Posted on September 29th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Everyone seems to think that developing tools around people’s daily
lives, on cleverly-designed platforms, is the Answer to lots of things
- the next iPod/computer/phone, new PCs for people in China’s urban
households, etc.
It doesn’t sound terribly innovative to me; am I just a stick in the
mud? How can anyone get excited about a PC-like platform when
there’s some real innovation being done for $100 PCs that torally
rethinks many layers in the development and distribution of
computing? Not that I think the $100 PC is the be-all or end-all
of what target consumers really need… I’m foolish enough to
think that most things that end-users really need doesn’t get developed
at all. A completely silly suggestion, I know.
Posted on September 28th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
I’m blogging from MIT’s Emerging Technology conference. Earlier today,
there were some great keynotes and a remarkable panel on innovation; a
full report on those to come. Up next: a panel on Nuclear-Power Comeback, featuring support from former opponent (and personal hero) Stewart Brand.
Posted on September 22nd, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
I am amazed by the number of people who think that a perfectly acceptable response to an emergency is disruptive, individual flight. I can think of a number of positive responses to emergencies, but this is an entirely negative one. Roads jammed with uncoordinated traffic
and hotels overwhelmed in the absence of coordination; people
struggling alone to cope with traumatic decisions — what a gray joke.
A few positive alternatives:
And this business of stores and people ‘running out’ of key supplies in
the run-up to every disaster gets old fast. In the first place,
each neighborhood should maintain a decent supply of these
staples. In the second, if Wal*Mart can figure out how to alert
their suppliers to up production every time there’s a sale, surely
cities can find a way to alert the usual suspects every time there’s an
impending disaster-alert.
Posted on September 15th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
I suppose that should be refined to “as long as we can choose what routes our traffic
takes…” — that is, which peers, what types of lines and routers, perhaps even what
last-mile providers. It should be possible to say “if
there’s no way to send the following content along routes I trust,
don’t send it.“
You don’t have to be paranoid to want this. You might distrust a
route because you expect it to attempt to reconstruct, alter, and
resend content; because you suspect it of not accepting content from
certain areas or sites, because you worry that it keeps track of what
you send when, without your permission… You might not want to
send content through any router that doesn’t respect the “return
receipt” flag which sends back information on how your packets
travelled on their way to a destination. Or you might just not want to
support in any way certain traffic providers, explicitly asking to
patronize other providers whenever possible.
Implementing this would seem to take significantly more intelligent routers and middleware than currently exists.
For a great coverage of some of the topics brought up at the Web of Ideas discussion tonight, see Geoff Huston’s killer essay on the finance of networks, with its diversity of options laid out in gory detail.
Posted on September 7th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Standards are sexy. Reuniting families is sexier. PFIF is worth the time it takes to read it.
In use by the grassroots Katrina PeopleFinder project [Katrina help wiki | search for refugees here).
Posted on September 5th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Public lists of “ways to help” with Katrina relief : a
retrospective. Below are a collection of links from the
past weeks, and some public timelines. How to do better next
time? Is a “Disaster 2.0″ effort the answer?
Timelines: from TPM | from Wikipedia
Posted on September 5th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Ray in Austin
is my favorite blogger at the moment. He’s writing solely about NO; his anger is tangible and practical. He
provides a recap of Walter Maestri’s work in predicting hurricane
damage and evangelizing for preparedness, apparently in vain. An NPR story from last year describes how explicitly this very storm had been played out in the minds of people preparing for it.
Meanwhile, skilled volunteers are actively not being called in.
Chains of command are still worrying about looking good to others,
while the “related deaths” toll is steadily soaring. I’ve seen
this kind of careful negligence before, and cringe to observe it when
so much is at stake. 10,000 deaths doesn’t sound unlikely to me any more. According to
some sources (the NYT?), we’re up to 250k refugees in Texas, far more
than the 100k I predicted last week.
Meanwhile, the Army relief forces seem to have dived into NO from a standpoint of total war:
… next up : you didn’t know what when???
Posted on August 26th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
There are an increasing number of articles and works published whichrefer to Wikipedia as an implicitly reliable source — often ininappropriate contexts. As its quality improves, Wikipedia
seemsto be shirking a certain quiet
duty
to be modest; something which wasnot a problem back when none would
have mistaken it for a meticulouslyedited compilation.
Example: Ann Simmons, writing in the
LA Times on a matter of British peerage earlier this summer, used the
clause “according to Burke’s
and Wikipedia,”a snippet which should immediately give one pause. For one
thing,the two references have nothing in common. It seems that aneditor tacked on the clause, “,
an online encyclopedia,” in a vain effort at
clarification. The full quote:
The 11th Earl is a bachelor and has no children.
With no otherapparent successor in sight, Capell is the new heir to the earldom.
Hisaristocratic genealogy is documented in the 106th edition of “Burke’sPeerage & Baronetage.”
Please understand me; I will be the first to tell you that you can
find
articles and collections
on Wikipedia - including many
on peerage and
royalty
- which are among the
best overviews in the Englishlanguage; if only you know where to look, and how to check the latest
revisions in each
article’s history.
But
the process for checking information added to Burke’s and that
foradding information to Wikipedia are vastly dissimilar.
TheWikipedia overview article on the Earl of
Essex,for
instance, continues to list no references, two months after theabove
(widely syndicated) article drew new attention to the wiki
articles on Frederick andRobert Capell.
It is
embarrassing to imagine some newscasster, writer, lawyer,politician,
student, professor, or publicistciting a random article from Wikipedia,
on peerage or anything else,without somehow verifying
thatthe article had been carefullyresearched. So what can be done? Short of the
full-fledgeddrive for moderated or static views of the project, that is.
What I would like to see is an internal quality review group that
issues regular recommendations
to the rest of the world. At first these
recommendations would look like a brief whitelist of the categories and
subsubfields thatare really
top-notch and being monitored by a healthy community ofrespected
users. As content improves, it would add various
hard metricsfor each of
various top-level categories — spot-check accuracy;vandalism
frequency/longevity; proportion/longevity of POV and otherdisputes;
rates of article creation, editing, and deletion; &c,
&c.
The recommendations could go out to educational, librarian, andresearch bodies –including
some of you reading this. Theywould be prominently linked
to the sitewidedisclaimer[s]. The metrics would be available to
anyone asfeedback, including those working on relevant WikiProjects.
What do
youthink? (… read the full
essay) A tip o’ the cursor to
lotsofissues
(Update: quintupling of this post reverted. Now how did that happen? Rogue content editor alert…)
Posted on August 19th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Shako Mukulu is one of those people I think of every month, though we have not spoken since my last visit to his hometown of Kibwezi
over 5 years ago. He taught me many things while I stayed with
him, off and on, for two months. Most importantly, after “never blow your nose on anything but tissue paper (or you’ll get sick),” was his maxim not to mistrust anyone without very good reason.
I once came home after a day of packed matatu rides
with a neat rip through my pants pocket and missing a 1000 KSh note
that had been there the day before - my luxurious budget for last week
in the country. I worried that it had been stolen;
Shako reproved me roundly, saying “don’t think such things if you don’t
know.” I checked through all of my belongings, and found I had
turned my pockets out into a small bag without remembering it.
Trust is a funny beast, but it is in many communities the right
default. This is a complex topic, worthy of a few chapters of a
book, but of particular relevance to travellers in strange lands with
professional pickpockets.
Differentiating between these pros and everyday people, and the milieus
each group prefers, is the difference between prudence and prejudice.
My mother left behind a makeup case - stolen? perhaps. I
left behind a stack of newspapers and a baseball cap (the Sox… you
had to ask?), and retrieved both of them once I found the right people
to ask.
Posted on August 1st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Day 1 of the Wikimania was a definite success. Everyone arrived
and found their way to the hostel (and, in Achal’s case, the hotel)
without incident; the hackers self-assembled to a midday start, and in
the process of discussing the first day’s topic, hacked out a first draft of a metadata solution.
After the day’s talks, and after what seemed like a fine dorm-style
meal, there were many good, quiet discussions and a viewing of Pi. Eugene and Sven and I talked about the active disinterest in HtmlArea
by Wiki programmers, including many of our friends. Without my
mentioning my interview with Ward Cunningham, Eugene commented that
Ward probably wouldn’t feel strongly about it.
When I pointed out that, in fact, Ward had twice listed “lack of WYSIWYG
editors” as the greatest remaining barrier to the general public
using wikis, Eugene was surprised, and commented that nobody had blogged
about it. Which was true! Mea maxima culpa.
So, I’m going to blog about it now; better late than never.
Posted on June 22nd, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Jeff Young and Outgoing’s Thom Hickey are working on developing a
Metawiki to hold structured metadata along with each record.
Talis advisor Paul Miller (of Common Information Environment fame) comments:
It would be interesting - in the spirit of openness and cooperation - to understand any relationships between the [Silkworm] Directory and OCLC’s MetaWiki.
Contrast this with recent ideas about a WikiCite project for annotating all references that might be used in books or encyclopedia articles, and you can see a lovely tool just waiting to emerge.
The Wikimedians don’t care about the differences between the Silkworm Directory and the Metawiki and Wikidata; they just want to get down to creating annotations as soon as possible. People can argue over what format they should be in and how they should be propoagated later…
Posted on April 27th, 2005 by .
Categories: metrics.
With bird song accompaniment, Jimmy Wales focused on international, multi-lingual Wikipedia efforts. An IRC transcript is available.
Transcript of the Queen of Engl^B^B^B^B^B Jimmy Wales’ Harvard Law School Talk …
Posted on April 25th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Jimmy Wales gabve a presentation for the whole of Jonathan Zittrain’s penultimate class today. An IRC transcript is available. There was also an audiostream, which will probably be archived; links as they turn up.
Posted on April 5th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
In the past few days: a Big Dig source pretends new report is positive; and a Harvard divestment from PetroChina.
Posted on March 16th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
The Weinberger thoughtfully transcribed what sounds like a cheerful, fast-paced panel on metadata. What I like best about the session is that most people got hung up on the terms and implementations currently being used, and didn’t get down to any kind of serious discussion of where metadata comes from and how to allow and support multiple overlapping schemas.
Instead there were brief discussions about empirics: why people have done things, where there is consensus and where everyone does their own thing. I don’t think they even managed to touch on the issue of how often people don’t metadatalize things ideally according their own preferences. The fact that everyone is different doesn’t mean that they don’t regularly make ‘typos’ (or whatever the equivalent is when you’re trying to annotate, contextualize, metadatify, classify… there must be a word for this in librarianship).
For my part, now that the bar for linguistic acrobatics is being set by the growing abusonomy of modern almostl33t-speek, I will try to help people overcome their %@&!sonomy and “prototag” fixations by insisting on referring to all such entities as “metadata,” or some verbal fauximile thereof.
Technometadata: *nomy |
etech | joho[ho]
Posted on March 8th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Derek Ramsey, Daniel Mayer, Bryan Derksen, Seth Ilys, Charles Matthews, and Stacey Greenstein
were all featured in today’s Wired News article on Wikipedia, as six of
the most prolific and active [English] contributors. Still no
thoughts on the rest of the world, nor really a recognition that it
exists. Charming profiles, though.
Posted on February 17th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: metrics.
Well, a scoop at least. The “SHA-1 broken” story broke on Wikinews, and then Slashdot (with just a Wikinews link) almost 12 hours before it broke in other international English-language press. Presumably the original source was in Chinese… WN also just got written up as a possible salvation for the future in BusinessWeek, which is pretty nicely laid out.
Huzzahs all around, in particular to the trio of crackers — all women, thankyouverymuch — who ‘deprecated’ the infamously hoary algorithm.
I love a world in which that can refer to something less than twenty years old!