Category Archives: Web

Wikipedia, academia and Seigenthaler

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Excellent essay on the phoney rows about Wikipedia’s alleged inadequacies and limitations. Sample:

What pissed me off more was how the academic community pointed to this case and went “See! See! Wikipedia is terrible! We must protest it and stop it! It’s ruining our schools!” All of a sudden, i found myself defending Wikipedia to academics instead of reminding the pro-Wikipedians of its limitations in academia. I kept pointing out that they wouldn’t let students cite from encyclopedias either. I reminded folks that the answer is not to protest it, but to teach students how to read it and to understand its strengths and limitations. To actually TEACH students to interpret web material. I reminded academics that Wikipedia provides information to people who don’t have access to books and that mostly-good information is far better than none. Most importantly, i reminded academics that the vast majority of articles on Wikipedia are super solid and if they had a problem with them, they could fix them. Academics have a lot of knowledge, but all too often they forget that they are teachers and that there is great value in teaching the masses, not just the small number of students who will help their careers progress. Alas, public education has been devalued and information elitism is rampant in an age where we finally have the tools to make knowledge more accessible. Sad. (And one of the many things that is making me disillusioned with academia these days.) I found myself being the Wikipedia promoter because i found the extreme academic viewpoint to be just as egregious as the extreme Wikipedia viewpoint…

The piece goes on to quote Jimmy Wales’s wonderful defence of Wikipedia with an analogy about steak knives in restaurants.

Evoca

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These services just keep springing up. Evoca allows one to create, organize, share and search voice recordings. Post audio to your blog using your phone. Record family stories for posterity. Etc., etc.

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Pictures in a bubble

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This is interesting — BubbleShare. It’s a Flickr-type service, but with the added punch of allowing you to put audio alongside your pictures to create a narrated slideshow. It’s neatly done — as this demo by Wade Roush shows. This stuff just gets better and better.

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The long arm of the law

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This morning’s Observer column…

Although the established order struggled initially with the challenges posed by the net, in general it has made astonishing strides in getting the unruly beast under control. That control will never be perfect (witness the way the file-sharing genie escaped from the bottle), but the long arm of the law has had little difficulty reaching into cyberspace when it chooses to make the effort.

And although libertarians will no doubt protest, sometimes these intrusions may have beneficial effects. Those of us who want the net to serve as the Speakers’ Corner of the 21st century have to accept that speakers must take responsibility for what they say.

Even in the US, freedom of speech does not include the right to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre.

And in Britain it should not include the right to call somebody a sex offender when he is not.

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Britannica retaliates

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Remember the study in Nature that concluded Wikipedia is about as authoritative a resource as Encyclopedia Britannica (see “Wikipedia vs. Britannica Smackdown ends in carrel throwing brawl”)? Turns out it wasn’t the rigorous piece of erudition you’d expect from the world’s foremost weekly scientific journal. In fact, it was anything but that. According to Britannica, everything about the study — from its methodology to the misleading way Nature spun the story in the media — was ill-conceived. “Almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading,” Britannica’s editors wrote in an annihilative bit of deconstruction entitled “Fatally Flawed”. “Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.”

The significance of the Writely acquisitiion

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More on Google’s acquisition of Writely, the web-based processing tool, about which I wrote briefly the other day. I’ve just come on an interesting (if slightly hyperbolic) essay describing the acquisition as Microsoft’s “Pearl Harbour”! I think that’s overblown, but it’s interesting to remember that Bill Gates chose Pearl Harbour Day way back in 1993 to alert his company to the threat posed by the Internet and Netscape.

The clickthrough’s tyrannical efficiency

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Terrific post on Nicholas Carr’s Blog about what the Net is doing to newspapers. Sample:

Traditional newspapers sold bundles of content. Subscribers paid to get the bundle, and advertisers paid to have their ads in the bundle, where those readers would see them. In effect, investigative and other hard journalism was subsidized by the softer stuff – but you couldn’t really see the subsidization, so in a way it didn’t really exist. And, besides, the hard stuff contributed to the value of the overall bundle.

That whole model has been slowly unraveling for some time, but the web tears it into tiny little pieces. Literally. The web unbundles the bundle – each story becomes a separate entity that lives or dies, economically, on its own. It’s naked in the marketplace, its commercial existence meticulously measured, click by click. Advertisers, for their part, pay not to be seen by a big group of readers, but to have their ads clicked on by individual readers. They’ll go where the clickthroughs are. Clickthroughs themselves are priced individually, depending on the content they’re associated with. As for readers, they’re not exactly trained or motivated to pay to read anything online. The economic incentives created by the web model are very different from those of the old print model – and it’s economic incentives that ultimately determine business decisions.

Google buys Writely

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I’ve been using Writely for a while as an online word-processor that enables one to create documents on which colleagues can also work. Now comes the news that Google has acquired the four-person start-up that created the application. It’s just another step in the progress towards public realisation that the network, not the platform, is the computer. Or, as one of my colleagues puts it, “the PC is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet!”

More: Some useful comments on Good Morning, Silicon Valley.

The very first Web browser

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Screenshot of Tim Berners-Lee’s Next workstation screen from, I would guess, early 1990.

Update: Hmmm… James Cridland did some digging and came up with a directory listing which assigns the date 7 June 1994 to the image. This doesn’t necessarily date the screenshot, though. But if it does, then the image certainly isn’t “the very first Web browser”, as the headline on this post suggested, because Mosaic was released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in the spring of 1993 and there were certainly browsers running on Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT workstation in CERN way before that.

In any event, the first browser was a text-browser like Lynx rather than a graphics-based one like that shown in the screenshot.

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