Ross Mayfield's Weblog

The Rose Bowl Wiki Wednesday

January's Wiki Wednesday coincides with the Rose Bowl (USC vs. Texas).  For Palo Alto we are projecting the game and have a keg from Gordon Beirsche.  Come on by for a weird mix of tech and sports.

The Business Blogging 500, Wiki Powered

Chris Anderson (Wired/Long Tail Blog) kicks off an open research project:

Short Form: In collaboration with Socialtext, we've created a wiki that tracks which of the Fortune 500 is blogging. Check it out here. 

Jason Calacanis already did by contributing Time Warner Inc (he should know), increasing the count to 14 of the Fortune 500, or 3%:

Blogging F500 Company	Sample Blog
Amazon.com Inc.	Amazon Web Services Blog
Avaya Inc.	2006 FIFA World Cup Blog
Avon Products, Inc.	Beauty Dish
Cisco Systems, Inc.	Cisco High Tech Policy Blog
Dell, Inc	Linux Engineering
Electronic Data Systems	EDS' Next Big Thing Blog
Ford Motor Company	2005 Mustang Blog
General Motors Corporation	FastLane Blog
Hewlett-Packard Company	HP Blogs
Microsoft Corporation	MSDN's Microsoft Blogs
Motorola Inc	Motoblog: 4 bloggers & a phone
Oracle Corporation	OraBlogs
Sprint	Things That Make You Go Wireless
Sun Microsystems Inc	Jonathan Schwartz
Texas Instruments	Video 360 Blog
Time Warner Inc	AOL Blogs
The Boeing Company	Randy's Journal

Chris (and Doc) may be on to something about observing the correlation between F500 blogging and stock performance.  But at the least, this can serve as a renewable resource for informing social software adoption.

My Wikipedia Policy

I'm not sure that Scoble has the right idea about pledging not to edit their own Wikpedia page.  Wired News' latest celebrity flap points out:

In fact, Wikipedia's own guidelines caution against editing your own bio as it "can open the door to rather immature behavior and loss of dignity."

It's actually a proposed policy or guideline, and one I would vote against.  I do think it is good advice, what you could call media training, to consider that:

• When you participate on your own page, you open yourself up to debate
• What edits you make could come back to haunt you
• Don't be an idiot, or it could go on your semi-permanent record

However, several reasons come to mind for why people should edit their own pages:

• You probably have a lot of expertise about yourself and a copy of your resume
• If enough attention is given to your page, your bias will be countered
• The policy would be near impossible to enforce
• It would be easy to obey the policy, but skirt the intent, by getting your friends to edit for you

At the very least, make the practice of watching your page and use your best judgement.  For the record, I added some facts a while ago to my Wikipedia page, we will see if they remain.

See Also: Tim Bray

Crazy Ass Projections

I wouldn't call them facts, but here they are:

Blogs:

Number of blogs worldwide in 2005:
• 22 million

Number of blogs worldwide in 2010:
• Approaching 1 billion

RFID

Price-per-unit that RFID chips need to reach in order to ignite massive deployment of RFID chips:
• $.05 (the “magic nickel” according to Sclavos)

TV

U.S. household use of Tivo and Tivo-like devices in 2005:
• 3%

Projected U.S. household use of Tivo and Tivo-like devices in 2010:
• 70%

Percent of TV ads skipped by users of Tivo and Tivo-like devices:
• 79%

What may be reasonable is 1B people projecting an identity online in 2005 and blogs will have an entirely different buzzword encapsulating them.

Capitalized Punishment

Unfortunately a journalist from the Times Online in the UK took a comment off of Mark Pincus' blog that was full of hate speech on the Tookie Termination and attributed it to him.  I really feel for Mark.  It's not just bad journalism or understanding the difference between a blog post and a comment.  They should know that Mark is against capital punishment -- and rarely capitalizes his posts.

The Nature of Wikipedia and Britannica

Recent events may provide cause for setting the differences, or lack thereof, between Wikipedia and Brittanica as well as Wikipedia and Open Source. A peer review of 42 articles in Wikipedia and Brittannica shows equal serious errors and a minor difference in minor errors:

Yet Nature's investigation suggests that Britannica's advantage may not be great, at least when it comes to science entries. In the study, entries were chosen from the websites of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica on a broad range of scientific disciplines and sent to a relevant expert for peer review. Each reviewer examined the entry on a single subject from the two encyclopaedias; they were not told which article came from which encyclopaedia. A total of 42 usable reviews were returned out of 50 sent out, and were then examined by Nature's news team.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.

A key difference is the speed of update for Wikipedia not only helps for correction, but means it is some thinig different -- something that doesn't presently claim authoritativeness:

But Michael Twidale, an information scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that Wikipedia's strongest suit is the speed at which it can updated, a factor not considered by Nature's reviewers.

"People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica," Twidale adds. "Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one."

The dynamic nature of Wikipedia does present challenges for participants and results in a different product.  There are plans to create a stable branch (basically tagging a revision as reviewed, although review processes are still experimental, while letting users continue to edit new revisions), which would result in a truely comparable product and support print versions.

My hope is the Nature article provides a proof point to at least simplify the neverending debate of quality in Wikipedia.  But before taking a break (the interesting stuff isn't metaphysical debates, but understanding the social practices that make Wikipedia work) from the disconnected-meta excersize of blogging about Wikipedia (albeit a hair above the disconnect of criticizing an Article without submitting changes), let me take on one last issue. 

The model of a stable branch is an approach borrowed from open source software development.  Recently, Cnet posted a News Analysis in search of a problem that came across as an opinion piece by the author.  The premise was that Wikipedia is often labeled as open source and the label was factually innacurate.  Open source practices have project managers as gatekeepers for quality, while Wikipedia offloads this responsibility to an open group.  A bunch of open source experts were rounded up to explain that, some speculated in agreement with the author that this may be the cause of quality issues in Wikipedia.  While the piece is an interesting read, as the CEO of a commercial open source wiki company (more critically, I am a student of the topic), I can point out some significant flaws:

• Wikis do not require centralized project management because the work product is different.  Coding software is an act of vertical information assembly, marked by the dependencies of contributions.  By contrast, Wikipedia is horizontal information assembly without dependencies.  It should be celebrated that the lack of central project management is a cause for the growth and success of the project.
• Having a central project manager for Wikipedia would also be complicated because of the lack of objective measures.  From the article: "With software, you get the benefit of there being some objective measure of a change," said Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Software Project. "It's not a question of aesthetics. Does this fix the bug people have noticed? Does it speed up performance?"
• Wikis and Open Source share the critical attribute of The Right to Fork
• Wikis and Open Source enable anyone to contribute, but with implicit reputation giving greater weight to different contributions.  Even in Wikipedia, there is authority of participants.
• Wikis and Open Source share a common model of Commons-based Peer Production.

The definition of what is Open Source is often debated and is more likely to be settled on a wiki page than here or in the News Analysis.  Here is an unpublished chapter in wiki format on Open Source Dynamics of Wiki Practices if you would like to learn, and possibly contribute, more.

Akimbo Abimbo and Video Blogs

Akimbo is an IPTV service for video and subscription on demand that is as simple to use as Tivo.  To get content to your couch, you use your existing broadband connection (I plugged in a WiFi USB keychain and was downloading in minutes) and take advantage of 150 hours of storage. You can manage downloads with a Tivo-like interface as well as a web-browser (can't watch your content over the web, yet).

VoD has been a dream of the cable TV industry for years, and it just happened without them, almost.  Akimbo is a relatively new network that has to contend with IP regimes that have vertically integrated.  Content is relatively sparse with about 400 channels (RSS feed for what's new) -- with two notable exceptions.

Porn.  Like all great new communications technologies, porn portends future.  In this case, there are gobs of it, perhaps more than any content type -- but it does come with parental controls.  My wife and I jokingly call it the Abimbo.

Video Blogs.  Okay, this is where it gets interesting.  Today there are only four video blogs on Akimbo, but Rocketboom and Clint Sharp are pretty cool.  Subscribing to them are dead simple -- and video is still best watched on the couch. When I started seeing my friends on some of Clint's episodes I think I saw the future.  With great independent content today, the launch of the video iPod with iTunes and new Flickr-for-video startups -- there will be a wealth of video blog content next year (more on that later).  Akimbo is about to open the network -- Video bloggers will be able to submit a registered RSS feed with enclosures to get their clips on the network -- which will blow the doors wide open.

Until this happens, the utility is limited and you could end up with a big bill for premium downloads (not just porn). It does provide a good entertainment alternative, but they are stuck playing MPAA wargames.  But the enticement today is a holiday special for $69 for the player (normally $199).  The subscription service runs on the player or the Windows Media Center for $9.99 monthly or $199 lifetime.

Full disclosure: I got a player and one year subscription for free as part of the Silicon Valley 100.

live evil

While Yahoo! may be the new evil, Microsoft is the live evil.

While researching the nature of evil, I came across this:

68.23.45.217: "Are you evil?"
Jimbo Wales: "Indeed."
68.23.45.217: "Is Wikipedia evil?"
Jimbo Wales: "It should go without saying."
68.23.45.217: "Is Wikimedia Foundation evil?"
Jimbo Wales: "Worse than that, actually."
68.23.45.217: "Are you a Todo?"
Jimbo Wales: "Only on Tuesdays."

There you have it. 

However, the one thing I do know about being evil is that you can't simply be evil, people need to believe you are evil.  And odds are, beliefs about what is evil will change.  Therefore, Larry and Sergey's credo of "don't be evil" may be less about being bad and more about being static.  It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy, unless you believe that religion is marketing.

Happy Wednesday.

Structured Blogging

Structured Blogging is described by Marc Canter as a way to gain structure without people having to look at XML.  Today at Syndicate they released an open source component to structure as microformats in microcontent within social software apps. It currently works with Wordpress and Moveable Type.

Socialtext is supporting this ad hoc standards effort alongside 40 or so great companies. These collaborative initiatives, harkening back to the social software alliance, are perhaps the greatest reason for innovation in social software.

My personal take is this bottom-up approach won't degrade into Semantic Fuzz.  But only a subset of users will fill in forms to contribute metadata (readers are better at it than writers, and they are better at writing in an unstructured way and freeform tagging than the constraints of a form).  The real test is if new innovations provide a strong enough incentive for user contributions at the cost of a form.

Syndicate San Francisco

I'm playing booth babe today at the Syndicate conference in San Francisco.  Here's the wiki, naturally.  Doc blogged his keynote here.  Quote of the day so far was from Liz Lawley: "I'm headed upstairs to help my kids level up."

Hot Tech, Cold Country

Really nice article in the NY Times today about tech startups in Estonia. 

Quotes all my friends and colleagues.  Rightly centers on the key question of how to be more than a flash in the pan.  My guess is yes, with a second billion dollar IPO lined up after Skype, if they encougage more skilled immigration.  Here's more on Estonia if you are interested.

UPDATE: Hey Estonians, you currently have a poor rating here.

No Feed is an Island

Remember my lazyweb request for tastebuds to leverage reader tags instead of author categories for this blog?  Well, Feedburner has gone and done it, within the feed with FeedFlare.  Subscribers to this blog can see the result at the bottom of each post.

Hmm... now give us an API to create and share flare extensions... and some design-customizable javascript to display the very same information in the bottom of our posts.

Yahoo is the New Evil

You heard it here first.

wikilaw

A new and valuable wiki community launched today:

Wikilaw's goal is to build the largest open-content legal resource in the world. To accomplish this goal, Wikilaw needs your help! We encourage all law professors, practitioners, and students to share their knowledge.

Currently, there are roughly 1,000,000 lawyers in the United States. If every lawyer in America contributed a fraction of their legal knowledge to this site, Wikilaw would become one of the largest libraries of legal information in the world.

That is, until they start suing each other.

[via Lessig]

Tagopoly

Yahoo acquired del.icio.us.  Congrats Joshua!

Wonder what was the price per tag.  What this really means is that Yahoo Social Search is a serious alternative for everyday use.

More: Zawodny, the VC, TechCrunch, Om digs it,  Rafat

UPDATE:  Let me explain the above statement.

Yahoo Social Search always held promise of more relevant, useful and fun search.  Just one problem.  Not only did I have to use it for it to be useful, so did my friends.  Now, with the del.icio.us acquisition, my online social network does.  Then consider the high-level metadata they have with del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming and more to come; and how they leverage it to enhance search overall.  That is, of course, if they respect the social contact with the community and continue the process of opening (they are far from done). 

In other words, because of this move, Yahoo may become my primary search engine.  This monopoly game is getting interesting.

My bet for the next acquisition?  Feedburner. 

Attention Arbitrage

My first corporate job was testing video games at Activision.  Every now and then I would be caught playing games that were already tested.  Now I find that both the gig and hobby have been outsourced to China, and with the time I've put into WoW, I've thought of tapping into this hidden economy.

"It's unimaginable how big this is," says Chen Yu, 27, who employs 20 full-time gamers here in Fuzhou. "They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers."

I'm suprised Steve Gillmor isn't sniffing out that the future of attention is being played out in these economies.  As Edward Castronova says: "The cost of someone's time is much bigger in America than in China."  Now I'm thinking of outsourcing my email time to an offshore administrative assistant.

Disturbing trend, yes.  Fun stuff, indeed.

Freedom of Anonymous Speech

Here's a scenario for you to consider on Wiki Wednesday.

Assume that John Seigenthaler gets what he wants from his criticism of Wikipedia.  He very well may gain congressional hearings on anonymity.  Purportedly in comments to a post by Larry Sanger that begs the question, his intent is to have the private sector regulate anonymity on the net.

The way he described it, you could shift the burden by changing the law so that Internet Service Providers would evaluate the plaintiff's evidence, and decide themselves whether revealing the customer's identity might be appropriate. If the decision is yes, at that point the ISP notifies the customer, who is given the opportunity to initiate legal proceedings to enjoin the ISP from revealing his identity.

Given the consolidation of telecom, this would empower a handful of ISPs, as in 5, to be judge and jury for revealing identity.  Anonymity is a critical facet of society, and it's value is more than whistle-blowing.  I wouldn't call it a right, but would call it a feature of the virtual and real worlds (we don't walk around with name-tags).  Regardless of how you value anonymity, you should agree that this would:

1. create undue costs for ISPs,
2. privatize governance and enforcement,
3. create undue legal costs for consumers, which
4. could lead to infringements on civil liberties, because
5. customers would be guilty until proven innocent.

Now, if the ISP or legal action revealed the libelous party it would resolve Seigenthaler's complaint against Wikipedia. 

Beyond this attempt to weaken anonymity on the Net, Wikipedia's open nature is also under attack.  Adam Curry edited podcasting history in his favor.  Big deal.  It's a wiki, just edit it if you disagree and let the community's practice work over time.

Consider regulating against graffiti.  You have two options:

• Guard every wall in town to prevent the infraction from occurring
• Paint over infractions and enforce the law by chasing down perpetrators

The former is not just prohibitively expensive, it kills creativity and culture.  The later is the status quo and generally works, especially where communities flourish.

So what would have Wikipedia do?  Lock down contributions through a fact checking process with rigid policy?  Or let people contribute, leverage revision history and let the group revert infractions.

Social media is disruptive.  The role of regulation significantly impacts how society will manage transition.  Today much of media is regulated through complaints (e.g. indecency).  It only takes one horror story for us to loose freedom of anonymous speech.  The easiest and most dangerous way to curb social media is to have it conform to mainstream models.

UPDATE: Cnet has a pretty good article on the liability reform sought by Seigenthaler, the first argument I made.  Mitch Ratcliffe takes issue with my second argument, about how a wiki works and how best to regulate it.  Mitch, you keep trying to fit Wikipedia into your model of how an encyclopedia should be instead of recognizing how it is different.  A print version of Wikipedia should have an editorial process bolted on to emergent practice, as it is a comparable product, frozen in time.  But instead, the evolving nature of Wikipedia needs to be recognized and celebrated for what it is.  Help people understand what it is, not what it is not.

FURTHER: Doc Searls on the first argument, "Identity without anonymity is like math without zero."

Critical Apps

There are some good conversations about uptime and scalability of Web 2.0 apps, but issue boils down to business planning and who your customers are.  There are some applications (like Socialtext) of the current generation that have become critical.  Like any company servicing the enterprise, we have guarantees to meet.

I just wanted to make this point in part to recognize the hard, and sometimes unglamorous, work of my team.

Nokia N90

Nokia sent me a shinny new N90 in hopes that I would blog about it.  It worked because I really like it. While it looks like an electric razor at first, this Transformer is more than meets the eye.  It does three things really well:

1. It's a phone -- a form factor that actually feels like one and doesn't require tweezers and chopsticks to operate.  You open it up and it rests comfortably on your sholder, which is helpful until they invent the third hand.  Actually, they kinda did.  Like speaking into a dictator, you cue the voice recognition for your contact list without opening it and it operates as a speaker phone.
2. It's a camera -- cameraphones are used for snapshots, so I judge them with three criteria:
   1. Lag: what matters most is the time from deciding to capture the moment until when you can, like shutter lag in a conventional camera.  With the N90, you swivel the lens barrel and it's ready to take a picture without opening the phone.
   2. Optics: until they invent flat liquid lenses, there is a serious tradeoff between phone depth and optical quality.  The Carl Zeiss Tessar 2.95/5.5 Autofocus 2 Megapixel is given ample room.
   3. Send: fastest path to Flickr wins.  It's a one thumb operation with 10 clicks, but relatively easy.
      
3. It's a video camera -- With a single twist the phone transforms into a video camera.  With 352 x 288 resolution you get half of your average video camera.  Vlogging is going to come into it's own in 2006 thanks to these mobile devices, the video iPod and iTunes, IPTV like Akimbo and forthcoming Flickr for video plays. Unfortunately it's not 2006, Lifeblog and Typepad do not support Mac users, so I can't publish and remix with ease, yet.

The N90 does one thing really poorly, text, which means I'm not about to give up my Treo 650, the best phone for mobile messaging.  As a frequent business traveler I need access to email, SMS and calendaring.  No mobile device should seek to do everything, and the N90 does playful sharing really well.  At $700, it better.

Growing Pains for Wikipedia

Growing pains for Wikipedia:

Thus, to avoid future problems, Wales plans to bar anonymous users from creating new articles; only registered members will be able to do so. That change will go into effect Monday, he said, adding that anonymous users will still be able to edit existing entries.

Seems like a reasonable change.  Anonymity matters for first time users to get a wiki experience with Permission to Participate, but creating a new page is not for the novice.  It also matters for community members that contribute to politicized topics as many have received death threats, but they use pseudonyms.  There is a need for a whistleblower wiki, but perhaps not for an encyclopedia.  I'm sure this change in code is well considered, but hope it isn't the first step in a slippery slope.

These days I'm less interested in debates on Wikipedia's authority, and more interested in models to increase media literacy.

Wiki Wednesday

It's that time of the month.  Socialtext is hosting Wiki Wednesday in a city near you.  Join me in Palo Alto from 6 to 9 pm, or others in other cities (Pete Kaminski happens to be in London on his way back from Les Blogs, and Taiwan is happening!).

Why I'm not blogging

Work is nice and busy, but really it's something else.  Two weeks without a cigarette.  I'm not prepared to really blog about that yet, but it's simply amazing how much I used to blog and smoke at the same time.