Open Password – Friday, May 27, 2022
#1077
The Syllabus – Google – Social Media – Willi Bredemeier – Evgeny Morozov – Quality, relevance and originality – Attention Economy – Sara Getz – Niklas Meek – Open Password – Algorithm – Curation – Editors – Cyberflaneurs – Clicks, Likes and Shares – Jose van Dijk – masterofmedia – Website – Curated Email Service – Shortlist – Corona – Curated Reading – Human-Machine Cooperation – Artisanal Automation – Twitter – Personalization – Reader’s Digest for the discerning
German Institute for Service Quality – Online portals – German Institute for Service Quality – ntv – Markus Hamer
An alternative to Google
and social media?
“Strategic de-economization and democratization of information access”
The Syllabus was born to contest the all-too-predictable culture of social media.
Hence, we regularly invite intellectuals, academics, artists, and politicians
to share the pieces they found insightful – all of them found using
our indexing infrastructure. …Think of this as a slow-paced Twitter
that thrives on serendipity and erudition.
Self-portrayal of The Syllabus
By Willi Bredemeier
Off to new shores: Comic by GBI-Genios about Willi Bredemeier
on the phase-out of Password Print and the start of Open Password (2015/2016)
Is there an alternative to Google? Should they exist? The prevailing criticism of high-tech companies is based on their market power and its abuse. These must be countered politically with “regulation”, “sanctions” and “ensuring more competition”.
Evgeny Morozov, the technology and internet critic from Belarus, became known as a FAZ columnist, especially in Germany, with the books “The Net Delusion” (2011) and “To Save Everything Click Here” (2013). With his criticism of the tech companies, he takes a more fundamental approach than the economic contexts that dominate the public debate: he asks about the quality, relevance and originality of the content that is made searchable and available. If we follow him, more competition among search engines would be of little use if the new players do not differ from Google in the criteria on which their algorithms are set (and which are possibly worse than Google from a technical point of view).
Morozov has also created an alternative to Google. At least that is how his service is perceived by parts of the public and in Morozov’s personal environment. The offer is called “The Syllabus” (in German: “The Register” or “The Directory”). www.the-syllabus.com. According to Sara Getz, this can be understood as a stand against the “attention economy”, in which providers fight for the limited attention of their users. How successful they are is measured by circulation levels, audience ratings, clicks and “likes”. These provide an incentive to write shorter, flashier, tabloid-style and more superficial.
Below are descriptions and evaluations of “The Syllabus” by Sara Getz and Niklas Meek. In addition, there are Syllabus’ self-descriptions on its own website and my personal balance after using “The Syllabus” for almost a year.
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Sara Getz: Making quality discoverable. An algorithm for quality and originality. Individual curation of the shortlist by editors. Plus the cyber flâneurs.
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Morozov’s criticism of the high-tech companies is summarized by Sara Getz as follows: ” With the Syllabus Morozov criticizes the way in which online information is discovered and disseminated: based on clicks, likes and shares – based on popularity” (in: Is Evgeny Morozov´ s The Syllabus the real Google antidote?, www.masterofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2020/12/098). Getz quotes Jose van Dijk, who sees Google’s hegemony over online content there, “( where popularity and thus visibility) has everything to do with quantity and very little with quality or relevance” (“Search Engines and the Production of Academic Knowledge”, in: International Journal of Cultural Studies 13(2010)”. Getz continues: “With the Syllabus Morozov aims to make quality content discoverable, offering readers “intellectual spinach” as an antidote to the “Silicon Valley junk food”. In the words of Morozov: “Nothing is at stake here but the ignorant man who perishes because of clicks and likes.”
What exactly is “The Syllabus” like? Getz: “ The Syllabus revolves mainly about two services, a website and a curated email service. On the website users can access their “Cabinet” that is filled with a constantly updated selections of books, academic articles, podcasts and videos on various subjects, curated by Morozov and his team. Additionally, users can choose to receive weekly emails with content recommendations based on their preferences. The different topics users can choose from are based on Morozov’s broad research interests, varying from “Politics as technology” to “Just transition” and “Climate change.”
We are looking for content that deserves a wide audience because of its relevance and the high quality of its discussions, but without Morozov and his team would be lost in the noise of social media . “Everyday a team monitors the thousands of sources that are retrieved by the algorithm for quality and novelty, creating a short-list that gets individually reviewed by the human editors. Behind the organization of The Syllabus is a group of around seventeen people who are closely involved in the project. These team members have all kinds of different backgrounds, making a diverse, but mostly academically educated team. The Syllabus can be seen as a highly curated digital archive, with Morozov and his team as the archivists of a highly curated canon: filled with qualitative content from different fields of research. The website can be considered as a pre-academic library, as it stands in a parallel position in relation to the academic field.”
Getz’s final assessment is: “Have we finally found a Google anti-dote? On the one hand, yes, we did. The Syllabus is a carefully curated digital archive that contains high quality content, has a plain but clear design that simply offers the needed information, no ads and pop-ups involved. …You will probably go to Google for finding the answer to your question and visit The Syllabus to “flaneur” and to let yourself be surprised by the content offered.”
Evgeny Morozov
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Niklas Meek: Nowhere else have you found such a density of reliable, intelligent, international articles about Corona in the past few months. Is a new “curated reading” emerging?
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Niklas Meek formally describes Syllabus as a newsletter ( Silicon Valley without nonsense – With Syllabus we should find the really important information on the internet: A visit to the internet theorist Evgeny Morozov, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine, December 18, 2020): “You subscribe to Syllabus, “You can mark your interests there under numerous keywords – such as “artificial intelligence” or COVID-19 – and then receive a selection from tens of thousands of articles published worldwide every week or, as in the case of Corona, every day.”
How does this selection come about? Meek: “One could describe… (it) as a human-machine collaboration of algorithms and curators. Morozov speaks of “artisanal automation” .
He and his seven-person core team … work with a dozen clearly tech-savvy researchers who scan thousands of publications, blogs and podcasts every week and scour Internet forums to see which texts are currently being discussed. You often find texts that, when you google them, only received five clicks or likes and therefore rank low in the major search engines and sink into digital oblivion.”
Meeks evaluates The Syllabus as follows: “ Nowhere else in the past few months have you found such a density of reliable, intelligent, international articles on Corona as here. … A new “curated reading (is emerging), made possible by a virtual science college, but not as subjective as the countless newsletters from individual journalists and bloggers and, above all, not as much as the major search engines and the ambiguous form of information dissemination and discourse via Twitter is dependent. One could also speak of a strategic de-economization and a real democratization of access to information; Perhaps a decisive step in an age that carries “information” as an epoch marker. … Finally really new information and exciting ideas beyond the repetitive chatter of social media controlled by dominant search algorithms”!
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Syllabus: Screening for quality and originality. Final selection by individual curators.
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The Syllabus presents itself as follows on its own website: “ Our credo is simple: The good content is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. Every day, we find hundreds of stimulating new articles – from videos of conference talks to academic articles – that are likely to get lost in the noise of social media. We do so by monitoring thousands of authoritative video channels, podcast hosts, small but insightful magazine publishers, and academic journals. We vet all these items for quality and novelty. Our human reviewers then go through this short-list, reviewing each item individually. We track sixty topis; they range from the politics of climate to the history of economic thought, from AI & automation to film & theater.”
Elsewhere it says: “The Syllabus is your expert guide to the digital public sphere. Podcasts, essays, academic articles, talks: we track it all. … Algorithms have their limits; so do humans. At The Syllabus our human creators work side by side with technologists to discover outstanding content. Every week we index, rank and review tens of thousands of newly published pieces across text, audio and video – and in 6 languages. Our team then hand-picks the most interesting material from this ever-growing pile of information. We call this “artisanal automation” (i.e. a synthesis of craftsmanship and automation?, ed.). The result? More than a dozen weekly syllabi with all the best new material to read, watch and listen to.”
The subscriber can specify a maximum of ten subject areas (out of a total of 60 subject areas) on which he or she regularly receives contributions. Among other things, he may also choose whether he would like to receive more academic or more journalistic contributions and which languages he prefers (for example German).
The standard subscription is 12 euros per month and 120 euros per year. The following is offered in detail: a personalized syllabus based on the subscriber’s choices according to the subject areas offered – 15 curated syllabi (for example: the best podcasts from Germany – the best new content in the technology sector) – searchable archive with 58,000 items for 23,000 subscribers – hundreds of Issues published so far – curated playlist of favorite podcast episodes – a newsletter published on Sunday ” featuring our Cyberflaneur as well as picks for the open-access paper of the week, hidden gem of the week, and much more.”
Regarding the cyber flâneurs, who as “free-floating intellectuals” select content in addition to the curators, it is said: “ Most weeks one of our trusted guides – artists, intellectuals, academics, journalists – chooses around 10 interesting pieces and writes a sentence or two to explain their selections.” One of these cyber strollers is Joanna Pope: “Researcher & Editor. Joanna is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on political ecology, epistemology and aesthetics. She studied comparative literature and art history at the Free University of Berlin. Joanna is also a composer.”
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More curators who have earned a high reputation and whom we trust, please!
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After subscribing to “The Syllabus” for almost a year, the weekly push services (and the occasional use of the archive) do not seem to me to be an alternative to Google, but certainly a useful addition – and this also to all periodicals and metapublications that “relevance “, “Quality” and “Originality” are lowercase. Whatever I read from the offers recommended to me didn’t bore me. I found the texts mostly intellectually stimulating and I always learned something. I would probably never have known about most of the texts without “The Syllabus.”
“The Syllabus” as a “multimedia reader’s digest for discerning people” seems to me to be particularly suitable for the educated citizen, the politician, the scientist, the journalist and the publisher, who are also interested in questions outside of which they are central need to take care of, keep up to date and want to maintain perspective. This “thinking outside the box” with the help of curators who have earned a high reputation and whom we trust seems to me to be important both for the individual and for society if we do not want to remain trapped in the bubble of our own frame of reference and society should not consist of areas of competence and consensus that are isolated from one another (e.g. according to industries, disciplines and super-specializations).
One similarity between the search engines and the syllabus is that neither of these entities says anything about how their algorithm works. I would have loved to know how an algorithm could be set up that weights publications based on their quality and originality.
Should there be an alternative not only to Google but also to The Syllabus? As a matter of fact. For example, the curation of German-language texts appears to be carried out by a person called “The Besserwisser”. The result is a predominantly left-liberal offer with an occasional socialist touch. It would be interesting to see whether a different screening of new German-language publications for relevance, quality and originality would lead to similar or largely different texts. Or to put it a bit more polemically: Are our left-liberal authors simply better or has the “know-it-all” looked at the German-language publishing landscape with a left-liberal eye?
German Institute for Service Quality
The best German online portals 2022
(German Institute for Service Quality) Inform, compare, find, book – online portals are an important contact point in many situations. The “Germany’s Best Online Portals 2022” survey, which received 43,183 customer opinions, answers which providers are currently at the top of users’ favour. The German Institute for Service Quality and the news channel ntv honored the most popular companies in 62 categories.
The best online portals from a customer perspective include 11880.com, Businessbike, Fewo-direkt, Idealo, Immowelt.de, Musterhaus.net, Myhammer, Neuwagen24.de, Secret Escapes and Stepstone. A total of 604 online portals were evaluated.
Among the winners there are also numerous specialists who are less known to the general public, but are highly valued by active users,” says Markus Hamer, Managing Director of the German Institute for Service Quality.
In the population-representative consumer survey, customer satisfaction with online portals was examined in the areas of offerings and services, customer service and internet presence. For example, the quality and variety of the service, contact options by telephone, chat, email and social media, reactions to customer inquiries with regard to advisory competence and friendliness as well as the information value and usability of the portal pages were taken into account. The willingness of customers to recommend a portal was also considered important. A total of 604 companies were evaluated; The individual evaluation included 437 online portals, each of which received at least 80 customer opinions.
PRIZE WINNER “GERMANY’S BEST ONLINE PORTALS 2022”
(alphabetical sorting)
TRAVEL & MOBILITY
Auto subscription
Cluno, Finn.Auto, Vive La Car
Boat sales & purchases
ADAC Skipper portal, Boot24.com, Boote.de
Camper sharing
Paul Camper, Yescapa
Camping portals
Camping.info, Eurocamp, Pincamp
car sharing
Flinkster, Hertz24/7, Miles
E-mobility
Smarter-fahr.de, The Mobility House
E-scooter sharing
Emmy, Felyx, Stella
Bicycle subscription
eBike subscription, Swapfiets
Holiday home portals
Fewo-direkt, Novasol, Traum-Ferienwohnungen.de
Used car portals
Autoscout24, Heycar, Mobile.de
Hotel booking portals
Booking.com, Check24, HRS
Automotive workshop portals
Autobutler, Auto Repairs.de, Fairgarage
Cruise portals
Dreamlines.de, Kreuzberater.de, Oceando.de
New car portals
Carwow, Neuwagen24.de, Sixt-Neuwagen.de
Parking spaces
Ich-parke-billiger.de, Parkandfly.de, Parkos
Travel bargains
Secret Escapes, Holiday Guru, Holiday Pirates
Fuel cost comparison
Clever-tanken.de, Ich-tanke.de, Mehr-tanken
Motorhome rental
McRent, Rent and Travel, Roadsurfer
Motorhome brokerage
Best Camper, Camperdays, CU Camper
Yacht charter
Argos, Boataround, Yachtcharterfinder.com
SHOPPING
Marketplaces for private sellers
Ebay classifieds, Etsy, Vinted
Price search engines
Cheaper.de, Guenstiger.de, Idealo
Discount portals
Coupons.de, vouchers.de, voucher pony
Bargain portals
Dealbunny.de, Dealdoktor, Mydealz
UNIVERSAL & FINANCES
Business directories
11880.com, The Local, Yellow Pages
Crowd investing companies & projects
Bettervest, Companisto, Invesdor (formerly Kapilendo and Finnest)
Bicycle leasing portals
Business bike, Euro bike, job bike
Gold purchase
Dein-Goldankauf.de, Goldankauf123.de, Moneygold.de
Gold comparison portals
Gold-Preisvergleich.de
Loan portals
Credimaxx, Creditplus, Maxda
Leasing portals
Abcfinance, Leasingmarkt.de, Vehiculum
Leasing comparison portals
Goleasy, Sparneuwagen.de
Online legal advice
Advocard, Frag-einen-Anwalt.de, Juraforum
Universal comparison calculator
Check24, Tarifcheck.de, Verivox
Finance & Insurance Comparison Calculator
Baufi24, Finanzcheck.de,vergleich.de
PROFESSION
Job exchanges for young professionals
Aubi-Plus, Training.de, Staufenbiel Institute
Job portals
Stellenanzeigen.de, Stepstone, Xing
Special job exchanges
The Eye, Experteer.de, Yourfirm
Student and temporary jobs
In staff, job call, study work
TECHNOLOGY & DEVICES
Cloud provider
Google Drive, Strato Hidrive, Your Secure Cloud
Equipment/machinery rental portals
HKL construction machinery, Klarx
Rental portals technology
Everphone, Grover, Liverental.de
Web hosting provider
Domain Factory, Host Europe, Ionos by 1&1
LIVING & HOUSEHOLD
Energy tariff switching portals
Cheapenergy24, Switchup.de, Wechselpilot
Craftsman portals
Aroundhome, Myhammer, Wirsindhandwerk.de
House building portals
Fertighaus.de, Fertighauswelt.de, Musterhaus.net
Domestic help/childcare
Betreut.de, Book A Tiger, Mr. Cleaner
Heating oil price comparison
Fast Energy, Heizoel24.de
Real estate portals
Immoscout24, Immonet.de, Immowelt.de
Brokerage
123Brokers, house gold, real estate sales24
Online textile cleaning
Jonny Fresh, Persil Service Online, Waschmal
National craft businesses
Cauldron Hero, Thermondo
Moving portals
Movinga, Moving.de, Moving Auction.de
WG portals
Housing Anywhere, WG-Gesucht.de, WG-Suche.de
LEISURE TIME
Wedding portals
Weddingplaza.de, Weddix, Zankyou
Cooking boxes
Hellofresh, Marley Spoon
Delivery service
Lieferando.de, Online-Pizza.de, Pizzeria.de
Universal rental portals
Erento, Miet24.de
Online lottery provider
Lotto.de, Lotto24, Tipp24.de
Portals magazine subscriptions
Leserservice.de, Lorenz-Leserservice.de, Readly
Restaurant portals
Love-veggie.com, Opentable, Thefork
Weather portals
German Weather Service, Wetter.com, Wetter.de
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