Video-microblogging with Seesmic

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web claims that video-microblogging service Seesmic is more than just Twitter with video.

There appear to be two primary factors behind the early enthusiasm for Seesmic. The first is that it’s very well executed. Le Meur is the former head of SixApart Europe, the company hired Ben Metcalfe as an early consultant and there must be a number of other very social-media savvy people there whom I haven't met yet. The company takes feature requests via a public video thread. They hired at least one very skilled Flash designer. Usability is fairly high, it’s very easy to record a video on Seesmic and there’s literally zero turn-around time before your video is available in the public timeline and as a reply if appropriate. Can the company continue to scale? That will be a big question.

Aside from that, there’s something about a video-only environment that yields a level of personal accountability and quality discourse that you don’t find on other services. It’s a small, yet global, and very welcoming community. Many entrepreneurs claim that their community of users are the key to their momentum—but at Seesmic you can see the faces and hear the voices that prove it.

I’m not sure that these factors are so different as to make the description “Twitter with video” inaccurate, but Seesmic sounds like an interesting service. As more people’s cellphones are able to record and transmit video, this service (or services like it) are going to be increasingly popular. However, if the site wants to truly lock up the market, I don’t see why it wouldn’t include text messaging as well. (And I may be wrong about this: it seems that Seesmic is video only, but maybe it isn’t.)

Delver: Social search

Delver, a search startup, uses social networks connections to personalize users’ search results. From TechCrunch:

Delver is attempting to solve two key search-related problems. The first is that current search engines do not take into account the identity of the searcher. For example, a teenager and a senior citizen performing the same query will get exactly the same results. The second is that current search engines do not allow users to search for information created and referenced by their own social graph. This is an important point because, let’s face it, social networking doesn’t offer much functional value beyond allowing people to connect with one another. The fact that you have 300 friends on Facebook, 200 on MySpace and 100 connections on LinkedIn doesn’t actually help you locate information. This is where Delver comes in. Search for “New York,” and the results that will pop up will be blog posts from people you know that mention or are about New York, or Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, and the like.

The technology, which has been in development since 2005, combines search technologies, semantics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Delver begins by crawling the Web in order to map users’ social connections. The information it finds on social networking profiles, blogs, bookmarks, photo and video-sharing sites is then cross-linked to the searcher’s social graph, which is built on-the-fly. Delver then prioritizes its results based upon the searcher’s social graph, thereby improving the relevancy of the results. Since every person’s social graph is unique—much like a fingerprint—the same Delver query will produce significantly different results for each person—as reflected through the collective experiences of each person’s contacts.

It will be interesting to see how this idea works out. Based on the description above it sounds something like search on Facebook, which defaults to the users network and friends (and which I find incredibly annoying). Based on my experience with Facebook, I wonder if this idea is going to be anything more than a niche solution for special searches. I’m not sure that I want all of my searches to be determined by my contacts; part of the purpose of search is to find results that are outside of a user’s normal social circle.

Google v. Facebook: New hires edition

While it is still an open question as to whether or not Facebook can find a way to monetize its user base, it definitely has its sights on Google. According to TechCrunch, the two are locked in a heated battle for new computer science grads:

Last year, salaries of up to $70,000 were common for the best students. This year, Facebook is said to be offering $92,000, and Google has increased some offers to $95,000 to get their share of graduates. Students with a Masters degree in Computer Science are being offered as much as $130,000 for associate product manager jobs at Google.

Clearly, I chose the wrong field.

Edward Tufte on the iPhone interface

Design guru Edward Tufte has posted a short presentation where he describes the pros and cons of the iPhone interface (warning: it’s a big download).



Basically, he likes the scrolling navigation panes, which he calls “sliding across displays on one surface,” and minimalist controls. However, he dislikes the “cartoony” stock app, which he claims is at the resolution of Excel or PowerPoint instead of the resolution of images. He essentially repeats this critique for the weather app (what I assume is his redesign of the weather app is on the right in the above image). He sums up by stating that clutter and information overload are not attributes of information, but rather failures of design, failures which shouldn't be solved by removing information.

There isn’t a lot new here for iPhone and Tufte fans, but the presentation is interesting and a good description of the pros of the iPhone interface.

via O’Reilly Radar

The life of a blog-post

This animated graphic from Wired shows how a blog post goes from its author’s computer to the web.



via Boing Boing

Tweetmeme tracks the tweetosphere

Tweetmeme is a new service for tracking the movement of memes through the tweetosphere.

Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorizes the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others. But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio).

I’m excited about this service; I’ve become interested in the kind of writing that occurs on microblogging platforms like Twitter, but I haven’t been able to do much research on the subject because I haven’t been able to find a way to archive tweets for research. It seems like Tweetmeme will make that possible.

via TechCrunch

Humanities: In the future!

Here’s a pretty slick presentation by Richard E. Miller, the head of the English Department at Rutgers, on the future of the humanities.

I like what he has to say about new media and the humanities (I want a colaboratory), but he somewhat distressingly seems to ignore the role of rhetoric, writing studies, and technical writing in the same. The only scholars mentioned in the presentation are literature scholars, and the type of writing which Miller spotlights is creative writing. According to Miller, what the university has to offer the Wikipedia generation is

sustained study and deep understanding. when you add that to the picture you get human creativity put at the center of the humanities[. . . . The] real function of the humanities is to engage in the act of creativity moment by moment to improve the quality of the world we live in.

The talk sort of reminded me of the ridiculous hand-wringing over the death of reading, where “reading” means “reading literature,” whatever that might be—no one ever seems to get worked up over the death of email at hands of text-messaging or the sad demise of the online message board. Definitions are similarly limited in the presentation, where it appears that the goal of the English Department is to study “literature,” whatever that might be, and the only type of writing worth mentioning is creative writing.

Embed Facebook Apps on any website

Facebook has announced a set of Java tools that will allow developers to embed Facebook Apps on their own webpages. As Duncan Riley at TechCrunch notes

I’m not sure anyone saw this move coming, but Facebook may have just changed the game again by essentially becoming an application host. It’s a clever move by Facebook in a year its competitors will get more serious about offering platforms themselves.

I’ll be interested in seeing how this move affects Facebook’s use as a content management system for educators. Although I doubt that it will lead to educators creating their own static web sites, it should have interesting applications, such as adding Facebook features or connectivity to existing course pages.

Huddle creates Facebook app, takes on Basecamp

Huddle has added a Facebook app to compete with Basecamp. From TechCrunch:

The Facebook integration will make your boss think you are working even when you’re on Facebook—as it allows full access to all Huddle’s tools. And the new Huddle Desktop application will let you drag and drop new documents between the desktop and Huddle’s service. Also included is OpenSAM Integration where you create, view and edit documents in Word, PowerPoint and Excel within Huddle through embedded Web Office tools from iNetWord, EditGrid and Preezo.

But unlike Basecamp the free version of Huddle includes three team workspaces, one Gigabyte of document space and unlimited team members (Basecamp doesn’t go this far on either count). After that there are paid-for options.

Review: John Scott, Social Network Analysis (2000)

I recently picked up a copy of John Scott’s Social Network Analysis: A Handbook when I was researching methodologies I could use in my study of Wikipedia and social networks. Scott, a sociologist, provides both a history of the development of social network analysis and an introduction to the basic terminology and concepts related to the discipline. While this second edition doesn’t seem to have been updated to account for the developments in the field since the first edition of 1991, I found it to be a more than adequate overview of the concerns and methodology of social network analysis.

(I have to provide a caveat here: I am not a sociologist and I’m completely new to social network analysis, so any criticisms—or praise—of this book on my part may be completely off-base. For example, I have no idea how social network analysis has developed over the last 15 years, so I’m not really competent to judge if Scott has left out any important additions or modifications to the theory and methodological practices used in social network analysis. My comment above is based solely on my impression in reading the text that the majority of Scott’s references in the text are pre-1990. Anyway, you should take most of my claims in this post with a grain of salt.)

Overview
Scott’s book is organized into three main sections: the first and second chapters outline the history of social network theory, while chapters 3–8 introduce basic terms and the methods of network analysis. Finally, an appendix lists software tools for conducting social network analysis with short reviews of each software package.

In chapter 2, Scott outlines the history of social network theory. According to him, it began with the focus on societal structures in the work of anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown during the 1920s and 1930s. Later, researchers, particularly a group centered at Harvard, combined elements of gestalt theory and the mathematical tools of graph theory to analyze these structures. One of the chief developments of this research was the formalization of the theoretical principles of network analysis, which helped to determine the basic methodology of social network analysis, and the development of the sociogram, a digram of the nodes and links in a network.

The remainder of the text serves as an introduction to social network analysis and the terminology and best practices used by network researchers. According to Scott, analyzing social networks is primarily a process of collecting and storing data. However, that data isn’t attributive data about a subject. Rather, it is relational data; that is, data about the connections between subjects. For this reason, when researchers collect social networking data, they should focus on these relations. The primary method of doing this is with incidence or adjacency matrices, where the former record binary information about the existence of a connection between two classes subjects and the latter record information about the number of connections between the members of a particular class. Further, these matrices can be directional, indicating that the connections between subjects do not necessarily flow both ways.

The analysis of social networks can be conducted using positional or reputational approaches. When using the positional approach, researchers are interested in investigating the social position that a particular subject occupies, whereas with the reputational approach, which is used primarily when there are no stable positions to investigate, researchers have their subjects suggest other subjects, and the connections between those subjects are mapped.

Final thoughts
Throughout the text, Scott emphasizes the difficulty that many researchers have with social network analysis because of its foundation in matrix algebra. However, there isn’t much math in the book, and what math is there is explained in an understandable manner. He acknowledges that most researchers will rely on software tools to do the number crunching for them, so he spends more time explaining the research rationale and grounds for using particular approaches to the study of social networks, emphasizing that individual projects will require different approaches and that researchers should understand what their tools are measuring, even if they aren’t sure how they are measured. As a rhetorician, I found Scott’s repeated insistence that researchers have a clear idea of their research goals before choosing the tools they will use so as to make sure that those tools are the best for their particular design to be refreshing, and it was easy for me to see how this type of analysis would be a good fit for ecological studies of social phenomena.

Overall, I found the book to be an accessible and readable introduction to the techniques of social network analysis.

Teaching kids to give away their personal information

Denise Howell at ZDNet has posted a description of the invasive information gathering conducted by the people at Build-A-Bear Workshop.

You see, each Build-A-Bear critter is issued a “birth certificate,” which is generated after the kids—and hopefully their parents, though that didn’t seem to be making a bit of difference on the common sense front—visit a bank of computers. These are big orangey-purple affairs, sort of Dr. Seussian in presentation. The keyboard buttons include stars and other colored shapes to make data input all the easier and more intuitive for youngsters. In fact, the computer-plus-keyboard experience is very close (no doubt intentionally so) to something children and their parents might have experienced in a kids’ museum, library, or school. Before their new friend can get its birth certificate, the kids are prompted to enter a host of very personal personal information: birth date, home address, gender, phone, and email among them. Along the way is the option to “skip” some of this input, but unlike what we’re used to in the world of online retail forms, there’s no effort to communicate what data is “required” for the transaction to proceed, and what’s “optional.” The overall effect is to sideline the privacy-savviness that might otherwise accompany the parent and/or child. I sat there and watched parent after parent prompt their kids to flex their memory muscles and practice their computer skills: “Ok Timmy, now, what’s our address? What’s your birthday? Do you remember our phone number? Good typing!!”

via Boing Boing

Newspaper economics and the internet

Jack Shafer of Slate explains how newspapers hit hard times before the popularity of the internet, despite the general impression that it was the internet that began the decline of print news.

The newspaper industry began worrying about losing its hold on readers as early as the 1960s, assigning task force after task force to the problem. So acute was the perceived crisis that in 1976, Los Angeles Times media reporter David Shaw asked in his multipart series, “Are you now holding an endangered species in your hands?”

The bad news began to mount in the pre-pre-Internet days of the 1980s, when the number of dailies published in the United States began a slide that continues. By 1990, total newspaper circulation began to dip, and most ominously, the percentage of adults who read newspapers commenced cratering in 1970. About 78 percent partook of dailies then, and by 2003, only about 54 percent did.

Humans v. algorithms: Search edition

ReadWrite Web has posted a rough transcript of a conversation between the advocates of rival search-engine technologies: Wikio founder and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis. Wikio is an attempt by Wales to create an open, user-generated search algorithm, while Mahalo uses people to power their search results. It’s a pretty interesting conversation about two of the most interesting projects trying to take down Google.

Update: Wikia is the search engine; Wikio is something else (thanks, Jim).

’Nother update: Apparently, Wikio, which was originally attributed to Wales in the story I link to above, is a startup by former Netvibes CEO Pierre Chappaz. ReadWrite Web has corrected their post.

Novel on life-streaming

Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch has posted a blog entry on life-streaming and privacy where he argues that some areas of one’s life should remain private, that is, unstreamed.

What I found most interesting about Riley’s post was his reference to a new novel by Ben Elton called Blind Faith, which deals with the topic of privacy and surveillance in the age of ubiquitous computing. Here’s part of the novel’s description from Amazon, which Riley posted with his blog entry:

Imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everybody. Where what a person “feels” and “truly believes” is protected under the law, while what is rational, even provable is condemned as heresy. A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a Crime against Faith.
...
Ben Elton imagines a post-apocalyptic society where religious intolerance combines with a confessional sex-obsessed, self-centric culture to create a world where nakedness is modesty, ignorance is wisdom and privacy is a dangerous perversion. A chilling vision of what’s to come? Or something rather closer to what we call reality?

It sounds like a good read. Maybe I’ll have time to get to it when it comes out this summer.

Facebook relies on user-generated translations

MySpace and Facebook are both trying to expand their markets outside of the English-speaking world. According to Tech Crunch, MySpace is doing this by creating local offices. However,

Facebook is taking a radically different approach—tapping users to do all the hard work for them. They are picking and choosing markets (Spanish was opened first, two weeks ago; today German and French were launched) and asking just a few users to test out their collaborative translation tool. Once the tool is perfected and enough content has been translated, Facebook will offer users the ability to quickly switch the language on the site, per their preference.

Like Google has done with image search and Wikipedia has done all along, sometimes it just makes sense to ask you users to do as much work as possible. As long as users go along with it, everyone is happy.

via Tech Crunch

NY Times on cellphone novels

Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times has written an article on the popularity of cellphone novels in Japan. While the phenomenon has been around for almost a decade (Onishi dates it back to 2000), it was reported at the end of 2007 that half of Japan’s top ten novels of the year were written on cellphones. The article provides some interesting background to the phenomenon.

The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cellphone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.

The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by cellphone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.

This kind of trend makes literary-types upset. One worry is that few of the current crop of cellphone novelists have ever written before. According to the article, cellphone authors aren’t being compelled to write for traditional literary reasons.

“It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”

Interestingly, one author of a cellphone novel, Rin, acknowledges the literacy divide between the writers/readers of cellphone novels and other kinds of novel reading. Here she explains why the readers of her novel aren’t interested in traditional novels.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

Related: Personal publishing and micro-fiction

Ikea and Web 2.0

Tim Harford at Slate argues that Facebook and Ikea have similar business models: while Facebook benefits by allowing its users to do most of the work—creating and populating profiles which the company can then monetize—Ikea does the same by having shoppers assemble their own bookshelves. Additionally, just like Facebook cultivates both developers (of Facebook apps) and users, Ikea does the same for their suppliers and shoppers.

Management experts Rafael Ramirez and Richard Normann pointed this out in the Harvard Business Review back in 1993. Ikea, they argued, was a success because it enabled "value co-production." This infelicitous term partly refers to offering consumers a discount to build their own furniture. But it means much more: Ikea recruited its customers to the idea that they could not only put up shelves, but also design their own stylish living spaces, equipping them with tape measures and printing almost 200 million catalogs that also serve as design manuals. It also devoted huge energies to helping its suppliers and designers play their part. Ramirez and Normann explain that rather than passively buying what the suppliers offered and reselling it, Ikea provided suppliers with technical assistance, equipment, guidance on standards, and even a kind of dating service that introduced them to new business partners.

Review: Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (2006)

I’m starting to review texts for the computers and writing course I hope to teach in the fall (RHE 312), and I recently reread Adam Greenfield’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (2006). The primary innovation of Greenfield’s book is, rather than there being just one model of ubiquitous or pervasive computing (ubicomp) there are in fact many “ubiquitous computings,” and that these ubicomps will combine to form an all-encompassing paradigm of distributed computing, communication, networking, and information gathering/retrieval which he calls “everyware.”

One unique feature of this book is Greenfield’s reaction to ubiquitous technology. It seems like the typical reaction to new technology (see genetic modification and nanotechnology) is to question the ethics of using/adopting it and to call for a halt to this use/adoption so its long-term effects can be contemplated. Greenfield, however, simply declares that everyware is inevitable, and that our best efforts will be spent in working toward altering its eventual appearance, rather than trying to prevent it.

In Section 3, “What’s driving the emergence of everyware?”, Greenfield examines the reasons for this inevitability. His argument is essentially twofold: first, he claism that at the moment our technology became digital, and devices were able to communicate with each other in a common language of ones and zeros, that the communication and interoperability on which everyware depends was a foregone conclusion. Further, Greenfield argues that the architecture and capabilities of many current technologies—RFID tags, the continuing development of computer chips, wireless computing—all contain the latent possibility of everyware. As he puts it, a technology like RFID “wants” to be connected to everything so as to provide a bridge between atoms and bits. Second, he argues that everyware is inevitable because it is both embedded in our collective imaginations in the form of science fiction and a workable solution to many of our looming problems, such as dealing with the move of the baby-boom generation into old age and the need of corporations for ever-increasing economic expansion.

Another thing I liked about the book is that Greenfield captures the complexity and contradictions inherent in ubiquitous systems. Everyware is divided into seven sections, and each section is made up of “theses” introduced by short, declarative statements (“Thesis 05: At its most refined, everyware can be understood as information processing dissolving into behavior.”), which are then explained, expanded on, or defended over the course of a few pages. While the sections gather the theses into larger arguments, I think they allow Greenfield to not force an extreme level of coherence on a topic whose edges are still coming into view.

To me, the two most interesting sections of the book are the first two (Google Books has the complete TOC). In these sections, Greenfield defines everyware and explains how it is unique from other instantiations of computing. As I noted above, he argues that everyware is not the same as ubicomp, but is rather a paradigm which contains many ubicomps. According to Greenfield, the everyware paradigm is the interconnection of various technologies and processes so that the computing experience will no longer be centered on a desktop or laptop machine, but will be a continuous experience of information retrieval (and encoding) via technology embedded in our surroundings. As part of this process, the bridging of the divide between data and the lived world will be key to the development of everyware.

One of his most striking pronouncements is that everyware will transform behavior into information, or, as he puts it, everyware represents the “colonization of everyday life by information technology.” Greenfield recognizes the emergent qualities of the combination of ubiquitous computing and society. Everyware is different from regular computing in that it is centered on the user and the environment. It is contextual and experiential, rather than a group of tasks like information retrieval. It does not have users—although it might have subjects. It is relational, and, as such, it has the possibility of yoking together a number of technologies and systems that we are already familiar with so that they become greater than the sum of their parts. Further, these connections will result in outcomes and effects that will be completely unforeseen.

In the book’s second section, Greenfield describes how everyware is unique. According to Greenfield, the combination of ubiquitous technologies on which everyware is based, fostered by digital connections and their inherent relational structures, will lead to emergent outcomes. That is, it will not be possible to completely foresee the results of this technology interacting together, and this fact virtually guarantees that the result will be unique. (Which would make pausing the development of the technologies everyware depends on so we can contemplate their use virtually pointless.)

Conclusion: Everyware is a good, non-technical introduction to the issues affecting the development of ubiquitous computing. I think it would be a good text for introducing undergrads to the opportunities and problems associated with new, distributed computing models.

Do we need Creative Commons licenses?

Gordon Haff has posted an interesting essay on what’s wrong with Creative Commons licenses and how to fix them. He takes issue with CC definitions of “noncommercial” and the focus of the group’s licenses on the type of use, rather than the type of user. He sums up by arguing that a clarified noncommercial CC license isn’t necessary.

I’d argue that if Noncommercial is defined to read “not associated with making money,” you’re effectively prohibiting the vast bulk of uses that aren’t already covered under Fair Use (use in academic environment), are trivial (I make a print to hang on my wall at home), or both. Sure, you can have such a license, but why bother? Some personal blogs and MySpace pages might gain access to some photos under such a license but it’s a pretty small slice of the possible uses. If you truly don’t want anyone to (legally) profit from your photographs however indirectly, there’s a simple option: Don’t release them under Creative Commons.

While Haff makes some good points about the need to clarify the language in CC licenses, I think he misses the point in some other ways. He points out that “One justification for having a Noncommercial [license] is that you don’t want your photos used in some big advertising campaign or in a company’s annual report without compensation,” and then makes a convincing case that this type of use is already covered by regular copyright. However, as I understand CC, the point is sanctioning noncommercial uses, which appears to be a gray area in traditional copyrights, not preventing commercial ones. Here’s how Haff sums up his piece:

Creative Commons licensing offers up a complicated set of options that seem calculated to encourage people to contribute works to the commons while not pushing their envelope to allow any uses with which they’re uncomfortable. While an understandable approach, it creates a system that’s far too complicated and doesn’t, in my opinion, have any real benefit beyond a simple license that requires attribution and which requires downstream derivatives to maintain the same license.

The NCAA and New Media rights

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting (login required) that at the recent NCAA convention, a company was marketing software designed to allow coaches and other athletic personnel to monitor athletes’ behavior on social networking sites. The software, called YouDiligence, will allow

real-time searches of Facebook and MySpace for up to 500 objectionable words and phrases ranging from profanity to slang used to describe drugs. If it finds anything, it sends an e-mail alert to a designated athletics official containing a link to the offending page.

Apparently, some people find this blanket monitoring of student-athletes’ speech worrisome:

Though three experts in constitutional law told The Chronicle that the new software was most likely lawful, all three agreed that it raises some tricky legal and ethical questions for which there are no clear answers, and that athletics departments should think carefully about using it.

“This kind of proactive examination of college students’ expression and associations and beliefs really gets you into very, very dangerous territory,” said Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group based in San Francisco. Before using such a product, he said, athletics officials should consult university lawyers on whether it might violate students’ constitutional rights.

(This, of course, begs the question: Since when does the NCAA care about student-athletes’ rights?)

While this software doesn’t seem to be explicitly endorsed by the NCAA, the announcement comes close on the heels of the organization’s ban on live-blogging of their sporting events. The ban is tenuously based on copyright claims, but whether or not those arguments have merit is an open question.

Warning: MacWorld IR chaos

Scott McNulty at The Unofficial Apple Weblog has posted a warning for MacWorld attendees: disable your IR port. Apparently, some CES attendees used a TV-B-Gone-type device to turn off displays during presentations.

As you may or may not know there has been something of a dust up across the tech blogosphere regarding a prank that a certain tech blog performed during CES. The prank involved a little gizmo that turned off a number of televisions at once, which one could use to turn off displays during presentations (which is just what the people in question did).

This is probably a good idea, although I think users are also likely to face inadvertent problems. We recently installed the new iMacs in some our labs at the CWRL, and, with the computers arranged along the walls, it is almost impossible to use the Apple remote without activating every machine on one side of the room. If this is the case, imagine what a carelessly directed remote would do on the conference floor at MacWorld.

‘The Simpsons’ on the death of print encyclopedias

Sunday night’s episode of The Simpsons, “E Pluribus Wigum,” featured a pretty good joke about the irrelevance of print encyclopedias.

(The setup: Ralph Wigum wins the Springfield presidential primary as a write-in, and is subsequently courted by both the Republicans and Democrats.)

P.S. I love Hulu.

Dominated by editors: Wikipedia and traditional publishing

Tim O’Reilly recently posted his thoughts on a 2006 article by Aaron Swartz, Who Writes Wikipedia?. Swartz argues that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s contention that the encyclopedia is not “some emergent phenomenon—the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing—thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content and out of this emerges a coherent body of work” but rather “a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” is flawed. Swartz argues that Wikipedia needs to depend on that faceless mob, rather than the group of editors described by Wales for its content.

O’Reilly disagrees with Swartz, however, suggesting that the Wikipedia model—where numerous contributors supply the raw material which dedicated editors transform into a usable product—is quite similar to the traditional publishing model.

Take O’Reilly’s book publishing operations: we have far more outside authors than we have employees. Many of them are passionate experts rather than professional writers or editors, just like Wikipedia authors. Their work is improved by an editing team and brought to market in the context of brands that we’ve created, but we couldn’t do what we do without them. This is just as true of any publishing company. Did Bloomsbury’s editors invent Harry Potter? No, it was a welfare mom who dreamed up the idea while riding on the train.

I recently presented some research at the SCMLA that I believe offers some support to O’Reilly’s claim. I did a study of the revision histories of high- and low-quality Wikipedia articles, and what I found was that while the high-quality articles’ revision histories were very similar to those of high-quality articles in other contexts, the low-quality articles were quite different from those in offline contexts. (The “offline contexts” here are previously published studies of revision in academic writing.)

While low-quality offline writing in previous studies was characterized by excessive editing with very little content development, the low-quality Wikipedia writing in my study was characterized by very little editing of vast amounts of relevant content.

In other words, I found that while the process for creating good writing in Wikipedia looks very much like the process for creating good writing elsewhere, bad writing in Wikipedia is bad because it is not effectively edited. While my study was small and needs some further investigation, it seems like this result would support O’Reilly’s claim that the Wikipedia publishing model is quite similar to that of traditional publishing.

Update: In a reply to a comment on his post by John H, O’Reilly makes a point similar to mine:

Aaron’s point was that MOST of the articles are written by outsiders. They are then edited and improved by the insiders. The “long tail of articles”, as you put it, aren’t written by a different demographic, but they haven’t benefited from Wikipedia’s *editing* community.

Wikipedia gets real

Wikipedia is bleeding out into the real world.

via Boing Boing