·:[ 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.

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.

Not much strikes me as truly innovative, but how about using water to write. Over at Pink Tentacle, they’ve noted how some are using waves to write. The current practical uses seem limited to amusement parks and hotels. Shades of The Abyss anyone?

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.

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.

Anyone who has ever tried to work from home with small children knows that such a thing is nearly impossible. Even trying to squeeze in a phone call can be difficult. Some enterprising souls in New York City have combined a workspace with day care. Two Rooms allows freelancers, part-timers and other flexibly-scheduled parents to really get some work done, while their children play in the next room.

This one is non-profit, fueled by grants. However, I can’t imagine that this won’t be franchised soon. Please mention me in your web site when you get rich.

Showing the power of combining two distinct applications, the HousingMaps maps real estate listings onto city maps. Craig’s List provides the listings, Google provides the maps and Paul Rademacher provides the context for them both.

Geolocation of information is more important than some previously believed. The much bally-hooed Death of Distance has not proven itself, as anyone shopping for real estate in Palo Alto can attest.

Read the Wired Article