Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on January 5, 2015

A capaciously vague ambition that no one, themselves included, is certain they can pull off.

Can a company of brogrammersbest known for explaining Kanye West lyrics and telling Warren Buffett to do unseemly things actually annotate the world?

One Friday this summer, and , co-founders of the website formerly known as Rap Genius, stood on a penthouse terrace outside one of 11 apartments turned offices their company occupies in a residential building on Kent Avenue in Williamsburg. The sun was setting, and they were hosting a party that, by the companys bacchanalian standards, barely qualified as one. Rap Genius had made its name as a place where a confused listener could search for the lyrics to Empire State of Mind, click on the line Took it to my stash spot, , and find a crowdsourced annotation explaining that was referencing the Boerum Hill headquarters of his old drug-dealing operation; the companys founders had developed a reputation as the tech worlds apex . Once, when a business adviser sent the company a start-up checklistemployee health insurance, bookkeeping systeman employee responded,

At the party, Zechory, the newly appointed president of the company, which has raised more than $50 million in venture capital, wore a white T-shirt and jeans, while Lehman, the CEO and programming expert, was in cutoff jean shorts and a pastel plaid shirt. Both wore Nikes, as they almost always do. Zechory was telling Lehman about a recent dinner party at the home of Ben Horowitz, one of the companys early investors, that Zechory had attended along with the rappers Kanye West and Nas, the producer Rick Rubin, and a couple other randos. Zechory had spent part of the meal trying to explain to West and Nas the appeal of Drake by arguing that the Toronto emcee was a thespian rapper, playing a role someone like Zechory could relate to. This was the sort of hyperintellectualization of hip-hop for which the had become known, sometimes controversially. I was drunk, and talking too much, and, looking at Kanyes face, I was kind of worried this might be totally off the rails, Zechory said. Rubin came to Zechorys defense, and anyway West is a fan of the site. He had sent the founders suggestions for a redesign (black, gold, huge lettering, lot of caps) and ended the dinner with a listening session of his about which Zechory saidnothing. After years of his company making headlines for the wrong reasons, he has learned the value of declaring certain things off the record.

Conspicuously absent from the company party in Williamsburg was , Lehman and Zechorys best friend, the third co-founder of Rap Genius, and the man most responsible for the sites uncouth reputation, which had come to obscure its actual product. At various points since the companys founding in 2009, Moghadam had publicly declared that the founders had built Rap Genius in the nude, on Adderall, and told two of the worlds most prominent billionaires to perform a certain sex act on him. In May, he published an annotation on Rap Genius of UC Santa Barbara killer Elliot Rodgers manifesto that landed somewhere between sympathetic and joking (MY GUESS: his sister is smokin hot). A day later, five years after the trio started the site in an East Village apartment, Lehman and Zechory accepted their friends resignation.

Lehman and Zechory have spent much of 2014 trying to scrub their past clean. Theyve shortened the companys name to Genius and secured $40 million in funding to plunge fully into a Silicon Valley : the transition from doing one thing better than anyone elseannotating rap lyricsto doing something bigger and bolderannotating the world, a capaciously vague ambition that no one, themselves included, is certain they can pull off. Annotation has been a Silicon Valley dream since the invention of the first web browser, but it has yet to produce an elegant solution comparable to what Wikipedia did with the crowdsourced encyclopedia. The Genius founders see their platform as a means for enlightened discussion in contrast to the dark world of the internet comment. Users can upload a text, click on any word, and add whatever context they deem worthwhile. Most annotations must be approved by other members of the Genius community, so that only valuable commentary, grounded in specific parts of a given text, will pass muster and appear on the site. But the Genius founders ultimate goal is bigger still. If their plans come to fruition, users will visit genius.com to annotate Shakespeare, Apple earnings reports, and the State of the Union, but the Genius platform will be built into the code of every website in the world, allowing users to mark up any text, anywhere. Its gonna take a decade to build or more, the investor Horowitz said. But it ought to be as long-lasting as any technology company thats getting built right now and any thats in existence. In grasping for an analogy to encompass their ambition, the Genius founders have variously described the project as a wall of history and an internet Talmud. Critics, who consider the majority of its annotations sophomoric at best, have called it an .

Geniuss task is now a cultural, not technical, one: convincing people that annotation is something they want. To that end, in addition to programmers, Genius has recently hired a former charter-school administrator charged with outreach to schools, a brand consultant from the firm that coined the term normcore, a magazine writer, and Russell Farhang, the companys Director of Operations, who came from the investment firm Bridgewater and at age 40 is the companys oldest employee. Genius boasts some 50 million annotations, on a million texts, although, like Wikipedia, a small group of users is responsible for most of the work. Will Nelligan, one of the attendees at the rooftop party, had rarely used WikipediaI edited my bosss once, when I worked in the U.S. Senatebut spent several hours a week annotating everything from the Scottish-independence referendum to The West Wing scripts.

Nelligan said this party felt different from previous ones. The first time I came here, I went with Tom and Ilan to a bar in Bushwick until two in the morning playing dice, he said. The gathering was being held to honor the first class of Genius Teaching Fellowsprofessors and teachers who agreed to use Genius as a pedagogical toolone of whom taught a 300-level English course at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, titled Becoming a Rap Genius. Genius had recently taken to hosting book partiesalbeit ones at which the police showed up to deliver a noise violationmore often than keggers, and the companys CFO (chief fun officer) got little interest when she encouraged partygoers to take advantage of a bedroom equipped with a swirling, multicolored light display. Though the playlist (Drake, the entirety of Wests ) was straight from the companys past, the vibe was muted. It took until 10 p.m. for anyone to ask the CFO where the rolling papers were. By that point, Lehman and Zechory had gone home.

When I first met Lehman and Zechory, they were dealing with the Taylor Swift Problem. On Pop Geniusone of the sites new verticals, along with Lit, News, Sports, and Law Geniusa moderator was like, Why are we doing so bad on Taylor Swift songs? Zechory said. While the scope of Geniuss ambitions is now much broader than music, 2 percent of all web searches are for lyrics, which still generate most of the sites traffic. For practically any rap song, Genius is among Googles top results, but its annotation of Shake It Off didnt appear until the third page of results, and Zechory didnt want to entertain the thought that might not need explanation. Look around at the other sites that are putting up the same thinglyricsand we have all these painstakingly edited entries, Zechory said with frustration. And there isnt a ringtone ad in your face.

is still sneering at us, Lehman said, referring to the worlds least attractive and most popular lyrics site.

See the article here:

Can the Brogrammers of Rap Genius Annotate the World?

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