Techno utopians

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems

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Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.

Criticism of the project from within the inner sanctum has been very rare so far, although fellow co-founder Larry Sanger, who is no longer associated with the project, pleaded with the management to improve its content by befriending, and not alienating, established sources of expertise. (i.e., people who know what they’re talking about.)

Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that’s almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, … passionate, you haven’t met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it’s a religious crusade.

In the inkies, Wikipedia has enjoyed a charmed life, with many of the feature articles about the five-year old project resembling advertisements. Emphasis is placed on the knowledgeable articles (by any yardstick, it’s excellent for Klingon, BSD Unix, and Ayn Rand), the breadth of its entries (Klingon again), and process issues such as speed.

“We don’t ever talk about absolute quality,” boasted one of the project’s prominent supporters, Clay Shirky, a faculty tutor at NYU. But it’s increasingly difficult to avoid the issue any longer.

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The Blooker Prize: small pieces, partially digested

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The Bible, for example, was originally produced as a scroll
– Cory Doctorow

Some press releases are so simply, staggeringly indescribable, we print them without comment. These are most often related to corporate makeovers or rebranding exercises, which is quite appropriate in this case.

We’ve tried to be faithful to the original’s unique typographical qualities where possible.

And we’d better warn you: there’s a lot of SHOUTING at the start, and odd emphasis throughout – but that’s very much its charm.

So sit tight – and here goes:

ANNOUNCING “THE BLOOKER PRIZE” THE WORLD’S FIRST LITERARY PRIZE FOR “BLOOKS” (BOOKS BASED ON BLOGS OR WEBSITES) LAUNCHES 10TH OCTOBER

 

“BLOOKS” ARE THE FASTEST GROWING NEW KIND OF BOOK – AND THE HOTTEST NEW PUBLISHING AND ONLINE TREND

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A Million Nation States of One fears Google Balkanization

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Some stories just take forever to come true. 30 months ago, we revealed Google was going to introduce a weblog search engine – and this week, it finally did. The story, so obvious in retrospect, barely merits the term ‘scoop’. But now, as then, it has been eclipsed by a raging debate about the implications for bloggers and for the web in general.

A great many people see this as the perfect opportunity to improve Google search – and introduce some innovation into the world of web user interface navigation – by removing weblogs from the main Google index, and giving them their own tab, as Usenet enjoys now.

Google, along with rival search engines which aped its link based algorithms, has to wrestle with the constantly evolving techniques deployed to trick it into promoting certain web pages. It’s an arms race comparable to email spam, and one of the chief culprits is ‘blog noise’ – a catch all term for the irrelevant blog entries and all the extraneous plumbing that props them up: RSS feeds, empty pages, duplicate pages, TrackBacks, and so on.

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On Computers, Creativity and Copyright

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“We’d run out of ironic things to say”
Neil Tennant

Creative Commons is an intriguing experiment to granulize the rights a creator has over his or her work, and to formalize what today is largely spontaneous and informal. What we rarely see when it is discussed, is a genuine attempt to answer the question “Why is it needed?”

For a very self-consciously idealistic “movement” this, absence of an explanation is surprising.

Behind the scheme is the recognition of a very real problem. The permission mechanisms by which rights holders grant or deny the reproduction of artistic works haven’t kept pace with technology. It’s now very easy to reproduce an image or a piece of music, but it remains just as easy, or difficult, to get the permission to use it. We now have an abundance of material available to us, they ask, so can’t we do more with it?

It’s a reasonable question, and Creative Commons is an attempt to answer it.

Let’s look closer at what it is.

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‘Sims school’ abandons books for laptops

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Technology vendors have long viewed the state of Arizona as rich pickings. In addition to the Federal pork barrel, state tax payers have found over $60m dollars for IT investment.

Now a high school in Tuscon is abandoning textbooks entirely, at the urging of the school district’s technology evangelist, who appears to have caught the religion big time.

Instead of spending $600 per head on textbooks, Vail High School in Tucson will buy each of its 350 sophomores an $850 laptop. That shouldn’t be too difficult – the school itself is located in a science park. But the Tucson school district’s superinterindent, an enthusiastic technology evangelist called Calvin Baker, candidly admits he doesn’t know quite how it will all work.

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For ambulance-chasing bloggers, tragedy equals opportunity

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No human disaster these days is complete without two things, both of which can be guaranteed to surface within 24 hours of the event.

First, virus writers will release a topical new piece of malware. And then weblog evangelists proclaim how terrific the catastrophe is for the internet. It doesn’t seem to matter how high the bodies are piled – neither party can be deterred from its task.

For the technology evangelists, the glee is barely containable. The daily business of congratulating each other jumps to a whole new level with all the bloggers marveling in unison at their ability to detail real-time tragedy.

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Space is the place, says Esther Dyson

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Fly her to the moon. Please. 

In a remarkable case of life imitating satire, Esther Dyson has decided to host a space conference.

No, we’re not making this up – and no, we can’t think of anyone more appropriate.

“It’s not that there aren’t space conferences, but nothing as tacky and commercial as we want to be,” Silicon Valley’s space cadet tells the New York Times.

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Net religion vs Organized religion

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Net religion bumped into real, organized religion again at the Berkman Center’s Votes, Bits Bytes conference today, held at Harvard University’s Law School. The subject couldn’t be more topical. In the recent elections, church-based groups got out the vote. Despite the view that a blogger’s vote is worth ten ordinary votes, real religion triumphed Internet … Read more

Netizens: white, wealthy and middle class (and full of it)

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Diversity in action: bloggers

“The Internet is becoming more and more widespread and will increasingly represent a scientific random sample of the population,” claims ICANN’s newest board member, Joi Ito. Quite what scientific experiments he will wish to perform, once the desired sample size has been reached, remains a mystery. But like many people who spend too long in front of their computers, he’s talking about a Platonic ideal rather than the real world.

A survey by the US Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration shows that the internet has entrenched the divide between rich and poor, and the races. Statistics reveal an internet that’s overwhelmingly white, wealthy and urban. And the net’s best days may even be behind it. The pace of internet adoption has tapered off to a trickle, with a substantial part of the population not interested in the internet at any price.

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