For the occasion, Facebook launched Facebook Stories (http://stories.facebook.com/).
“Facebook is all about the individual and collective experiences of you and your friends. It’s filled with hundreds of millions of stories.
On 12th Febraury 2010, I made the following picture: at that time Facebook reached 400 million users and, if it was a country, it would have been the third country in the world. Today, 17th September 2010, it is at 500 millions. Anyway it will take some time before becoming the second largest country in the world, considering India has more than 1 billion citizens.
Techdirt reports about the paper “Is the Sky Falling on the Content Industries?” by Mark A. Lemley of Stanford Law School.
Mark makes many example of a recurrent pattern:
1. New technology
2. Legacy settled industry freaks out saying the world is ending
3. Industry flocks to DC & the courts to demand fixing
4. Turns out that the new technology actually increases the market
The examples are:
* photographs (would destroy painting),
* musical recordings (would destroy live music),
* radio (would destroy recorded music)
* cable TV (would destroy regular TV),
* photocopier (would destroy books),
* VCR (would destroy the movie industry),
* audio cassettes (would destroy music)
* MP3 player (would destroy music),
* file sharing (would destroy music),
* DVR (would destroy TV)
There is even a
Pornographers complain of a once-lucrative market flooded by amateur pornography (see Copyright Infringements in the Porn Industry); even sex, it seems, fears it can’t compete with free. But I wouldn’t list “lack of sufficient pornography” as among our larger societal problems.
All this reminded of an old post at techdirt History Repeats Itself: How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers. In short, 17th century tailors in France were beginning to make buttons out of cloth (new technology), and button makers (settled industry) start complaining. The last piece, from the book “The Worldly Philosophers” of Robert L. Heilbroner is even more astonishing
The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.
In this January 2007 (!) post, Techdirt concludes, and I totally second:
Centuries from now (hopefully much, much sooner), the actions of the RIAA, MPAA and others that match those of the weavers and button-makers of 17th century France will seem just as ridiculous.
Amazing project.
“The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs” is a twelve-volumes book. It contains all the changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War. The twelve volumes cover a five year period from December 2004 to November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.
It contains every change, from small typo fixing, to important changes up to vandalism edits such as when someone erases the whole article and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.
The author, James Bridle, explains on his blog that:
In a world obsessed with “facts”, a more nuanced comprehension of historical process would enable us to better weigh truth, whether it concerns the evidence for going to war, the proliferation of damaging conspiracy theories, the polarisation of debate on climate change, or so many other issues. This sounds utopian, and it is. But I do believe that we’re building systems that allow us to do this better, and one of our responsibilities should be to design and architect those systems to make this explicit, and to educate.
One of the ways to do this might be to talk more not only about history, but about historiography. History not as a set of facts, but as a process, and one in which, whether we agree or not with the writers, our own opinions and biases are always to be challenged.
Wikipedia (…) is not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.
As is my wont, I made a book to illustrate this. Physical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples’ attention on.
and concludes with
And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future.
George Orwell said “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” Now, for the first time in history, we have the possibility of controlling present, past and future together, thanks to Wikipedia.
(Credits: I discovered the project via an email by Dror Kamir in the very interesting mailing list of Critical Point of View (CPOV) Wikipedia Research Initiative (Critical Point Of View is a clever play with one of the pillar of Wikipedia that is Neutral Point Of View)
Two images (released under Creative Commons) of the book:
Top 50 Editors in Feminism articles in Wikipedia and their editing patterns visualized in time (from 2002 up to 2009).
The image is from “The Feminist Critique: Mapping Controversy on Wikipedia” (pdf), a report prepared by Morgan Currie for the new media masters program at the University of Amsterdam. The document is 49 pages but don’t be afraid: it is very interesting and the last 20 pages or so are just a copy and paste of raw data and tables used for the report.
The image embedded above is just one of the many thought-provoking images and graphs.
All the scripts used for producing the report and the graphs are available as free software thanks to Papyromancer who wrote the software and released it on github. Great!
Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. It is a critique of data mining, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current future world where digital histories are as important, than oral histories, and computation methods of condensing our digital traces are largely opaque and socially ignorant..
Warning: this webpage loads many processor-intensive animations. It might break your browser and probably you will have to close browser window (tab) after use.
The first visualization is made by Erik Zachte and available at stats.wikimedia.org.
The animation (embedded below) shows 4 aspects of the development of different Wikipedias in different languages (en, it, fr, …): X-axis: Age of a project, Y-axis: Number of articles per project, Circle size: Number of editors per project, Color: Maturity of content (blue=mostly stubs, violet=mostly larger articles)
Interactive version, all projects (requires Firefox 3+, Safari 4+ or Chrome)
Static version, Wikipedia only (8 Mb Flash)
The other 3 visualisations are made by Matt Ryal with JavaScript (Processing.js and RaphaëlJs). They are about activity on wiki and blogs of Atlassian’s Extranet.
I embed them here but you can check Matt’s post for more details and better visualization.
Activity — a rippling visualisation of comment activity on the wiki. Based loosely on the Apple Arabesque screensaver.
Comments — a falling bar-graph visualisation of comments by blogpost. Based very much on a Flash visualisation by Digg, but reimplemented in JS (this is about blog and not wiki).
Contributors — a tree graph visualisation linking commenters and blog post authors. (this is about blog and not wiki)
Inspiring presentation on KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).
It is made by Dan Ward and, since he licensed it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, I embed it here. Enjoy!
In 2008, Google opened a project competing with Wikipedia: Knol. The project at January 2009 had grown to 100,000 articles, something it is hard to define a success. Since then it seems the attitude of Google towards Wikipedia have changed a bit, more like “Ok, you (Wikipedia) can become the de facto monopolist in the user-generated creation of knowledge, we have other and more challenging competitors to defeat now, we will incorporate you later on down the way”.
Two example of this new attitude (according to my view of course) are the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge and the Health Speaks Wikipedia pilot project.
The Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge was a challenge launched in November 2009 by Google. The task was to translate English Wikipedia articles into Kiswahili or to write Wikipedia articles from scratch. Participants received prizes such as laptops, mobile phones, prepaid internet access modems, Google T-shirts. Google stated goal: “We hope to make the online experience richer and more relevant for 100 million African users who speak Kiswahili.”
Nearly all of them are gone now and left a lot of articles which often are not really state of the art formally and also linguistically … they don’t care because they were there for laptops and other prizes (no need to be rude, but it hurts me pretty bad).
An article in New York Times is similarly not exalted. The last paragraphs of the article comments on Google-generated content in Wikipedias in languages of India.
However, the surge in content created by Google’s project to improve these sites still needs work, according some local site administrators. For example the Wikipedia in Tamil – one of the underrepresented South Asian languages – the entries covered “too many American pop stars and Hindi movies, which Tamils may not need as a priority.” There was also sloppiness in language and coding.
Despite these concerns, Tamil Wikipedia plans on working with Google to continue the additions. The Bengali Wikipedia, however, took greater umbrage and simply deleted the Google-generated content. The Bengali Wikipedians explained that the material simply did not meet their standards.
The Health Speaks Wikipedia pilot project was announced yesterday and is focused on increasing the quantity and quality of online health information in languages spoken in developing countries. They started a pilot project to support community-based, crowd-sourced translation of health information from English Wikipedias into Arabic, Hindi and Swahili Wikipedias.
They have chosen hundreds of good quality English language health articles from Wikipedia that they hope will be translated with the assistance of Google Translator Toolkit, made locally relevant, reviewed and then published to the corresponding local language Wikipedia site. They have also funded the professional translation of a small subset of these articles. And they are additionally providing a donation incentive to encourage community translators to participate. For the first 60 days, they will donate 3 cents (US) for each English word translated to the Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357, the Public Health Foundation of India and the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) for the pilots in Arabic, Hindi and Swahili, respectively, up to $50,000 each. This means that community translators will help their friends and neighbors access quality health information in a local language, while also supporting a local non-profit organization working in health or health education.
As dating interactions have moved from the privacy of bars and social gatherings to the digital world of websites and e-mails, they are generating an unprecedented trove of data about how the initial phases of romance unfold. Most research is done on OkCupid, that now publishes a blog, OKTrends, that delves into its database of more than 1 million users to analyze their interactions.
Some findings reported in the article:
Men get more responses from women if they don’t smile in their profile pictures, and women find most men below average in attractiveness — but write to them anyway.
A man needs to make several extra tens of thousands of dollars to compensate for being an inch shorter, and that race matters more than people admit.
The company found that while men rate women’s attractiveness in an even curve — most women being average — two-thirds of men’s messages go to the best-looking third of the women. Women, on the other hand, are more harsh on men, rating the majority as below average, but are more likely than men to send messages to people they don’t find attractive.
In their online profiles, for instance, all users add an average of two inches to their height and a 20 percent raise in salary.
The data debunk some dating myths. In analyzing 7,000 user photos, the company found that women get more male attention when they flirt into the camera or smile, while men, surprisingly, did better when they looked away from the camera and didn’t smile. Even more surprising, not showing their face in their photos didn’t affect the number of messages users received.
Can you convince people to recycle glass bottles? To take the stairs instead of the escalator? To throw rubbish in the bin instead of onto the floor?
It seems so … How? With FUN!
The fun theory, a (clever) initiative by Volkswagen.
