Over at Loomware Mark Leggott has linked to a fascinating look at the evolution of a Wikipedia article as demonstrated by John Udell. Using the heavy metal umlaut entry, he shows how certain threads go through life cycles, how vandalism is swiftly corrected and the way in which the famous Wikipedia self-correcting NPOV mechanism works in practice.
In fall 2002, the Bush administration stepped up a campaign to publicize the dangers of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. At the center of the campaign was an argument that Saddam’s Iraq was an “urgent” threat because of its “massive stockpile of biological weapons … thousands of tons of chemical agents,” the possibility that “it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year,” and “Saddam Hussein’s links to international terrorist groups.” To a nation still recovering from the shock of the 9/11 attacks, news that such a powerful enemy was poised to deliver an even more powerful blow rallied many behind the President’s call to action.
However, during this same time, a group of researchers, using the tools created in the previous decades’ technological and communication revolution, came up with a very different image of Iraq, one that proved far more accurate than the one painted above by the President. While disorganized and likely still not fully aware of the larger system in which they participated, these citizens worked together to understand the real state of Iraq’s military. The key to their success was the use of the intelligence discipline that is least well-known to the public, but most crucial in any intelligence agency: open source intelligence.
This is a quote from a draft of a paper I did about a year ago on citizen use of public resources to reveal an extremely accurate image of Iraq’s weapons programs before the Iraq War. While clouded by the political shit-fest of the election, the success in this area shouldn’t go unnoticed. In particular, information professionals of all kinds should recognize that it represented a fundamental shift in citizen consumption of information. The hype surrounding the political blog fad has focused most people on just one small part of the online information explosion leading up to the war, so I hope to expand on this subject in coming months.
Note, too, that this subject line is about the information collection and processing methods, not the politics.
Google is now strongly backing developers and open source with Google Code. Nice to see that the code is also hosted on SourceForge. There’s also an Updates from code.google.com blog over at blogger.
A book locating/lending phenomenon known as the “Dewey Decimal System” — enabling users to get access to copyrighted text for free — has sent shockwaves through a panicked publishing industry.
“Why would anyone pay for a book once it’s accessible for free?!” - Publisher’s spokesman Brent Aullett
What it does:
- removes ads on most Google pages
- fixes fonts on most Google pages
- Google web search:
- adds links to other search sites (”Try your search on…”)
- in news results, adds links to other news sites
- in movie results, adds links to other movie sites
- in weather results, adds links to other weather sites
- in product results, adds links to other product sites
- Google image search:
- adds links to other image/photo/art sites
- Google News:
- adds links to other news sites
- Froogle:
- adds links to other product sites
- Google Print:
- Removes image copying restrictions
- adds links to other book sites
- Google Toolbar Firefox page:
- adds links to other Firefox-friendly toolbars
Get it here
seen on BB
Here’s a collection of links to Doctorow DRM/Web 2.0 stuff from Boing Boing over the past few days.
The “DRM hypothesis” is that the public is dishonest, and will do dishonest things with cultural material if given the chance. DRM is deployed in order to force dishonest customers to behave honestly and buy media and to limit their activities to those that are authorized by rightsholders.
For this to work, it must be impossible for a potential customer for media to locate a non-DRM copy of their chosen movies, books, games or music. If a dishonest customer for an ebook can download an un-restricted version of a book that is otherwise available in a restricted DRM format, she surely will.
But DRM is simply not very good at doing this job. Because DRM is based on “security through obscurity” — that is, in hiding from a user the way that it works — it is inevitably broken in short order and the materials that it covers are put on the Internet where anyone can download them.
Indeed, there has never been a single piece of DRM-restricted media that can’t be downloaded from the Internet today. In more than a decade of extensive use, DRM has never once accomplished its goal.
TangognaT suggests some good online resources for librarians.
Catalogablog notes that the Open WorldCat deep linking tutorial has been updated. By setting your library up in the system, users will be able to see your holdings when a Yahoo! or Google search matches something in the WorldCat database. See the OCLC Open WorldCat page for more info.
The NYTimes ran an article today discussing the future of the online newspaper model. There has been quite a bit of criticism of the way online news sites give free access to current news and either make users pay for archives or not have them complete (or not have archives at all). I’m certainly no fan of the WSJ pay for everything model, either. The Times article breaks down how some of these work and how the newspapers look at everything.
Also interesting:
The New York Times on the Web, which is owned by The New York Times Company, has been considering charging for years and is expected to make an announcement soon about its plans.
One other suggestion I have: local news papers need to prominently display what city and state/province and country they are from. The whole point of WWW is that it is ‘World Wide.’ Don’t they realize that people from all over the world are going to eventually come to their site to read a story? I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve gone to a local news site and couldn’t or had to work to find out where in the world it was from.
This is PSA for the non-programmers:
It’s pretty often that I’m on a web page and want to know when it was last modified in order to see if the info is out of date. By typing this command into the address bar when you are on a page or saving it as a bookmark and hitting the bookmark, you will get an alert that tells you the modification date on the document. It does not work properly on dynamically generated pages like those of any CMS, including this blog. However, it does come in handy often enough that it’s very useful, particularly since many people do not include the modification date on their pages.
I don’t have many of the same complaints a lot of folks have about Perl. It’s a powerful language that’s simple to use once you have the basics down and is full of shortcuts that allows for a lot of creativity. However, I’ve really wanted to look at Python for a while, largely because it seems more suited for larger projects in an organization with turnover. Is that the case? That’s what I aim to find out. An old Linux Journal article from Eric Raymond is what finally convinced me to sit down and focus on it. Good thing I downloaded Dive into Python months ago when it first got put online, because for some reason I can’t get into the site. Other places to learn are the Python docs site or this nice programming 101 level online book at ibiblio.
Anyway, I’ll post my thoughts as I learn more…
Google’s addition of customization features to Google News follows this pattern they are developing of offering really cool, simple and user-friendly web apps. It works great and makes the service much more powerful. I was concerned about how to get my customizations into Firefox from Safari and to my PC, but I see they’ve included a URL you can use to transfer it. Not ideal, but it’s nice that they made it work even without using profiles.
From the BBC:
Police in Mexico City, one of the most crime-ridden capitals in the world, have been told they must read at least one book a month or forfeit promotion…If they do not read at least one a month, they lose their chance of being promoted…The policemen will be regularly tested to make sure they have read the books they name.
- via BB
Barbara Fister makes a number of great points in this Library Issues article. On online books:
Evidence suggests people will pay for the convenience of reading sustained texts offline. After all, the 9/11 Commission’s report became a bestseller even though it was available for free on the Web. The National Academies Press, which makes the full text of their books available online, has conducted a study that supports the argument that free, online browsing does not hurt sales; it may even create new opportunities to “unbundle” book content and create new revenue streams.
I’ll just assume that, like me, you are already sick of the whole ebook debate, but the fact remains that books are fantastic and I see no signs of them going anywhere. Journals, sure, but not books. I think she’s right on about the ebook concern just being a modern manifestation of an old fear:
We’ve had mixed emotions about having too much information since Biblical time; the Book of Ecclesiastes complains “of the making many books there is no end.” With the advent of the printing press, much uneasiness was caused by the availability of so much unregulated textual production. “One of the diseases of the age is the multiplicity of books,” Elizabethan-era writer Barnabe Rich grumbled. “They doth so overcharge to [the] world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the world.”
Honestly, I don’t totally understand the fear of increased information access. It’s rather telling that most librarians who, like ALA prez-elect Gorman, openly complain about a dumbing down tend to advocate stagnation rather than encourage experimentation and development of new, innovative tools for easily accessing information in the way people would like to. While the current vast mess of disconnected information is no replacement for knowledge, it’s rather short-sighted to ignore that many of today’s problems will be solved by tomorrow’s tools. Believing that the future will consist of ignorant masses intellectually drunk on snippets of disparate information is just plain unrealistic. More folks interested in information naturally results in more folks interested in doing the information thing correctly.
I’ve mentioned before that the evolution of the library as a place both necessary and a great opportunity, but the evolution of the library as a web app is also vital. I have a hard time believing that what’s standing in the way of library technological innovation is simply a staffing problem and low pay. From what I’ve seen, it seems to have more to do with the sluggishness in making it a priority and the resistance of librarians to give up control.
Tied into all of this is a problem touched on in the Library Issues article: Google still doesn’t have a lot of options or tools that are necessary for serious research. It’s one of the many gaping holes.
University of Texas’ Dennis Dillon wrote this short article in the December Chronical of Higher Education discussing the problems libraries face in an electronic future. As he points out, journal subscriptions are skyrocketing while simultaneously growing in number and becoming more specialized, creating a situation where libraries may be forced to become more specialized themselves. As Mad Librarian notes, what he’s describing is the Serials Crisis, which, combined with Google’s torrent of project announcements, leads some to believe that books are on the way out. However, as Dillon points out,
Here are the certainties: People will continue to write books, people will continue to read books, and the academic-publishing process needs to be reformed so that we can continue to meet our goal of scholarly communication in an economically sustainable way.
Anyway, check out the whole article. It’s a fun take on the whole issue.
Don’t mess with the librarians at Burlington Library.
A Burlington, Washington man has been ordered to pay a library $150 and do community service after he was arrested for overdue library books.
The arrest was for failure to appear before a judge to answer charges of “Detaining Property.” The property was library books the man had checked out last July.
[…]
“After months of dealing with this we sent a letter from the police chief giving them one last chance.” said Librarian Christine Perkins. “And warning if they do not respond they will be invited to talk to a judge about it.”
[…]
The library insists no one wanted to arrest anyone, but the librarian suspects the arrest could have an upside. “Well, I’m interested to see if we get a lot of books turned in in the next week or so.”
from KOMO News
Just a quick pointer to the O’Reilly History of Programming Languages poster, the O’Reilly language poster wiki, and the original creator’s site for it.
How cool is that? Reviews, hours, phone, etc. This thing is starting to save me so much time. Internet OS indeed…
As communities start understanding the importance of providing free Wi-Fi, we are beginning to see resistance from legislators and industry.
Telecommunications companies have taken notice as cities, nonprofit organizations and startup companies have begun using these technologies to offer free or steeply reduced Internet access, said Bill Gurley, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Benchmark Capital who closely follows the issue.
Legislators in a dozen states, including Texas, have filed bills to remove competition for telecommunications companies, he said. Most are pending, but an Indiana effort failed, while a similar law in Pennsylvania passed, although it omitted Philadelphia because of that city’s existing efforts.
“These are very disruptive, low-cost technologies, and it’s not in the incumbent telecommunication companies’ best interest to embrace them,” Gurley said. “But these are technologies that can be very beneficial to communities.”
NOW on PBS recently had a show on it and they have a good run-down of the arguments for and against posted online. For more info, see the Slashdot discussion and the Lessig podcast posted to Wired the other day.
UPDATE: FCC commissioner Michael Copps speaks out in favor of municipal WiFi:
If we are going to fix the Universal Service system, which is predicated on the idea that everybody should have access to comparable communications at comparable and reasonable prices, we have to ask, is our advanced telecommunications part of that or not? Is broadband a part of that or not? So before we start fixing every little problem with universal service I think we ought to have some kind of a philosophical or national purpose or national objective discussion about where does broadband fit in.
I think we may be probably the only industrial country on the face of God’s green earth that doesn’t have a national plan for broadband deployment.
And when I talk about central-infrastructure challenge, you know it seems like each generation faces an infrastructure challenge. Before the Civil War, we had infrastructure challenges and building internal improvements of highways and turnpikes and canals. After the Civil War, it was building transcontinental railroads. With the Eisenhower years, we built the national highway system. I think our (challenge) is broadband.
Here’s a PDF link to the EFF brief. As quoted on Copyfight, Eben Moglen lays it out wonderfully:
At the heart of Petitioners’ argument is an arrogant and unreasonable claim–even if made to the legislature empowered to determine such a general issue of social policy–that the Internet must be designed for the convenience of their business model, and to the extent that its design reflects other concerns, the Internet should be illegal.
Petitioners’ view of what constitutes the foundation of copyright law in the digital age is as notable for its carefully-assumed air of technical naivete as for the audacity with which it identifies their financial interest with the purpose of the entire legal regime.
Despite petitioners’ apocalyptic rhetoric, this case follows a familiar pattern in the history of copyright: incumbent rights-holders have often objected to new technologies of distribution that force innovation on the understandably reluctant monopolist.
The EFF also has a good comparison between the Grokster and Betamax cases.