Re: A Less Ephemeral Web

I think this is relevant.Last year (it seems such a long time ago) I organised
a conference on AI and psychotherapy.And yes, I did manage to find quite a few
speakers able to talk to the topic.But as I was writing up the material for the
website someone who is the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the charity
associated with this pointed out that they, according to their charitable
purposes, could not be political.So we weren't - I think.But this begs the
question: what does it mean to be political?Or not to be political for that
matter?How do you assess "right-leaning" or "left-leaning". Who or what makes
that assessment?It is not possible to rely on logic for this as logic is
not parti pris, so it may not lean either way in an argument that is a question
of opinion. Logic cannot "know" where to draw the boundary between not the outer
boundary of such an assessment.We decide, possibly in the light of logic, logic
does not decide for us.I think that a lot of the appeal of the current
arrangement of biased algorithms is that it happens under the surface, mimicking
the way we do not want to think things through.What is it in what you suggest
that will encourage people to think things through and help them with that
process?(Scrapbooks of articles plugged into a classifier could be an
interesting diversion, but I don't think it will get us very far.)
Adam  





On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 6:26 PM, Adam Sobieski adamsobieski@hotmail.com  wrote:
Web users could press or click on a Web browser button to save, note or
scrapbook webpages and/or Web-schema-annotated objects in them, storing them for
later use. This storage could be organized into folders and Web schema could be
of use for sorting webpages and/or objects into these folders. For example, a
NewsArticle schema could indicate that, when saved, noted or scrapbooked, Web
content could be organized into a folder called “News Articles”.



Webpages and/or objects in them could be stored on users’ local devices or
stored on cloud-based storage such as Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive. This
could be configurable for end users.



Cloud-based storage and extensible architectures could facilitate the
development of apps, plugins and services to analyze the contents of collections
of stored webpages to provide features for end users. Some specific examples of
analytical services in the news space include: (1) notifying users of the
distribution of the sources of their collected articles, (2) notifying users
whether their collected articles contain misinformation or disinformation, (3)
notifying users whether their collected articles are “left-leaning” or
“right-leaning”, (4) indicating to users the distribution of topics in their
collected articles, (5) indicating to users sentiment analysis upon their
collected articles, (6) indicating to users the comprehensiveness of their news
search and gathering processes for a given topic, and (7) providing other
features made possible by other AI and natural language processing tools.



Multiple means of navigating collections of stored webpages and/or objects can
be envisioned. Users could utilize a calendar-based widget to navigate
collections of webpages or objects. Users could also navigate via a
folders-based user experience.



Multiple means of searching collections of stored webpages and/or objects can be
envisioned, for example searching for content by text strings or keywords.



Thank you. I hope that these ideas are of some interest to you.





Best regards,

Adam Sobieski