Very nice New Yorker piece by Stacy Schiff about Wikipedia. And an interesting comment on it by David Robinson, who was a guest blogger on Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker.
Category Archives: Web
Quote of the day
Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.
Tim Berners-Lee, in a fascinating interview (transcript here) conducted on 28 July, 2006 and published as an IBM podcast.
He goes on to talk about his original concept of the Web:
And the original World Wide Web browser of course was also an editor. I never imagined that anybody would want to write in anchor brackets. We’d had WYSIWYG editors for a long time. So my function was that everybody would be able to edit in this space, or different people would have access rights to different spaces. But I really wanted it to be a collaborative authoring tool.
And for some reason it didn’t really take off that way. And we could discuss for ages why it didn’t. You know, there were browser editors, maybe the HTML got too complicated for a browser just to be easy.
But I’ve always felt frustrated that most people don’t…didn’t have write access. And wikis and blogs are two areas where suddenly two sort of genres of online information suddenly allow people to edit, and they’re very widely picked up, and people are very excited about them.
And I think that really for me reinforces the idea that people need to be creative. They want to be able to record what they think. They want to be able to, if they see something wrong go and fix it…
Slivers of time
Now here’s a really good idea.
Slivers-of-Time is a new way of working. You list the hours you would like to work and local employers buy them.
New web sites are making this way of working easy to organise and less likely to go wrong. They remove all the overheads of booking top-up workers at short notice, for short periods. The web technology to achieve this is only now viable.
The Slivers-of-Time programme is funded jointly by the UK government and private companies. It’s low profile at the moment but working with far sighted government agencies, employers and recruitment agencies to launch a new way of working for the UK.
The interesting thing is that it’s funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. So that’s one thing John Prescott is good for, then.
Goggles: The Google Maps flight simulator
This is simply wonderful: a flight simulator written in Flash which uses Google Earth to provide the backdrop. I’ve just flown round London!
Thanks to Tom for finding it.
Websites that changed the world
The Observer had the nice idea of celebrating the 15th birthday of the Web by compiling a list of the sites that have had had a big influence on our lives. I wrote the introduction. Sample:
By any standards, the web represents a colossal change in our information environment. And the strange thing is that it has come about in just 15 years. Actually, most of it has happened in less than that, because the web only went mainstream in 1993, when the first graphical browsers – the computer programs we use to access the web – were released. So these are early days. We can no more envisage the long-term implications of what has happened than dear old Gutenberg could…
To get a handle on the scale of what has happened, think back to what the world was like 15 years ago. Amazon was a large river in South America. Ryanair was an Irish airline that flew to places nobody had ever heard of. eBay was a typo. Yahoo was a term from Gulliver’s Travels. A googol was a very large number (one followed by a hundred zeroes). Classified ads were densely printed matter in newspapers. ‘Encyclopedia’ was a synonym for Encyclopedia Britannica. And if you wanted to read what your MP had said in the Commons yesterday you had to queue at the Stationery Office in London to buy Hansard. Oh, and there were quaint little shops in high streets called ‘travel agents’…
Carr on Benkler
Nicholas Carr isn’t convinced by Yochai Benkler’s view of the prospects for peer production. It’s an interesting contrarian view.
The Scaredy Cat Encyclopedia
From David Weinberger’s journal…
The Encyclopedia Britannica has refused my request to interview an editor for 15 minutes about the process by which it chooses authors. I explained that this is for a book. But, the head of the Britannica’s communications group decided – based on what? – that they don’t want to support people who are “cheerleading for the downfall of businesses that they deem to be part of an old regime.”
Desert Island Discs
Image (c) bp plc
While driving yesterday I was listening to John ‘Lord’ Browne, CEO of BP, being interviewed on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs programme and was struck by one of his choices — a song by Diana Krall. But of course I was unable to make a note of it at the time. It turns out that the BBC maintains a useful web page detailing the choices of current and past guests on the programme. Later, I bought the track — ‘Narrow Daylight’, written by Diana Krall and Elvis Costello — from iTunes, and very nice it is too.
I met Browne at a college dinner a few months back and discovered that we have two interests in common — photography and cigars. We use similar cameras, but he has much better smokes. Which is not entirely surprising: after all, he’s the one with money to burn.
Jimmy Wales seeking more intelligent politics
From his Mission Statement – Central Campaign Wikia…
Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let’s be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.
Campaigns have been more about getting the television messaging right, the image, the soundbite, than about engaging ordinary people in understanding and caring how political issues really affect their lives.
Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics.
One hallmark of the blog and wiki world is that we do not wait for permission before making things happen. If something needs to be done, we do it. Well, campaigns need to sit up and take notice of the Internet, take notice of bloggers, take notice of wikis, and engage with us in a constructive way.
The candidates who will win elections in the future will be the candidates who build genuinely participative campaigns by generating and expanding genuine communities of engaged citizens.I am launching today a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.
This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.
Together, we will start to work on educating and engaging the political campaigns about how to stop being broadcast politicians, and how to start being community and participatory politicians…
The Long Tail
Just back from the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London where I interviewed Wired Editor, Chris Anderson, about his new book, The Long Tail. He’s a voluble, intelligent, persuasive talker and he gave a polished performance to a packed house.
Two interesting points.