(Finally a tool to truly speak back here! Thanks, Genius!!)

This line was delivered with a coyly sarcastic aplomb completely lost on the author. I believe I may have even underscored said sarcasm with an exaggerated wink. MIT’s @jamiefolsom came to my defense at the time with the video evidence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGCjLY0QE_8

In any case, the whole business model question is the most common and unimaginative one I (and probably any startup employee) get.

Could anyone have imagined that a company built around sharing passing thoughts and photos with your friends would become one of the most powerful in the world? (To be clear: I’m talking about Facebook here, David.)

Also, it should be noted that this snide final paragraph did not appear in the print version of the article.

This is starting to sound like an Andy Rooney rant from 60 Minutes: “This darn Internet is always lying to me, why when I was a boy our books had spines and smelled like fall.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7LqsAnhrR4

(Wait for it at 1:19.)

The tone of this article from beginning to end drips with technophobia–surprising for the “Bits” blog. The author seems to start with the presumption that Internet networks of knowledge are inferior to such “estimable” and traditional sources of information and authority such as print publishing and knowledge production.

In fact the bowdlerization likely began with this text at a widely respected University of Virginia site. To put a finer point on it, the error began in a source that the the author would likely believe is trustworthy: the academy.

There’s no doubt that the Internet and Genius especially are complicated knowledge ecosystems that require new literacies of citizens, but to simply throw up one’s hands and say “Look I found a mistake online” doesn’t even begin to engage that new frontier of knowledge creation.

The very grammar of this sentence belies a basic misconception of the Internet and especially the (Rap) Genius project. Rap Genius should not be the active agent here and not only because we have since changed our name. Genius provides a platform for crowd-sourced discussion and explanation of texts, so the annotations on this Faulkner story are done by users not employees of the site.

In fact, one of the first web pioneers to think of annotation as integral to the Internet was Marc Andreessen, inventor of the web browser and an investor in Genius. He explains why it never happened with Mosaic/Netscape in this verified annotation on Genius.

While I think this is a great characterization of Sitek’s production–I’d liken it to the busy, but flavorful taste of an IPA–Kelis’s voice still commands this record unlike Tunde’s does on many a TOTR album.