Wikilessons

Maybe the biggest revolution is the change in the idea of what knowing a fact is or what knowledge is. These are no longer things to be held in one person's head.
Anyone stumble onto this?

Written by some guy like you

But what's wrong with that?
A lot of people let that intimidate them.

OK, let's begin with the Colbert video.


Kasey notices that Wikipedia sometimes has a very high opinion of itself.

MattD wonders what Wikipedia considers "a source."
Jess jumped right in there and got into a revert fight.

Sheila wonders why WP is a little bit hard to use.

M. Fitz became a wiki-expert on Marlborough, CT. and Courtney worked on the Golden Girls. Lisa has been working on Rosa Ponselle. (I have a theory about why a lot of us tackle people articles.)

Kasey has neatly pinned down the issue of authority. But what does it mean to say somebody is not an expert.
Courtner A calls WP the window shopping of learning. She says it relies on -- sound familiar -- trust.

Greg decided to see what WP says about ...Trinity. He's read for wiki-haters tonight, he says.
I think Lisa will help him.
But Dan doesn't really buy the collaborative effort argument.
Jess found this, which says it's a guy thing:
Courtney A. found this which says it's even more of a guy/geek thing.

Jess says trolls are a problem. I love this thing she found about Nickelback. Lisa found the Jarre thing, which I had forgotten

Jess found this, a by no means exceptional example of the problem for Wikipedia and for people who NEED Wikipedia to work for them

Also from Jess, what happens when WP is NOT a good source -- and then pollutes the news stream.

There must be a band called Wikipedia somewhat

Cool post by Kevin about editing WP and learning about music from it.

Of course...

...you need to tour around in what Wikipedia says about Wikipedia.

Turn to Shirky

Time to read Chapter 5 in "Here Comes Everybody."

Keep on wikin'

Here are some links about how Wikipedia works.

And how it sometimes doesn't work. Please read this all the way through. You may have heard me talk in class about the DeFoe stuff, but it's worth reading about.

What happens when "the community" can't agree?

One of the more interesting commenters on Wikipedia is Jason Scott. This is just one of Jason's many posts on WP. The comments -- although they go way, way off topic -- also have some angles worth pursuing.
A lot of Wikipedia critiques seem incredibly ancient by web standards, but I think they still hold true.

if everybody is an author, is NOBODY an author

This seems to be getting at something we -- especially people having conversations with Dan --have been talking about.

If Google went bad

This particular page is a killer.

And if you find it exhausting to try to keep up with the truth ahd the changes to the truth about Google's storage architecture, all I can say is me too.

Another conversation you didn't know you were having

Let's start (or end?) with this post from Alyssa.
Especially the notion that Google is too good not to use, that we have to redefine privacy, that we need to figure out why we're willing not to care. And Lisa says we don't care.
The thing is, just the sheer prevalence of Google is a kind of power.
Here's Kevin on what happens when you use. Sheila knows a lot about cookies and spyware. M. Fitz doesn't like cookies so much anymore.

Matt D. is a good reporter, so he tried to pin down what Google does. Courtney A. pursued this question to all kinds of different levels. Who's in control? What kinds of information is truly surrendered. What about IP addresses? Is Google kind of an alternate consciousness, sorting all our questions and choices? Allison says Google is her best friend. But then she and her real friends thought about that a little more. We might want to discuss Jess's analogy to a drug dealer. Is Google a privacy time bomb?

Don't be evil? Jessica and Courtney A. discovered that was quietly decomissioned. why? Courtney isn't sure it ever meant anything anyway. Sheila seems to agree. I like the Lithwick reference -- the ranking system. Jessica thinks the two questions are inextricably linked. The motto and how Google exercises its basic function are inextricably linked. Matt wonders whether the slogan would really ever prohibit the company from doing something. Like, for example, putting in cookies that study what you look at even when you're not using Google. M. Fitz suggests that one's person's good may be another person's evil. I'm guessing that the bright line in our room will be age., that younger users like Greg won't be terribly bothered by the nature of Google and will be OK with its claim not to be evil. But Greg also believes in a kind of Lockean response to Google. Vive la common sense and les natural laws! Lisa doubts the boys of Google are mature enough to have a fully developed notion of good and evil worth paying heed to. The more you guys blog, the more Mephistophelean the pact seems to me.

If you don't read each other's blogs, you miss a lot! Check out Jessica's Google instruction videos.

When you think about Google

...don't forget to think "they own YouTube."

You do NOT have to watch this

One of the things I find baffling is Google's belief that that the best way to promote Wave right now is this self-referential, boring-ass, interminable video full of fumbling associates.

Keep on Googlin'

As we get ready to reconvene, continue reading about Google.
Read Google's own blog and assorted supporting materials and do your own nosing around. Let's see if we can really crowd source this subject and inform one another on Monday night.

Two Unskippable Assignments!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Google's motto is "Don't Be Evil." Blog about what you think that includes and excludes, based on research and/or reading by you.

Come up with a statement about what happens when you do a search on Google. What does Google wind up knowing about you and how. Blog about this. Then ask another human being this question. Ask one or more people what happens when you use Google. Blog about that.

Not everybody likes Google

In fact, some believe the worst.

Especially about cookies.

How big a problem are cookies?

Of course, there are a lot of ways to research, as we said, the facts as we have presented them to Google and Facebook.

Not sure I believe this

The end of email? Really?

The Air War

I was thinking this morning that our old mental image, for decades, of the structure of information looked something like the page on the left, and swiftly, it has been converted to the page on the right. Sometimes I think that, somewhere way up above our heads, a serious war is going on for air supremacy.

As a (very unimportant) author, I sometimes geet updates on the Google books settlment, and I tend to pay them very little heed.

But as you can see, Google's rivals take this stuff very seriously.

I'm also intrigued by the Google blog, where the founders explain themselves so (apparently) reasonably. What purpose does this serve?, I wonder.

Google has, um, complicated relationships with newspapers.

Google also competes with PayPal, and here's sort of an interesting thing (I think). If you type "Google checkout paypal" into, um, Google, mostly what you get are side-by-side comparisons, helping you decide which one you should use. (Which is sort of a funny idea all by itself.)

You get only a smidgen of offerings about why, maybe, you shouldn't use either one.

And I guess I do wonder whether there's as much reportage as there should be about the reach and ambition of some of these new giants.

Upping the Ante

I'm bringing pizza for those who attend tomorrow night's voluntary class.
Fresh. Hot. Nourishing. Savory. Pizza. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

More wet toes

Wave and Chrome

Just dipping our toes in.

We become relentless again

Enjoying your spare time?
We need to start easing back into action.

Do you know anybody who gets the New Yorker? I really need all of you to read this, but it's subscription protected.
I will make some copies and bring them to the optional class. Otherwise, read it at the library or borrow it from someone or whatever.

A discussion you didn't know you were having

Dan doubts that it's advancing or transforming communication. Anyone want to argue?
Matt D. doubts it's transforming journalism.
John says FB sometimes breaks stories ahead of the journalists.


We need to talk about the criticisms, especially the terms of service criticism

I found this amazing page on FB privacy-- scroll all the way down and see some of the encyclopedic content.
Matt D. did a privacy survey
M. Fitz thinks the hacking and messing-with is the decline and fall.
Kasey thinks the very notion of privacy might be changing.
Tina on the Obama threat.



Matt D. thinks it's a mall.
MFitz can walk us through fan pages.

Life and death and the personal and the private.
A divorce is personal. Does a FB divorce cheapen life?
Relationship status, anyone?
A lot of you are pondering FB and death: Tina here.
This from CA is the kind of definition thing I was looking for. Part 1 has some good stuff too.
Lisa is also asking: what is it?
So is Jessica. (Remind me to say that the WAY Jessica got on FB is significant.)
I do want to talk about what a friend is. Tina on that.
I had my own experience with that, which was widely covered.

remind myself to show Dillon and Tripp and Rizzo and my new friend Michael.

remind myself to talk about the changing nature of transit through life -- re Wendy and the widening of the opinion circle.

A different kind of tutorial

A Tutorial

Old school vs. FB

I found this, oddly enough, on Facebook.

Not for this week

Just posting this thing about Twitter, so that I don't lose it.
(This is where some of you want to start using tags.)

FB$$$$

How does information travel? Alyssa wonders if it travels too fast and with too little control on FB, at least in certain circumstances. I think it's a great question. The new media has certai nrules on how to handle stuff like that. (In fact, think back to last week and ask yourself how the Enfield hostage crisis might have played out if the husband had been more of an FB guy.)

Kasey points out that lawyers are being trained to use Facebook.
Tina thinks Boomers are killing the platform. But that means there's a right and wrong way to use it.


And Jessica -- great post right here! -- is reading the rules and asking some interesting questions about who can get what from Facebook. (I'll ask one of my privacy guys if he has any input one this.) Kevin is following the money too. The more I look at these questions, the more I think that Facebook must be sitting on an insanely valuable galaxy of information, right?

A lot of the business analyses I've seen are somewhat out of date. This guy tries to keep up and links out to some cool stuff, so I've included his Facebook tab. Check the first comment on this post. The comment comes from a guy who blogs about social media for realtors. It's interesting, because the mass media remains much more interested in Twitter than in Facebook, but the people who are dipply into it seem to get that Facebook is expanding much faster.

FBIII

Courtney A. found this, and I'm going to say it's a must-read.

Even more to the point, I think it's important, as you use Facebook, to do two things:
a. see if you can make it do something beyond the things you typically make it do.
b. ask yourselves some searching question about what this thing is. And then answer them on your blogs. What I mean is: pull back and take an astronaut's view of Facebook. What is that huge presence hanging there in space.

FBII

Did you know that this profile exists?

There's probably a lot of stuff we don't know.
(I'm totally looking into x-friends, but it doesn't seem to work off that link.)
Here's a major compiler of FB information.
I found it partly because of this post.