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Defining Original Content in the Internet Age: Part 2
I got such a response from my previous online article on the subject of Original Content, that it caused quite a bit of discussion among some friends of mine, one of whom asked me the following: “If newspapers, magazines and bloggers take original content and rewrite it, and it morphs through time, just how many times can something be ‘original’? And with sufficient commentary, can it be ‘new’ or ‘original’ again?”
My friend’s question leads to all sorts of philosophical and ontological considerations.
A fact, such as a phrase or sentence in a news item or a corporate press release, is a datum, an atomic bit of information or knowledge. How you represent such information leads one to the problem of ‘knowledge representation’. Our brains hold information as electrochemical traces that strengthen certain signal pathways among neurons. To make it explicit and unambiguous, one can use logic, such as the first-order predicate calculus, or “first-order logic,” the great formal deductive system used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science, an advance on the previous, less complex system known as propositional logic.
As you learn in a Logic 101 class, the following sentences: “Socrates is a man”, “Plato is a man” are propositions. Socrates can be represented symbolically by, say, “p” and Plato by a “q”. In propositional logic these two entities, p and q, are unrelated, but in first-order logic both sentences can be connected by the same property: Man(x), where Man(x) means that x is a man. When x=Socrates we get the first proposition, p, and when x=Plato we get the second proposition, q. This opens the door for powerful logic quantifiers such as “for every x...”, for example, “for every x, if Man(x), then...”.
When the Japanese in the 1980s attempted to build the big “Fifth Generation” project, essentially a comprehensive artificial intelligence system, they used first-order logic as the system of knowledge representation. Fortunately, they found a computer programming language, called Prolog (“programmable logic”) a general purpose language based on declarative, logic programming. It was conceived by a group around Alain Colmerauer in Marseille, France, in the early 1970s, and it was first turned into a true compiler by David H. D. Warren in Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s often used in the fields of AI and computational linguistics. There’s a purely logical subset of it called "pure Prolog", and it also has a number of extra-logical functions.
But you and I don’t read unambiguous first-order logical formulas when we examine a news item or a press release. Oh yes, there have been attempts to create human-understandable languages that make their grammar free from ambiguity, such as Loglan and Esperanto, but the reality is that we humans communicate via more ambiguous “natural” languages such as English.
It was the great linguistic expert Noam Chomsky, wielding his transformation grammar thesis, who demonstrated that a series of facts can be represented in an infinite number of ways. Any hack writer can take a press release and rewrite it in a million different ways. Indeed, if you look at the front pages of newspapers or the new products sections of newspapers and magazines, one can often see the same “original content” mutated and rewritten a million times.
Now, is this “original content” too? Not exactly. But in the act of rewriting, one can achieve originality by adding commentary and additional background information, or perhaps even correcting errors in the original content itself. One could actually end up with content that’s not the original content, but different-though-related content, perhaps even better content than the original content.
Back in the 1980s Symantec ( News - Alert) has a program called Q&A, which used a semantic grammar to provide a natural language front-end to a database. You would input a question, such as “How many employees do we have in Chicago?” and the program would parse the sentence. The semantic grammar would recognize it and construct an SQL database inquiry.
Now, imagine a system like that turned on its head. One can envision an AI system where one could take a news item or a press release, for example, and, using Google ( News - Alert), retrieve other information about the subject (e.g. historical information). Using a semantic grammar and some randomly selected rewrite rules, one could rewrite the sentences containing the information, then rewrite the background sentences retrieved by Google and use those for an historical introduction. For example: “The AdvancedTCA ( News - Alert) form factor was first proposed six years ago. It is designed for carrier-class computing platforms in telelcom. And now, Company X has developed Product Y…”
Now, how much value have we added by rewriting the press release? Not a whole lot, since the information is already out there. But we have also brought disparate pieces of data together to change and enhance the presentation, such as the way a chef starts out with same raw materials that anyone can purchase in a supermarket, but, being a master chef, makes a masterful meal, whereas the same ingredients when cooked up by a less-skilled amateur results in something that’s merely palatable.
Somewhere in the adding and enhancing of information, the original kernel of data is preserved and enhanced, but we’re no longer dealing with original content.
Now that technology enables us to emulate hack writers, the question arises whether anyone should create such a system. One could envision a service where companies are offered rewritten and enhanced material for a small fee, rather than keeping writers on staff. It would even be cheaper than dealing with freelancers. Buy enough of this new material for a website, and Google or Yahoo will note the changes and additional material to your website and it will improve your organic rankings.
The preposterous end result of all this, is that as Napoleon said, “God fights on the side with the heaviest artillery.” Large corporations will buy and post many permutations and modifications of the same information to stay head of their competitors’ rankings.
It reminds one of Arthur C. Cleark’s 1953 science fiction story, “The Nine Billion Names of God". It’s the story of an Asian monastery whose monks have long sought to list all of the possible names of God using a writing system they’ve developed. The monks believe that one all of God’s possible names have been enumerated, existence will lose all meaning, and God will "wind up" the universe. Using a manual, “by hand” method, it would take them 15,000 years to complete the task, so they end up buying a computer and a couple of Western programmers to get the machine to print out all of the possible name permutations.
The O. Henry-like twist at the end of the story is that the programmers flee as the computer is about finished, thinking that the monks will be angry when nothing happens. In fact, they look back, and "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
And indeed, one would expect similar cataclysmic results to occur if the entire Internet became clogged with redundant and mutated pseudo-original material drowning out authentic original expression.
And that by itself is saying quite a lot!
Richard Grigonis (News - Alert) is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group. To read more of Richard’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Internet Protocol (IP) | X | | IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
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