杏吧原创

WHEN Philip Greenspun鈥檚 beautiful dog George died in 1991, he had no idea
just how attached he had become to the animal. 鈥淚鈥檇 go away on a trip or fall in
love with a woman and say, `OK, now I鈥檝e recovered from George鈥檚 death鈥�,鈥� he
says. 鈥淭hen life would throw me a curve and my reaction revealed to me how
fragile George鈥檚 death had left me. I decided to take the trip we were going to
take together, Boston to Alaska and back.鈥�

In 1993, Greenspun created a lavishly illustrated record of the trip and
posted it on the Web (www.photo.net/samantha/). He called the site
Travels with Samantha and within months it had become one of the most read
personal sites on the nascent World Wide Web. (Samantha, in case you鈥檙e
wondering, was the name Greenspun gave to his laptop computer.) While many
readers responded to the touchingly intimate narrative, the gorgeous photos were
the biggest hit. People wanted to know exactly how Greenspun had achieved
results that appeared on computer screens with the clarity of stained glass.

In 1995, he acquired the domain name photo.net and traffic to the site
exploded. 鈥淚t started out as a place for writing about travel and experience,
illustrated with photos,鈥� explains Greenspun, who works as a computer scientist
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 鈥淚 added a static FAQ for
photography so that people wouldn鈥檛 have to send me e-mail. I added a dynamic
Q&A forum so that my answers to the never-ending stream of questions would
be archived. Other folks started answering and I found myself merely moderating
exchanges. Now people answer each other鈥檚 questions and senior community members
moderate.鈥� Photo.net is now arguably the most reputable and authoritative guide
to photography on the Web.

Photo.net is remarkable in many ways. First, the site is non-commercial and
is still funded entirely by its founder. Second, Greenspun is not a professional
photographer, just a dedicated and gifted amateur. And most strikingly, the site
no longer merely records what Greenspun knows. It has grown to be an archive of
the collective knowledge of the community he has helped foster. Greenspun has
become an acknowledged guru for amateur photographers, not just because of his
own interest and ability but also because in photo.net he operates a large and
extremely efficient clearing house for information. He performs a function that
has yet to be named: part host, part historian, part librarian and part
referee.

Greenspun is one of a new breed of experts that the World Wide Web is
creating. There have always been individuals with extraordinarily detailed
knowledge of hobbies, history, sport or trivia鈥� experts who could impress
friends and colleagues but never aspired to greater things. The difference today
is that the Web has given these people a global constituency. Start a website
and anyone can read it. The Internet is nurturing gurus like Greenspun in every
imaginable field of human endeavour, from Raf Alvarado, an academic at Princeton
who runs the Mayan Epigraphic Database Project
(http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/med/), to Sheryl Todd and her Tapir
Gallery (www.tapirback.com/tapirgal/). Most of these sites are
non-commercial, run by keen individuals for fun or out of goodwill. Most of
these people had relatively easy access to the Web in its early days. Often they
are academics like Greenspun.

Expert sites are usually uncontroversial, but Keith Cowing鈥檚 NASA Watch
(www.nasawatch.com) is an exception. Cowing started working for NASA in 1986
as a space life scientist and ended up on the International Space Station
programme. He left in 1991 and has since worked for a non-profit organisation
where he ran biomedical peer-review panels for breast cancer, and as a
self-employed Web consultant.

NASA Watch started life in 1996 as NASA RIF Watch; RIF stands for 鈥渞eduction
in force鈥�, civil service jargon for axing jobs. 鈥淚 did not like the way NASA
administrator Dan Goldin was running the agency鈥攁nd the pointless job cuts
he was promoting,鈥� Cowing explains. 鈥淚 saw a large number of my friends being
threatened with job loss for no good reason. I got angry and threw a page up on
my Web server in April 1996 and started to publish whatever I could find out
about the layoffs.

鈥淲hen that threat subsided I tried to take the website offline. Alas, people
urged me not to. You see, since it had initially gone online, the site had grown
well beyond its original scope.鈥� In 1997, Cowing changed the name to focus on
all aspects of NASA. 鈥淭he press picked up on it, which only served to fuel
interest,鈥� he says. 鈥淲ith increased interest came increased contributions of
information from NASA鈥檚 rank and file鈥攎uch to the chagrin of NASA
尘补苍补驳别尘别苍迟.鈥�

Gaining notoriety

Cowing admits that the site鈥檚 origins were less than auspicious. 鈥淣ASA Watch
started as a crude, haphazard collection of rumours and a lot of my personal
opinions and biases. When it gained notoriety, it did so as somewhat of an
anomaly more than anything else.鈥� But he insists that his standards have risen:
鈥淥ver the years, NASA Watch has become more professional in both structure and
content such that both the website and I are regularly cited as a news source by
`traditional鈥� media around the world.鈥�

Cowing is now a significant force in space politics and has even been asked
to testify before Congress. But relations with the space agency鈥檚 managers,
including Goldin, remain frigid. 鈥淣ASA鈥檚 administrator views myself and NASA
Watch as a thorn in his side,鈥� he says.

Cowing is particularly upset that NASA鈥檚 public affairs department denies him
press credentials. 鈥淣ASA has always accused me of not posting accurate
information. Yet by denying me press access, NASA denies me access to the very
information they claim NASA Watch lacks in the first place. Go figure.鈥�

If battling with NASA seems a large task for a part-time Internet watchdog,
then identifying risks that computers present to the public is a Herculean one.
The man who has taken it on is Peter Neumann, a scientist at the Computer
Science Laboratory at the Silicon Valley technology company SRI International.
In 1985, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) asked Neumann if he would
organise a forum on risks to the public. He was a logical choice. Since 1976 he
had been editor of ACM Software Engineering Notes, a publication he
created and which included many cases of computer-related screw-ups. Neumann
called his new forum RISKS (http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks) and set it
up so that a select group of people could view it as a newsgroup or subscribe to
it as e-mail. It has since become famous in the computing world.

RISKS differs from photo.net and NASA Watch in that it is externally funded.
The ACM gives Neumann a small annual budget, and SRI International provides
computer support and gives Neumann a few hours a week to run the site. 鈥淭he
earliest readers were all colleagues whom I had hand-picked,鈥� Neumann says.
鈥淢any of them became valuable participants.鈥� But the content of the forum has
changed over time. 鈥淚 have to moderate a lot more than I did in the early days,
when the contributors were all people I knew well and almost everything
submitted was relevant,鈥� he laments.

These days it takes him far more effort to select suitable submissions and to
choose between competing submissions. 鈥淏ut overall there are many repetitive
patterns of causes and effects that are quite striking,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he same
kinds of risks keep recurring.鈥�

Like Cowing, Neumann was invited to testify before the US Senate and
Congress. Unlike Cowing, he took up the offer. This represented a watershed for
Internet communities. The legitimacy of a leading Internet expert was now
officially recognised, and policy makers were taking his accumulated expertise
into account. 鈥淚 have been outspoken on many issues, and am delighted that I was
asked to testify,鈥� Neumann says. The material he presented to Congressional and
Senate subcommittees was fed back to the Internet community in its turn. 鈥淎ll of
my testimonies are on my website,鈥� he notes.

Ready for action

From here it is a short step to mobilising the Net community as a shaper of
policy. To that end, Neumann has joined forces with Lauren Weinstein, who runs a
similar ACM-sponsored forum on privacy. Together they formed People For Internet
Responsibility 鈥渢o address these sorts of issues in an objective manner that is
not captive of any vested interests鈥�, Neumann says. They fear that powerful
commercial and political interests will overcome the public interest in areas
like domain name policy, privacy, security and freedom of speech. PFIR is their
way of trying to maintain the open Internet that made a project like RISKS
possible.

Paradoxically perhaps, Neumann sounds a note of warning against implicitly
trusting self-appointed experts. 鈥淚 think the Internet, self-publishing and
unmoderated newsgroups are transforming all sorts of people into pseudo-experts,
whether they know anything or not. There is a lot of trash on the Internet.鈥� But
he recognises that there are also real experts who give their time as moderators
and interject a lot of wisdom: he cites Weinstein and his privacy forum as one
example. 鈥淐arefully moderated groups are an enormous benefit, especially when
the moderator is really knowledgeable about the topic,鈥� he says. But in the end,
Neumann warns, the Net leaves people to judge for themselves. 鈥淓veryone has to
do his or her own mental filtering.鈥�