Larry Sanger, who worked on Nupedia with Jimmy Wales and was present at the creation of Wikipedia*, is starting a new project to compete with the wiki-based encyclopedia. Sanger is addressing some of the concerns about quality and accountability by hiring experts to be responsible for certain areas of Digital Universe. *Larry’s identification as a [...]
Dan Gillmor, blogger and citizen journalist, will join the Berkman Center as a fellow in January. Known for his book We the Media, Dan is starting a Center for Citizen Media. Congratulations and welcome, Dan!
One of my fans pointed out that I’m in Robert Scoble’s public aggregator. An A-list blogger, Robert works at Microsoft. Like me, though, he blogs for himself, not his employer. I like the disclaimer on his blog: "Robert Scoble works at Microsoft (title: technical evangelist). Everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not [...]
The comment spammers have been at it again pretty aggressively lately, so I’ve been doing a lot of comment deleting. Sometimes, I’m not always sure what’s comment spam and what might be a legitimate comment. Usually comment spam follows a few patterns. The number of messages. In an hour, I might get 15-200 comments. Things [...]
I’m not sure which part of this news article is creepier: that a student requesting a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s "The Little Red Book” gets a surprise visit from Homeland Security agents or that things professors ask us to read in college could haunt us in later years. Addenda 1/1/06: A follow-up newstory claims the [...]
I’ve mentioned various who’s who publications in this space fairly recently, so I feel like I should share this tale of caution from a blog reader. She was recently involved in a situation similar to the one linked above and another one where Manchester’s Who’s Who contacted her about including her in their directory, then [...]
Google introduces a newsletter for librarians after discussions with librarians at the American Library Association 2005 Annual Conference.
This Penny Arcade comic answers the question we all wonder about: "What would Skeletor do if he could edit Wikipedia?"
The radio show Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me jokes about radical, militant librarians early in the December 17 show and asks at the show’s end what librarians will do to get back at the FBI.
Matthew Battles, an editor of the Harvard Library Bulletin and author, writes in the Sunday Globe’s Ideas section about Wikipedia. He presents some ideas about how people who understand the workings of networked information can have more power than subject experts: "The Seigenthaler affair points up a crucial condition of the Internet’s information ecology: It’s [...]