Two things:
Bloggership is going on right now; the web of scholarship, libel on blogs, and the predominance of blog discourse in shaping legal and other discussions.
And we’re having a pizza-laden Wikimania presentation today at 5pm at Berkman; come get a sneak peek of the new conference site and banners, and find out about the list of open tasks for the summer.
BBC Focus put out a micro-comparison of Wikipedia, Britannica Online, Encarta, and Infoplease, asking three experts to review one article apiece. Suburbia describes it well.
Reporters running a statistically insignificant comparison with other references, is becoming as popular as vandalizing Wikipedia, when it comes to coming up with a story to publish.
Wikimania 2006, August 4-6 2006, Cambridge MA :
Submit workshops, tutorials, and presentations for the 2nd annual Wikimedia Conference! Present to hundreds of Wikimedians and collaboration enthusiasts from around the world The earliest submission deadline is this Saturday; See the full Call for Participation on the new conference website.
It will be a fabulous event; not your usual conference. Whether or not you have something to present, I hope you can join us.
Verizon Online is an unusually poor service provider. I have suffered through two ‘once in a lifetime’ catastrophes with them, and do not wish to wait for a third. VZNO have no warning system in place for outages, repairs, or changes;
and offer minimal information in their reports and summaries. This all
falls under ‘general incompetence‘; Comcast Cable and most broadband providers have similar issues. When they mistakenly disconnect a line, and then say it will take
12 hours to verify and over 24 hours to fix due to ’standard
paperwork’, that goes a bit beyond. When 24 hours later a supervisor says that due to insurmountable bureaucracy and employee error on their part there will be another 48 to 72 hour delay, as though this were the most natural thing in the world, one wonders what ritual incantations they must perform to coax bandwidth from the Baby Bell routing daemons.
In the past eight months, there have been two additional 12+-hour outages thanks to infrastructure failures … it is only through inertia that we still use their DSL.
Alien to terra firma, that is. The Arapaima, fish- and bird-eaters that get up to 200lbs and 3m. The Tripod fish, fresh from WotW to you. If that isn’t enough alien nature, try browsing the pages of Bizarre Books…
Alien to terra firma, that is. The Arapaima, fish- and bird-eaters that get up to 200lbs and 3m. The Tripod fish, fresh from WotW to you. If that isn’t enough alien nature, try browsing the pages of Bizarre Books…
Check out the Global Voices/Reuters teamup
tonight — starting right now — as seven mainstream media panelists
are joined by five Mid-east GV bloggers to discuss whether the “:real” Iraqi story is being told by the media. There will be streaming audio and a live online chat available for the two-hour special discussion.
Reuters calls it the “Reuters Iraq Newsmaker debate“. I’m guessing the MSM will be taken down a few notches, but I would love to hear what Reuters’ Iraq bureau chief Alistair MacDonald and Guardian photojournalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad have to say.
Come wikify your night with a [local group] of entrepreneurs and wikiphiles. The second Boston Wiki Wednesday gathering is happening tonight, properly the first week of the month this time.
Where : at Smile Thai in Harvard Square (12-14 Eliot St).
When : at 7pm
Who : anyone who has ever contemplated deleting an entire wiki page.
Call to RSVP, or for more information. 529 4266 (617).
Wikipedia was reportedly temporarily blocked by three ISPs in Pakistan today. I don’t quite understand what this court order is suporting such actions, or why they might have reversed the block so quickly (it’s unblocked now); and hope for a more detailed confirmation from someone in the know.
China’s still blocking WP. Someone claimed that Burma is as well; is this so? And has Iran ever blocked it? Sadly, I don’t know the answer. This last part should be fixed.
The Company Formerly Known As Wikicities, the world’s largest provider of MediaWiki hosting (and employer of an increasing number of my friends), this month closed a $4M round of series A funding from Omidyar and Bessemer Ventures (whence new board member Jeremy Levine) and a few lucky individuals (including one-name stealth disco star and serial board member Joi). Congratulations all around.
Finding times when all board members are on terra firma at the same
time may be difficult… but with modern technology, also increasingly
unnecessary. (I look forward to a photoset from inside Wikia Force One.)
The company is now known as Wikia (sometimes
“wikia.com”), a name which you may recall fromits former life, adorning
a related search engine portal. It continues to host the world’s drollest wiki, and will hopefully be yet another channel for MediaWiki development, so that all those fine programmers still sitting on the fence about which wiki platform to use with can make up their minds with light heart and easy conscience.
Perhaps we need a live ticker…”MediaWiki. Powering 3.00001542% of the world’s public web pages.”
