The Citizen Journalist meets the Citizen Engineer and soon we’ll be drowning in data:
The new NewAssignment.net site launches today and Tom Evslin writes about a very real networked journalism project to find whether there are the smoking guns of network (non)neutrality lurking in our ISP wires.
We’ve already seen network neutrality discrimination claims made by Craig Newmark that turned out to be caused by the odd configuration of his equipment, discrimination claims that turned out to be temporary service outages, and in Canada discrimination claims that turned out to be service offerings. When the citizen engineer/jour-analyst starts looking at packet delay data, no doubt every traffic-related variation in delivery times will be linked to the latest Evangelical gay sex scandal, Saddam’s WMD program, Ed Whitacres sexual preferences, and the price of soybean futures.
The trouble with citizen efforts at skilled professions isn’t a dearth of data, it’s the inability to interpret the data according to rational standards.
This is going to be fun to watch.