Wikipedia watching : Steve Rubel, Islam

Posted on December 1st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Steve Rubel outdoes himself with some wikipedia hacks for newcomers, and just today promotes WP to disruptive monarch.  He seems to have a growing love affair with the project, but expresses that enthusiasm in odd ways.

Meanwhile, the Finnish Wikipedia’s article on Islam was panned by Finnish economics magazine Taloussanomat (here I link to their pda-friendly site; their main pager crashes my Firefox),
which did a sampling of WP articles and gave it a rating of 1/10. 
It is worth noting that the Hebrew and Russian language-versions of the
article ( אסלאם and Исла́м, respectively ) have been featured as excellent articles in their languages; the English article Islam, on the other hand, failed a recent featured-article candidacy (though it remains on the new and growing list of  ‘good articles‘ [which I hope to see expand to 2% of the entire work]) and — while full of information — could use some cleaning up.

0 comments.

The responsibility of government for the public safety

Posted on September 16th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

“The responsibility of government for
the public safety is absolute, and requires no mandate.  It is in
fact the prime object for which governments come into existence.” — Churchill.

Timeless footage from last week: Keith Olbermann steps back from his normal perspective and delicately eviscerates federal leaders over their responses to Katrina.

And, crass but still almost as cathartic, here’s the ill will press on the subject. 

0 comments.

Weinberger on the brain

Posted on September 14th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

The Weinberger talks tonight, restarting his “mind and clueful chatter over matter” series at Berkman, and two weeks from now at the KM Cluster summit in Waltham.  Don’t miss a single episode…

In other news, Erik Moeller has an incisive analysis of how -NC licenses (like cc-by-nc) are harmful.  He doesn’t go so far as to classify when they are useful (the
most productive way to speak ill of a tool), and he relies a bit too
heavily on Wikimedia examples for my tastes (there are all sorts of community factors at work making these projects successful, not simply what kind of license was chosen), but it is worth reading carefully.

0 comments.

New Orleans flooding: dynamic map overlay

Posted on September 11th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Database-backed GMap flood-data overlay, for the entire city.

New Orleans flooding: dynamic map overlay …

0 comments.

101 Interfaces that Should Be Canonical

Posted on September 1st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Spurred on by the heady smell of hay here in the wagon, and inspired by
Jimmy Wales’ blogging chez Lessig recently re: 10 things that want to
be free, I thought I would propose my own list of interfaces that should surely be canonical.


One downside of this plan : it will push all recent posts off the main
page very soon, and Manila has no archival offerings to speak of.


Another downside: Manila also has no categorization to speak of, so you can’t just ignore what I’m about to post.


An upside: Manila is nowhere in
the set of chainlinks in the chains on the bandwagon floor, so I should
be picking up another one in any case.  Look for a collection of drupal (nice translation setup), wiki, the-other-wp (smooth wagon appeal), lj and blogger.  
I would like to separate out personal/science/invention,
translation/interfaces, wiki[media]/knowledge, communication/society,
and robotwisdom/odd-news channels… with a healthy dose of abbreviated
interlinking to avoid stagnation.

Feel free to
A. suggest other excellent setups I should be trying, 
B. suggest which topics would go best with which platforms, and 
C. suggest how open the collaboration should be for each (topic, platform) —

First up, on the list : self-aware management and status ice
for computers (for those following along at home, a few songs may come
in handy in the heady months to come) — auto-detection of the need for
displays of memory, battery, CPU and network monitors, and improvements
on the current bloodless defaults.

0 comments.

Facets of old glory #11846 : satire in plame view

Posted on July 14th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

You have to love a country where you can have cheerfully-mindless-yet-vicious government satire at whitehouse.org, and pornography (well, not anymore!) at whitehouse.com.   Now if only journalists would stop producing content that is similarly mindless and easily confused with pulp… 

The best concise articles on the Plame affair, despite recent coverage, remain ones written back in 2003 (like this slightly anti-administration
Newsweek piece).
You would think some busybody would have improved on them by now.  If
you know of another good overview article, particularly a pro-administration one for good measure, please
leave a link to it. 

At least we now have a fairly encyclopedic overview of the case vis-a-vis Rove, and a decent timeline. 
But the real story isn’t about Rove or alleged illegality, it’s about
why multiple people in the government (and outside of the
administration) decided this was an acceptable result.  Not sexy,
hard to research — don’t hold your breath for detailed coverage this decade.  Just snag a copy of Pravin’s 2017 “Global Politics in Turn-of-the-Century America” when it comes out.

1 comment.

Amarok, KDE, LinuxTag — http://amarok.kde.org/

Posted on June 27th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Not long ago, KDE announced it’s working closely with Wikimedia to produce KDE
goodies that draw from all this free content.  It was funny; a big deal
at the KDE conference, yet many people in the Wikimedia community were
surprised to hear about it.  As for future development, I’d like to see an open-source
knowledge solution for select-and-query, similar to the desktop tool
gurunet provides.  Oh, how I would love to hack a few good regular
expressions and cheap context awareness into such a thing.

Amarok, KDE, LinuxTag — http://amarok.kde.org/ …

0 comments.

The Wonderful World of Wikis

Posted on June 23rd, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Come explore the wonderful world of wikis at tonight’s
blog group meeting,
or, if showing in person is not possible, check the blog for remote
participation options, like Skype or IRC at
 the
presentation

The Wonderful World of Wikis …

3 comments.

Wiki platform proliferation

Posted on June 15th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

In tracking down groups to invite to Wikimania, I’ve discovered a
wealth of active wiki platforms populated by entirely different circles
of users, and promoted on different social/blog circles as well. Let’s
see how many I can list (NB: capitalizations not CaMel perfect):

  • MediaWiki. Low on ACLs, manuals, and single-user snappiness, high on scalability and install speed. Server cluster compatible.
  • Twiki. Oldie and goodie. Endlessly extended; a frankenstein of great bits that often work well together.
  • Xwiki. Ludovic’s baby. Neatly modular, cleverly multilingual, a jack of all trades.
  • Socialtext. The most open of the enterprise wikis. Pretty swell.
  • JotSpot. The early leader in “how hot is enterprise wiki?” VC circles, afaik. Flashy.
  • Confluence.
    Atlassian’s editable workspace; not called a wiki for the first year of
    its life. Compatible with an endless collection of databases and
    middleware platforms. Largest enterprise-wiki userbase.
  • Snipsnap. Fundamental notion of snips, for transclusion and reuse.
  • PurpleWiki. Niche case contender; primarily used by its creators and as an example application of Purple Numbers.
  • UseMod wiki. MediaWiki’s ancestor. Stable. Unchanging. Stuck in 2001.
  • Historical wikis : c2, meatball, others which helped mould the philosophy of the budding tool.
  • Planned wikis Of The Future : WordPress-wiki (another
    contender for the name wikipress by another contender for the acronym
    WP?), WorldCat wiki, …

Free wiki hosts (with ads):

  • In English:  wikispaces, with beautiful layout and inline stats,  wikicities (jwales & wikia), schtuff (brian), seedwiki (since 2001),  xwiki (ludo himself),  pbwiki …
  • In other languages : [a few german hosts I need to look up.]

Other wiki hosts:

  • Broken wiki hosts: atwiki, swiki (another xwiki site?), …
  • Non-free wiki hosts :  Sometimes there is one combined with each non-free wiki platform… 

More entries, and links, to come… please suggest your own favorites
to add to the list. If you have favorite wiki hosts, free or non, you
can mention them as well. I’ll get around to doing a comparison of them
one of these days.

4 comments.

Boston Cyberarts 2005!

Posted on April 21st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

The Boston Cuberarts festival kicks off tonight, Thursday, at 6pm at the Hotel@MIT. Deliciously cool people will be there in force, including the ineffable Martin Wattenberg and, oddly enough, yours truly. Through the javalicious genius of Daniel Wunsch, I will be bringing the joys of rcbirds (a live audio feed of recentchanges) to the assembled cyberati.

See Event #10 on their calendar for this week. If you want to come say hello for a few mins, and have trouble getting in, give me a call: 617 5 2 9 4266.

To enjoy the glories of a real-time audio-feed of Recentchanges (with different sound cues for different classes of edits), see the rcbirds project page, and set it up on your local machine. I find this to be just the right level of detail to make my editing really enjoyable; the English Wikipedia feels like a small community again when I have this running in the background.

If you want to use this with English Wikipedia, you can download my English config files and replace the config/ directory with them. New: Support for namespace differentiation, better troll-alerts, quieter background sound.

0 comments.

Wikipedia and the Digital Divide: Free Licensing for a Free World

Posted on April 20th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Save the date!

  • When : Tuesday, April 26, at 8:30pm
  • Where: in Pound Hall 101 [map]
  • What : Jimmy Wales talks about Wikipedia and free knowledge.

There may even be free pizza. Come have a great free time…

0 comments.

Citizen Journalism discussion tonight

Posted on April 14th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

We’re broadcasting (tech stuff willing) at:
 http://rura.org:8000/stream.m3u beginning around 7 pm EST.
A few of us will be hanging out on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), too:
 Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog.

Check out our agenda:

0 comments.

Brittanica buys Yahoo!glepaedia, to compete with Wikicarta

Posted on April 8th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

The week in wiki, retold via the Wiki Muse… I mean, Wikinews.

While Wikipedia was still recovering from an attempted April 1 buyout by Britannica:

Unfortunately, while Encarta is opening itself to wiki-style editing from the masses, and wants to make its mark as a reliable source of content, it doesn’t even list the names of its editors, not to mention email addresses or ways to get in touch with them. Having a blog hidden away on an MSN Space where a few users can contact one or two of the online editors just isn’t the same. Now if they were to really grasp what openness means, I could get excited about it…

0 comments.

Wikipedia DVD hits top-2 on Amazon best-sellers list

Posted on April 1st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Germany’s Directmedia today released the Wikipedia Frühjahr 2005 DVD from Wikimedia Deutschland, which immediately jumped to the day’s Amazon bestseller list, and proceeded to rise to the top spot on the list for a few days, and then settled in at 2d place for the following fortnight. This came on top of a sizeable batch of over 7,000 preorders.

Schoenhof’s was no help in getting copies here (6-8 weeks and over $20 each), but I’ll see how long it takes Directmedia to send me a box. Let me know if you want one.

Wikipedia DVD hits top-2 on Amazon best-sellers list …

0 comments.

Breaking News : Indonesia hit by Mag 8-8.5 earthquake

Posted on March 28th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Southern Indonesia. One? two? underwater quake[s, 3 minutes apart]. Potential for a tsunami in the next 3 hours. Forbes, English Wikinews

0 comments.

InstaSet’s sweet-smelling shit

Posted on March 25th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

I just snagged an InstaSet AM/FM Clock radio with blue display, to replace my aging red display, in the hopes that some proto-Doppler effect would rub off on me. (It must have worked; today, without even plugging it in, I was up at 7am, and literally itching for 9 to roll around so I could start making business calls… a rarity since I stopped running my own shop.)

It has a mini clockchip that’s installed on manufacture; keeps the time for three years. No setting. Has decent speakers, decent reception, no annoying antennae-extension. I plugged it in, the radio tuned in. The default alarm time was 8:25AM, fine by me. The tuner and volume-wheel were sensitive and nicely done. The buttons for switching times and modes were cheap and stuck, moving jerkily; I’m glad I won’t have to press them often. What a beautiful piece of junk.

0 comments.

Sexy Web surfboard waxes wiki

Posted on March 21st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: popular demand.

Surfwax Inc is a 7-year-old search portal and knowledge-tool provider with atrocious website design and a love of bizarre nomenclature, which has brought you such well-known marvels as
Nextaris, the all-in-one search/upload/store/social-networking portal, and the infamous Surfwax Scholar Plagiarism Guard.

They regularly receive praise for their featureset from such prominent critis as SearchEngineWatch’s Gary Price, and [cl]aim to offer “the best grip on information from the Open Web,” and have been offering visitors “Look-ahead” auto-complete searching for a while. Now they offer look-ahead wiki searches as well, and claim over 600,000 Wikipedia terms (perhaps this means that ~80,000 terms are not counted in the official article count; if they were including all redirects, it would be more like 900k terms).

0 comments.

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