·:[ Sound and Fury ]:·
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Much has been made of the accuracy of wikis - collaborative documents that has an open editing interface. Wikipedia is perhaps the most well-known wiki out there. It’s not 100% accurate, but what is? Other encyclopedias have errors too. Just with this one, they can be fixed. Who in their right mind would use any encyclopedia as a primary source anyway?

The best explanation of Wikipedia is a movie about how one article evolved. See the screencast here: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html

I realize that it has been a long time since I last posted. I’d like to update two earlier posts.

Slideshare has matured. People are using it primarily to share picture shows and how-to presentations about doing presentations. People obviously feel that most presentations can be improved. People “zing” presentations which is a way to mark them for others to see. You can comment on shows, rate them, and mark them as favorites. Combine a slideshow with an mp3 and create a slidecast.

Reader2 has also improved. Links to Amazon and other shopping venues are included. The interface is still clunky though. How much does an Ajax programmer cost these days anyway?

The other place I’ve been spending some time is Shutterfly, which is a commercial site for pictures. They do nice work with books and photos.

I’ve never been a big fan of sports. In fact, I’ve always been confused and more than a bit irritated that sports scores are considered news. When I was on a command center watch floor, the three channels that were shown were CNN, CNN-Headline News and ESPN. Really.

Imagine my joy at seeing the new Fantasy Congress. It’s pretty much what you think it might be. Draft legislators into your team, earn points for their performance and compete against others. Just drafting my team was an education. Some high performers you might suspect, like Sen John Warner or Sen John McCain. What intrigued me was that a disproportionate number of the high earners were women. Hmmm. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Navy has embarked on yet another reading program. I’m a fan of these, since I’m always looking for something good to read or to listen to in the car. What I’m not a fan of is the format of the list. I’d like a list where I can login, check off the ones I’ve read, search Audible.com, mark the ones I’ve downloaded to my GPS (which BTW has an MP3 player, very nice), search my local library for others, and search Amazon for the rest. Maybe even write reviews, metatag it, search and read other reviews, and add my own recommendations for similar reading.

Is this too much to ask? Okay, I’ve found Reader2. They have some features, but not everything that I really want.

NetFlix is offering a prize of one million dollars to see who can improve their recommendations system. What’s interesting about this (to me, anyway) is not the dollar amount or the problem they’re trying to solve. It’s the way they’re trying to solve it.

Logo designers have long hated the idea of a logo design contest, as they believe that such free work undermines the true value of their profession. Will code developers backlash against this type of thing as well? Or will the Open Source tradition of code development for free and for the spirit of the hunt win out?

Trolling around Wikipedia tonight, checking my watchlist, looking for vandalism on “my” pages, I notice an odd entry on the USMC page. Someone added an external link to The Marine Corps’ My Space. No, really, a USMC MySpace. Yes, and the Corps, in spite being out of the typical age bracket at 230 years old, has over 27,000 friends.

It’s nicely done. A bit understated compared to the sites of some of their “friends”. They have disabled the comments feature, which, given the the FOAF comments, I can hardly blame them.

Reminds me of a story of the Marine Recruiting’s dragon commerical. You remember the one that looks like a video game and then turns into a Marine? When they showed it to the Commandant, he said, “I don’t get it.” And they told him that they weren’t trying to recruit men his age.

Where I am today. Relatively interesting workshop on wikis for collaboration.
ColabWiki3A20Expedition20Workshop

Some of the best information I’ve found about Web 2.0 is coming from an 8th grade classroom.

Vicki Davis, my new favorite teacher, set up a wikispace for her students. She gave them some guidelines and let them those. The result is both a great example of Web 2.0 and a great resource for it.

These students are going to be our employees in less than 10 years. They’re going to come to us with the experience — and the expectation — of working collaboratively online.

I hope we’re ready for them.

How is calendaring search? I mean, if Google’s core competency is Search, why are they now providing a calendar? Don’t get me wrong. I’m generally a fan of Google. Not sure why I want them to hold my calendar, in addition to my files, photos, email, web site, shopping, etc.

Aggregation of information can be a dangerous thing. Right now, I don’t seem to benefit from it. I don’t see a way to easily add events from my Gmail to my Gcalendar or link a video from the Gvideo into my Gcalendar. If I’m going to put all of my data in one place, I would like to get some benefit from the aggregation rather than just worry about the next subpoena.

It was bound to happen.

Wikipedia has become the establishment. Like Google, Wikipedia started small — the bastion of geeks. Now, everyone uses it. College students reference it. Bloggers link to it to define terms. With 1000s of edits a day and over a million English-language pages, Alexa consistently ranks Wikipedia in the top 20 visited sites.

But the real harbinger of establishment-ness has only just emerged. The Uncyclopedia is seriously devoted to fun. Based on the same software as its target, the un’pedia claims to be content-free. Jokes, rumors, baseless theories all find a home here.

They also seem to be testing out some of the new features that the ‘pedia wants to implement, such as verification. Good luck to them. As hard as it is to see someone spoofing the venerable Wikipedia, it was bound to happen.

Simply building and deploying a social software system isn’t enough to guarentee success. Despite what Kevin Costner has been told, in reality, If you build it, they may not come. Ross Mayfield, of Social Text, and Suw Charman have proposed a reasonable strategy for software adoption over at Many-to-Many.

Both bottom-up and top-down approaches are described. My experience has been that without leadership support a system is doomed. Mainly because the leadership controls the funding and will only fund what they know to be valuable.

We’ve noticed this before, but now people seem to be actually using Amazon’s ProductWiki. Seeing how people can already comment in the Reviews section, one wonders how this will be used or abused. They suggest that their readers/writers should “Think of a Wiki as an encyclopedia entry that everyone who comes to the page will read.” Obviously, they’ve heavily influenced by Wikipedia, but who isn’t. A wiki is a way for a community to create content. It needn’t be encyclopedic, but perhaps the ‘pedia’s influence on wikis has contorted their flexibility.

So far, their 2200-some entries are unremarkable, with some link spam and pet projects. The wiki lacks social construct, such as being able to see who edited what. Maintenance pages, like recent changes, are also missing, although “recently edited” is available. The distinction, while subtle, is important. I can see what was edited, but not how. Therefore, I can’t police the wiki for Amazon. Let’s see how long this lasts.

You’ve all seen an intelligent agent like the Wiki Choice Wizard. The wizard walks through the feature list then spits out the list of Wiki software packages that meets your specifications.

Some things I’d change. Most of the distinguishing features are technical; programming language, database or files. Most end users don’t care. Only the page history and WYSIWYG features are ones that are functionally important to the typical end user. Rather than discern based on the type of license available, why not discuss what process the wiki is designed to support. Will the wiki be used for project management or as a content management system (CMS)?

The comparison matrix has some nice features, including the ability to flag features and show only those.

Why don’t I get paid to develop something like this?

Brrreeeport, a game? A show-the-man? A bandwagon? An easy way to get hits? Why would so many bloggers, including me, include this nonsense word and even try to define it.

Robert Scoble started this, and he can tell you why better than I can. Technorati shows brrreeeport as the most popular tag, beating out Cheney shooting a man.

Me? I’m facinated by the phenomenon of the bandwagon. While the major search engines seemed “slow” to pick it up, the blogosphere picked it up like wild fire. Are bloggers that interested in search, or is it just a cool thing to participate in? The latter, I suspect.

As many bloggers as there are, they (we) still like to think of ourselves as anti-establishment, of being outside looking in, but slowly taking over. A community outside, or deep within, the larger Internet community.

It harkens back to the APRAnet days. Techies knew something everyone else didn’t. And we liked it that way. An inside joke, our own culture.

Brrreeeport tapped into that.

The things people will do with Flickr. Here’s a game fastr, where you try to think like the rest of the crowd. Fascinating.

For those of you already enjoying GoogleTalk, they’ve announced that they’ve opened their service to federation. As they say, “Service providers just need to support the XMPP standard for server-to-server federation and their users will be able to talk to our users (and vice versa).”

Note that this is different from the AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) paradigm where service providers must pay AOL a fee to federate. Like many of us, Google is advocating what they call “service choice” — the idea that IM should work like email or your phone.

Go figure.

PowerPoint is not a good way to make a sale or to make a decision. It’s not. Really.

Evidence the continual attempts to squeeze this round peg. Lately, Guy Kawasaki lays down some rules about giving a PP pitch to venture capitalists. His basic advice (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 pitch font) isn’t bad; the underlying premise is. The best way to convince someone to give you their money is tell a compelling story.

And you can do that without any slides at all.

If you must provide something for people to look at, hand out a single sheet of paper with the important information you want them to remember. Your name, contact information, salient points. Send it to them ahead of the brief, so they can be ready for questions. Okay, maybe the head folks won’t read it, but their staff will. Then use all of your one hour meeting to have a discussion.

A colleague pointed me to a C4ISR Journal article about General Cartwright’s blog. On a classified network, the general habitually asks questions - and expects non-vetted answers. For the uninitiated, “vetting” is a process by which the people with the answers work with the people with the political savvy to craft an answer for the people with the responsibility to give. Gen Cartwright wants to skip all that vetting and get a quick answer.

From the article: “If you’re not contributing, I don’t want you as part of the organization,” he said. “And if you’re not contributing because you don’t think the information will be perfect, I still don’t need you.”

The more I hear from him, the bigger fan I am.

Video blogs. It was only a matter of time before weblogs moved beyond the simple text. First we had moblogs - blogs with pictures taken from mobile phones. Next came podcasting, which can be considered an audio blog.

Now, video blogs. The most popular is apparently Rocketboom. I found out through my Tivo. Ain’t life grand?

What’s next? We must have a better way to discover and promote all this information. So, what technorati and reddit are doing for text and Flickr is doing for images, someone will do for video.

The digital trust models that we’re used to all involve Alice trusting Bob and Bob trusting Tom, resulting in Alice trusting Tom to some degree based on a formula. In other words, I trust someone, they trust someone else, therefore I trust the stranger. This model of trust is fairly intuitive.

What actually happened on the Internet is something completely different. People may not trust a stranger, but they seem to trust a mob of strangers. Take eBay as the example. I routinely send my money to someone I don’t know in hopes that they will send me something that looks like what they told me it would. I trust that they will for two reasons. First, their feedback rating tells me that they have done this in the past. Second, we both know that if they don’t, I will leave negative feedback and adversely affect their future business. This trust takes a while to build and is fragile. One negative can impact sales by an average of 14%, as well as spark the begin of a decline that might only be solved by an identity-change. [1]

Another good example of a Mob Trust (TM) model is Amazon’s (www.amazon.com review system. Again, I may not trust one person’s opinion of a book, but when 100 people dislike the book, I’m more likely to listen.

A third example is the Internet Movie Database www.imdb.com rating system. One can compare the top 100 rated movies from IMDB with the top 100 from the American Film Institute. The AFI list is restricted to American-made films, which leaves out such strong performers as Kirosawa’s Ran. The IMDB seems heavily influenced by the technical-lean of most of its contributors; the Lord of the Rings ranks fairly high.