So much to blog, so little time...(but Verisign draws my attention)
There's stuff I want to be saying about Bush's military service records ("...nine days of active duty between May 1972 and May 1973") and the obvious, unfavourable comparisons with John Kerry.
Plus, I've been thinking more about Orkut and its ilk, and how they could improve the service. (BTW: this may be hard to believe, but when I created my Orkut card, I actually had no idea Orkut had an actual jail 'feature' - their description of what happens to accounts that are frozen for real or perceived violations of their TOS. Bizarre).
But no time to rant about all that stuff now.
One thing I can't allow to pass, though, is the news that Verisign is planning to relaunch its universally reviled Site Finder service this spring, according to the Washington Post.
While the Post piece adopts a justifiably outraged tone throughout, I still wish the reporter had done a better job of nailing the Verisign spokesdrone on some of his points:
"Site Finder was not controversial with users, 84 percent of whom said they liked it as a helpful navigation service," said Tom Galvin, VeriSign's vice president of government relations. "We continue to look at ways we can offer the service while addressing the concerns that were raised by a segment of the technical community."
First: where the heck did that 84 percent number come from? 84 percent of what sample size? 84 percent of what kind of narrow-ass survey approach did you use to produce that figure?*
Further proof that 76.04 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Second: "...concerns that were raised by a segment of the technical community." Doesn't the arrogant, dismissive tone of this characteristic Verisign piece of spin just make you seethe?
This is exactly the sort of thing that I most despise about the job often done by people in my profession (if one can even call it that). It's a subtle, insidious, and downright dishonest manipulation of the facts through slippery allusion.
Widespread outrage and censure from significant individual influencers and large organizations right across the Net is greasily downgraded to "concerns" raised by "a segment" of the community so artfully dismissed as mere techies.
Compare the Verisign guy's flippant trivializing of the issue with ICANN's characterization of the "widespread expressions of concern" for the impact Site Finder would have on "the security and stability of the Internet". Some of the most telling expressions of concern are in the public record, and can be reviewed at ICANN's site (in the section "Internet Community Comments".
Again - why isn't this economy of truth challenged more directly by the reporter?
In the reporter's defense, he does step out of the way and give Verisign a second opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot -- belittling the issue and demonstrating their bloody-minded refusal to accept certain key infrastructural strengths of the Internet.
The Verisign spokesweasel says that in their opinion, the opposition to Site Finder stems from "...an ideological belief by a narrow section of the technological community who don't believe you should innovate the core infrastructure of the Internet."
Contrast this with Doc & David's useful definition in their World of Ends piece, that: "Adding value to the Internet lowers its value." Or, as they go on to say:
"If the Internet were a smart network, its designers would have anticipated the importance of a good search engine and would have built searching into the network itself. But because its designers were smart, they made the Net too stupid for that. So searching is a service that can be built at one of the million ends of the Internet. Because people can offer any services they want from their end, search engines have competed, which means choice for users and astounding innovation."
One of the many things wrong with Site Finder is that it tries to make a search service infrastructural.
And it's their search service - not one the user has chosen, which constitutes a flagrant misuse of their government-sanctioned monopoly.
IMHO, of course.
*A little further digging reveals that the 84 percent figure comes from an earlier survey commissioned by Verisign, and carried out by Markitecture and Harris Interactive some time last year.
The actual result originally quoted was that: "84 percent of Internet users who have tried Site Finder said that they preferred the service to receiving an error message" - a still slippery use of stats, omitting, as it does, the essential word "surveyed"; as in: "84 percent of Internet users surveyed...".
Nowhere in the original press release or in subsequent references to this statistic do they mention the sample size of their survey. The typical Harris Interactive poll, AFAIK, is based on a "nationally representative telephone survey" of between 1,000 and 2,500 adults from across the U.S.
So 84 percent of those people surveyed (out of a total US online population of around 280.5 million), who had experienced the Site Finder "service", answered some probably very tightly worded closed-end question, expressing an implied preference for Site Finder over a 404.
Bonus link: Site Finder and Internet Governance by Jonathan Weinberg
