment?  In a world in which it matters to hear the straight goods and make your own decisions about what you see and hear, I doubt it.

The other problem is, these organizations can be killed by a competitor with an apartment and a cat.

Highlighting Lies and Propaganda

The area I am interested is in behavior modification, advertising and propaganda. Web annotation is a threat to the status quo in these areas, due to its effectiveness as an exposure tool.

The groups advancing web annotation have indicated that past efforts to annotate third party web pages without their express consent has created controversy. Google launched a program to do so years ago which it called Sidewiki and it apparently generated a lot of controversy. The linked article complained about Google assuming it has the right to monetize everything on the web as if it owns it. However to me the Google problem is far greater than that and less understood, and that is the collection of user data Google is gathering with everything it does.

People honestly have no clue how damaging it is for anyone to have their personal data, which I will be explaining in great detail with links, information and research to back it up. I don't use Google for search, don't have Facebook, and stop my family and grandchildren from using them. Google and Facebook are effectively a behavioral cancer on the earth.

In other discussions about unauthorized annotation one problem that was brought up was the effect of trolling, or comments that end up being name calling, accusatory, threatening and so on it. Anyone looking at unmoderated blogs and comments knows what they are talking about.  A group I worked with which included EDS and Microsoft built an online chat system where the entire running dialog was on large monitors in public places, which Microsoft dubbed Public PCs.  The language was so shocking lawyers for all of the parties involved panicked and suggested we had to moderate it. The firm representing us, a big DC law firm raised the issue of free speech and questioned the wisdom of trying to stifle it. Free speech is NOT limited to nice words, please and thank-you. Our lawyers said to either get rid of the chat or invest heavily in moderating it, which might be OK for a few hundred users, but not millions on line 24 hours a day.

Today you have Google and Facebook suggesting they will be the ones deciding what is legitimate news and quality speech, which to me is no different than allowing any tyrant to do so. They are trying to become China, Turkey, Iran, the UAE all rolled up into one. When you fully grasp the implications of what is happening around you with your data, you will understand the need to cripple these guys completely. They are simply dangerous and their close ties to intelligence agencies makes them complicit in criminal thuggery authorized by politicians that are clueless or devious, or a little bit of both. 

Another part of the conversation about annotation touched on companies that have been exposed for lying and manipulation and the lengths they go to prevent exposure, fighting for years in court to suppress speech they do not like. Should we back off on that challenge we would effectively be giving up on freedom. Unfortunately the system has permitted this type of behavior for so long the wrong doers seem to think it is their right to continue doing so.

For example, Volkswagen built software that could detect when their diesel engines were being tested for fuel efficiency and emissions, and falsify those emissions right at the point they were tested. 

Then they tried to cover it up.

And then, just so you get really upset, here is how Volkswagen, like thousands of other companies screw millions of consumers who pay for their fraud and malfeasance, use lobbyists, politicians, lawyers and a corrupt legal system to get a Get Out of Jail Free card and pay an admittance fee (think movie ticket specially priced for scumbags).


Here is where annotation comes in, in this case on Volkswagen’s home page. Consider Volkswagen's home page being overlaid with a plastic sheet or another layer that hosts the yellow text, the annotation layer and you can begin to see how the idea works. Think of the overlay as a pair of X-Ray specs in your pocket that when you put them on you see through the layers of baloney Volkswagen shows you.

Guaranteed the liars and manipulators will keep coming, but given the fact that there may only be 200 hundred or so people that control the wealth of the entire world, their extinction is likely. It is an unnatural imbalance that cannot be allowed to continue, although it is as much our fault as theirs simply because we continue to believe in fairy tales like mommy and daddy will protect us, a god is looking over us even though a careful examination of the gods' representatives and their conduct, which they go to great lengths to hide, would make one ask what the heck were we thinking, and we hand the reigns to our lives to a bunch of politicians who are simply toady, sniveling supplicants who will do anything for a buck, reelection, and attention. That applies to all sides of the political aisle and we have no way of addressing the damage these clowns do to our nations because they come without any kind of warranty. Hell, even our cars have a warranty and someone looks over their production and sale because a defective vehicle can do so much damage to us and those around us if the defects are not fixed.

In another example of lies and manipulation being exposed, here is where Ram Trucks got caught using Martin Luther King's words to create an implied endorsement of their trucks at the Superbowl.  

Annotation falls under the doctrine of fair use as codified at 17 U.S. Code Section 107, which provides for use for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research, all of which are germane to fair use, although it will prove to be extremely unpopular because it is one thing to lie, cheat, steal and manipulate, and another to be caught at it. Although as Volkswagen and a gazillion other scofflaws like them have worked out, the fines are simply a cost of doing what they loosely describe as business. Robbery for a fine is an accepted way to do business in a globalist world in which politicians will hit their back or belly for a buck.

My bet is the repeated offenders will go to their lapdog politicians to change the fair use doctrine next. At some point you have to wake up and simply put an end to the nonsense. Exposing it continually is what required.

So when you read criticism, optimism and excitement in the pages of p2p.media, understand the simple idea that individuals and companies that lie, manipulate and abuse the public are like manna from heaven.  They just keep on giving.