Category Archives: browse the web

Arianna’s Jackpot

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The AOL galaxy
A email this morning from the HuffPost doyenne herself broke the news: AOL is acquiring the Huffington Post for a cool $350M. Not bad. Or, on second thought….

Arianna, in her email, assures us that HuffPost will continue on course:

Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be, for HuffPost, like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.

I have problems stepping onto a moving walkway at the airport, myself. Arianna, I think you’d better watch your step! And I’m pretty sure that the guy who drives a supersonic jet doesn’t call it a “wheel”. And speed is not the highest good.

HuffPost has, overall, been good more often than it’s been rotten, but it’s not always been a clear call, especially in the past year or so, where the sheer volume of posts has tended to bring the average quality down. And there is the troubling tendency of the blog to give a prominent platform to science deniers and other posters whose prose is more pompous than wise, more raucous than reasoned. Will the new overlords encourage such stuff or give AH and her staff the backing to push quality forward?

The cost of digitizing books (and of spreading the info in them)

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Brewster Kahle, over at the Open Content Alliance, has an interesting post about the cost of digitizing books. His overall take: it’s very cheap, especially relative to the cost of maintaining brick & mortar libraries. And, I might add, incredibly worthwhile, especially when you factor in the negligible additional cost of reproducing a digitized book. As a way of preserving our cultural heritage in the face of certain change, and possibly pernicious attack, it’s money that we absolutely need to spend.

The next step is to figure out how to get those digitized books into the hands of readers, with some responsible way of preserving some reasonable level of copyright protection for authors (needless to say, perhaps, that I consider our current copyright laws unreasonable). Kindle doesn’t do it; Apple’s probably upcoming netbook/tablet/ginormous ipod touch might, but only for a few. Perhaps the OLPC consortium might look into repurposing their technology as eBook technology; that might help more people, and respond to greater need, and spread information more widely and democratically and at lower cost, than the rather silly and instantly outmoded device that they came up with (and that I first saw in Brewster’s offices; thanks, Brewster & Becky).

Once Upon a Time (and again, and again, and again…)

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An incredibly powerful post by Arthur Silber weaves together a bunch of narratives – about Iraq, about Tim Hardaway, about liberals and conservatives, about freaks and normals, and delivers an emotionally wrenching and totally convincing revelation about who I am, who he is, and who those others are whom I observe and work so dutifully to understand. It’s impossible to abstract or pull a suitably revealing quote; read it, follow the links. Then look into a mirror.

Happy Wikipedia Day!

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Source: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Day – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
WikipediaWikipedia turns five years old today. It’s difficult for me to think of a website that’s done more to change the way I learn than Wikipedia. I’ve been reading E.P. Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class”; it’s fascinating, persuasive, and well-written, but filled with allusions to people, movements and events in English history that I don’t know: Socinianism, the Gordon Riots, Tyburn Fair, et.al. Wikipedia has been very helpful with about 90% of those references. The following clip, which is the entire text of Wikipedia’s own article on Wikipedia Day, is typical of what I find there; authoritative, non-defensive, brief and clearly written, replete with links to other articles and outside resources that might help me find what I’m looking for, or that illuminate what I’ve found. (Click on the Source link above to go to the article; then the links in it will be live.)

The English Wikipedia alone now has more than 920,000 articles, with over 340,000,000 words. The millionth article is expected to appear in late February or early March. The combined Wikipedias for all languages have an estimated total of over 3,100,000 articles in some two hundred languages. Eighty-four of the non-English Wikipedias have over 1,000 articles, thirty-six have over 10,000 and seven have over 100,000.

For a few days now, Wikipedia has been listed on Alexa as the 20th most popular website in the world (one week average). The current trend should see it entering the top ten this year.

129 new servers were purchased during 2005, bringing the total to 171.[1] The Wikimedia cluster has had to be moved to another facility (also in Tampa, Florida) to obtain more space. Wikimedia now has three auxiliary server clusters, in Paris, Amsterdam and Seoul.

Though Wikipedians are celebrating, the future of Wikipedia has come into question over the last year with numerous negative stories in the media, and internal political strife. News focused on studies which found Wikipedia to have a slightly lower article accuracy than Britannica and incidents of patently false articles which have drawn international attention and criticism. In 2005 many new tools had to be introduced to deal with the growing incidents of vandalism, but have had little effect other than to keep the rate of vandalism steady. The vandalism coupled with questions about whether or not Wikipedia can ever serve as a trustworthy reference source means that 2006 will likely be a challenging and important year for the Project.

Wikipedia has been steadily increasing the number of articles it serves, with a doubling rate somewhat less than a year. (Here’s an archived snapshot of Wikipedia as it existed a little more than a month after its public debut, with over 1,000 articles, aiming at 100,000.) More importantly, the service has developed, in a communal, orderly, and democratic manner, mechanisms for insuring the accuracy of the information it presents and preventing vandals and fanatics of various stripes from interfering with its mission. Short of spending eight hours in the library, I know of no better way to get an authoritative overview of even complex and extensive subjects.

If you find Wikipedia as useful as I do, you might want to contribute something, as I have, to help them keep the service operating effectively. And even if you don’t want to contribute, at least join me in wishing Jimmy Wales and his many thousand colleagues and collaborators a very Happy Birthday!

The end of the Internet

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Is that being alarmist? Maybe. The story is in the Washington Post, and it’s chilling.

The big telcos, headed by Bell South and AT&T, are promoting the idea that they should be able to control the Internet traffic that flows through the channels they control, to deny access to services that compete with services they offer, and to charge big content providers, like Google and Yahoo, to give their traffic priority over traffic of small content providers, like this blog.

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.

Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth’s offering.

It’s not hard to see that such a scheme would mean the end of the Internet as we know it, which is the Internet that many of us have come to consider indispensible. Lest we miss the point, Smith gives us another example a little later in the article:

Smith said the ability to prioritize traffic would benefit consumers, such as with online services providing medical alerts. And he said his company wants to be able to assure vendors such as online-gaming firms that their subscribers will get top performance even when there is heavy network traffic, which can slow a system. [Emphasis mine: RB]

This is not a theoretical discussion. There’s legislation in the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House right now that would give Smith what he wants—legislation, need we add, whose passage through Congress is being liberally greased by contributions from the telcos and cable companies.

There’s a pretty powerful coalition of interests opposing the legislation as it’s written, including Amazon, Google and Ebay, but it’s unlikely that they own as many legislators as the network providers, being so new to that game. And given the various other things happening on the national scene these days, something like this could gain a good deal of momentum before the public in general, or even most legislators, become aware of it.

It’s probably not too early to drop a note to your congressfolk to let them know that you are aware of what’s going down, and that you are mighty disturbed by this attempt to hijack the Internet, and that you will be watching their response to the legislation. It’s probably also a good idea to get to know Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group that has been quick to speak out against the so-called “pay-for-performance” concept, and even to give them a contribution to help them with their good works.

Thanks to The Progressive Blog Alliance and Blogonymous for the heads-up on this one.

What do you know for sure

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WikipediaWikipedia‘s been much in the news recently (if, by “news”, one means the gossip of the blogosphere; and right now, it seems to me, that’s the best news we have). Adam Curry was busted when he attempted to edit Wikipedia’s article on podcasting to pump his own contributions and eliminate or downgrade the contributions of others (particularly Dave Winer). And Dave, in today’s Scripting News, points to an article by Rex Hammond which cautions against unquestioned acceptance of Wikipedia’s authority, calling our attention to a situation in which the Wikipedia bio of John Seigenthaler Sr., courageous editor and publisher emeritus of the Nashville Tennessean, had been changed by an anonymous ill-wisher to implicate Seigenthaler in Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Rex cautions us, “You’re crazy if you take what you read in Wikipedia at face value.” And, of course, he’s right. And he’s also right when he goes on to say that we shouldn’t take any source at face value.

But I think he’s not quite so right when he says, further on, that we should be especially wary of “personal [media] like blogging … or a collaborative one like Wikipedia”. I think, on the contrary, that we should be on our most watchful guard with the impersonal and corporate media: The New York Times, Encyclopaedia Britannica, NPR. It’s not simply that the bias of the articles in those media are just as carefully concealed as those of the articles in Wikipedia (although they are). And it’s not just that those media speak with a weight of authority that Wikipedia lacks (although they do). It’s that the biases in traditional media are less subject to correction by those who do not share them. If a newspaper is caught in a particular egregious misstatement, it may publish a correction, days or weeks later, in small type on an inside page. NPR might broadcast a one-sentence apology at the end of a newscast on a single day. Any outrageous bias in a printed reference book must wait for the next edition to be corrected, if it ever is. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is on the case in hours or days; the podcasting article was rolled back to its prior state and locked for further editing before the first articles on the Curry case surfaced in the corporate media; the Seigenthaler article has also been corrected, and the story of the article’s pirating has been incorporated into the article itself. That’s a level of responsibility (in every sense of the word) that traditional media simply cannot rise to, even if they were to try (although I wish they would).

Wikipedia is an amazing resource—one whose nature I could never have predicted prior to its emergence. I find it invaluable as a source of basic background about people, events, places, ideas and things that I’ve not heard about before or about which my (book learned) knowledge is fuzzy. The more widely I range through the World Wide Web, the more such things I encounter, and I’m grateful to Wikipedia for being always at hand, and so close at hand. But I don’t believe everything I read there, either.