Posted on February 5th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Blogroll, metrics, chain-gang, popular demand.
First things first. I’m no no-holds-barred Obaman like Larry Lessig.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Boyish Orator’s style, and give him a leg up over Her Royal Cleverness, but don’t stay up nights worrying about the future difference to world peace their differential election would make (other things keep me up, even in politics), and not because I don’t think peace a devastatingly important realm for immediate change.
At any rate, Lessig taped a Barackish paean, and Ball and Prime started simulscribing in gobby. Gobby sessions exert a gravitational pull on me and soon I was transcribing myself, to exercise day-cramped hands — though I would never have listened to the piece otherwise. You can read the result of our labours.
The promise of making a set of ideas more accessible and revisitable is an infinitely better reason to divest oneself of twenty minutes of life than amusement or boredom… Which makes me wonder why we don’t see dotsub everywhere, at least among the sj crowd of one. Maybe it just needs a gobby plugin, or a way to find two friends and start transcribing in tandem. I’m even feeling the itch to ride a tandem bike or sidecar. Ach. Time for a seaweed shower.
Posted on December 9th, 2007 by metasj.
Categories: metrics, Glory, glory, glory.
Kaltura.com does a dozen things right in one place; unusual for a modern creator/social-networking site, they focus heavily on creation. Most unusually, they do all of this with video, the black sheep of the collaborative family : small clips, visualized; smooth remix process, with interface on the client and reasonably response time on the server without redrawing a whole screen; the best memes of history and authorship transparency realized with large-font rounded-corners elegance.
Now who is using it ? where are the transclusions for mediawiki instances? I can’t wait to see the beta site develop.
Posted on December 16th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Global Voices tracks stats in a number of ways : a stats site, with day-level data; Technorati numbers; and the results of a great survey.
Posted on October 27th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
YouTube and Libya compared for value, brought up by a thoughtful Italian blog on next-media and society.
Posted on September 1st, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
The result of the Great Wikipedia “Foo 2.0” debate of August 2006 : See the enterprise social software page and the social computing discussion page. Please contribute to the quality of those articles, still in sad shape and hardly a useful reference for any audience.
As always, it amazes me that so many people — homemakers, high school students, firemen — who simply care about the development of a reference work can be as sensitive to nuance and level-headed in academic discussions as academics (who have devoted much of their life to scholarly discourse). It makes me at once proud and disappointed by our civilization; that all manner of subtleties can be picked up without special training; and that much capability is untapped through ignorance or denial of this.
But I’m ranting again, when I should be describing how to add constructively to WP. Until then… find a hill to fly a kite this long weekend, be kind to your neighbors and good to your family, and don’t labor too long or hard.
Posted on April 17th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
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.
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.
Posted on March 23rd, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Below is a letter that Encyclopedia Britannica sent out today to some of its customers, in response to the December Nature article comparing the accuracy of articles in Wikipedia and Britannica. A more detailed review of the Nature study, including responses to each alleged error and omission, is linked from the front page of www.eb.com; you can also see an HTML version of the review here (thanks to Ben Yates).
Arriving amid the revelations of vandalism and errors in Wikipedia, such a
finding was, not surprisingly, big news. Perhaps you even saw the story
yourself. It’s been reported around the world.
Those reports were wrong, however, because Nature’s research was invalid. As
our editors and scholarly advisers have discovered by reviewing the research
in depth, almost everything about the Nature’s investigation was wrong and
misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not
inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not
even in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and
its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.
Since educators and librarians have been among Britannica’s closest
colleagues for many years, I would like to address you personally with an
explanation of our findings and tell you the truth about the Nature study.
Almost everything Nature did showed carelessness and indifference to basic
research standards. Their numerous errors and spurious procedures included
the following:
* Rearranging, reediting, and excerpting Britannica articles. Several
of the “articles” Nature sent its outside reviewers were only sections of,
or excerpts from Britannica entries. Some were cut and pasted together from
more than one Britannica article. As a result, Britannica’s coverage of
certain subjects was represented in the study by texts that our editors
never created, approved or even saw.
* Mistakenly identifying inaccuracies. The journal claimed to have
found dozens of inaccuracies in Britannica that didn’t exist.
* Reviewing the wrong texts. They reviewed a number of texts that were
not even in the encyclopedia.
* Failing to check facts. Nature falsely attributed inaccuracies to
Britannica based on statements from its reviewers that were themselves
inaccurate and which Nature’s editors failed to verify.
* Misrepresenting its findings. Even according to Nature’s own
figures, (which grossly exaggerated the number of inaccuracies in
Britannica) Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica. Yet the
headline of the journal’s report concealed this fact and implied something
very different.
Britannica also made repeated attempts to obtain from Nature the original
data on which the study’s conclusions were based. We invited Nature’s
editors and management to meet with us to discuss our analysis, but they
declined.
The Nature study was thoroughly wrong and represented an unfair affront to
Britannica’s reputation.
Britannica practices the kind of sound scholarship and rigorous editorial
work that few organizations even attempt. This is vital in the age of the
Internet, when there is so much inappropriate material available. Today,
having sources like Britannica is more important than ever, with content
that is reliable, tailored to the age of the user, correlated to curriculum,
and safe for everyone.
Whatever may have prompted Nature to do such careless and sloppy research,
it’s now time for them to uphold their commitment to good science and
retract the study immediately. We have urged them strongly to do so.
Nature responded with a polite but firm declination.
Posted on March 4th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
The original English Wikipedia turns 1 million this week. Kudos to KG, who won the millionth-article pool… the two-millionth pool is now closed, but you can still place (gentleman’s) bets on when the eleventy-billionth article will be written. (Full disclosure: My money’s on 2021.)
Posted on March 2nd, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
New traffic data from Hitwise (.doc)
suggests that by their standards, Wikipedia is also in the top 20 orgs
with popular websites; though some, such as Yahoo, MSN, Google and
Myspace, have more than one site ahead of it. Thanks to Hitwise for sharing their results for the millionth article press release.
I hope that some of these leisure sites will start to integrate more
useful content with their portals, and not remain paeans to the id; it
is heartwarming to see useful content providers (such as pure search
engines, and news portals) near the tops of the list.
Wikipedia fields 11% of education-related traffic, and 0.17%
of all traffic they measured, with Answers.com getting 1/3 of
that. I asked for details on their methodology and sample size;
they claim 25 million users, but I don’t know their distribution,
geographically or otherwise. They also show a pretty flat age
distribution from 18 through 44, and an even split along gender lines.
Posted on February 17th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Wikipulse is gone . But its spirit lives on. Perhaps it can be revitalized on a New Machine. We can rebuild it. The Six Million Dollar Analytic>