Stilgherrian » wikipedia

Pesce’s “This, That and The Other”

Stilgherrian — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 08:55:28 +0000

Mark Pesce’s closing keynote from Web Directions South, “This, That and The Other”, is starting to make its way online. So far there’s the text interspersed with the pre-recorded video segments. The full video, which I helped shoot, will doubtless be online once Mark’s finished editing it.

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Links for 23 May 2008 through 24 May 2008

del.icio.us — Sat, 24 May 2008 23:03:06 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 23 May 2008 through 24 May 2008, collected almost-automatically…

Only Connect | the human network: The text of Mark's keynote at Microsoft's ReMIX 08.
Mark Pesce - Only Connect | Viddler.com: This 23-minute keynote presentation from Microsoft's ReMIX 08 is a wonderful distillation of Mark's thoughts over recent months. If you want to get your head around the future, watch this.
TimesMachine | New York Times: All issues of the New York Times from 18 September 1851 to 30 December 1922 available to browse as images and PDFs. Free to NYT delivery subscribers, but even the sample issues offered to everyone are a fascinating read.
We Travel in Tribes | Rands In Repose: Excellent explanation of the appeal of Twitter.
Royalty-free music | Aussie Bloggers: Links to some sources of royalty-free music, i.e. music for which you pay a one-off fee and can then continue to use in your production.
Twittiquette and Acceptable Online Social Network Behaviour | DEDLOG: Dedlam offers 5 excellent tips for being a "good participant" on Twitter and other social media.
All The Cool People Are Still Going… | hyperpeople: Adolf Hitler gets ready for the Burning Man party. Wrong. Funny.
PR and the Management of a Real Crisis | DEDLOG: Shanghai-based Dedlam's commentary on how China handled the media during this month's earthquake.
Power-Tweeting: 101 Everyday Uses for Twitter | Inside CRM: Examples of how the Twitter community uses this simple tool. When it works.

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No, this wasn’t me, but close

Stilgherrian — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:12:24 +0000

Thank you, Richard, but no. This article in The Onion is not about me. Close though, eh?

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Even in defeat, he haunts us… via our folksonomies

Stilgherrian — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 22:29:44 +0000

I’ve been working on the tag cloud page, and one of my attempts to clarify things has revealed a disturbing fact.

I decided that the “category cloud” on the left-hand side of the website was already showing that the biggest categories were politics, the Internet, human nature, media and business. I didn’t want the tag cloud to repeat that information. So I decided to remove all the tags which were also the names of categories.

Boy, that certainly changed the emphasis!

Even in the reduced screenshot (right), one name dominates. Yes, out of 944 posts, counting this one, 91 are tagged “john howard”.

My own boyfriend comes in a poor second with just 42.

Is that right?

I’ve tried to placate ’Pong. I’ve said that at least he doesn’t frustrate me to the point of inspiring lengthy rants about the destruction of social values and the end of the Enlightenment. I’ve never suggested that he be tried as a war criminal — though after that night-time canal boat ride in Bangkok I may reconsider that.

(Actually I haven’t told you about that canal boat properly yet. It’s another Unreliable Bangkok piece waiting to be written. I’ve been back in Sydney two months now, it’s not too late is it?)

However this does raise an interesting point about how tags work…

In a traditional information system, you’d plan your keywords in advance. You’d invent a taxonomy (that is, a formal classification system), and then you’d develop a controlled vocabulary (that is, a set of authorised keywords). For example you’d decide that it’s the “construction” industry, not “building”. Everyone would work off that controlled vocabulary.

Save confusion, y’see.

Everything filed into neat little pigeon-holes.

However in the Brave New World of the Social Internet, no-one bothers with all that. Everyone makes it up as they go along, throws it all into the ether, and with luck it’ll all sort itself out. Or Google will do it for us.

Instead of a taxonomy, you have a folksonomy.

This development mirrors many, many aspects of the post-Industrial Age. In the Industrial Age everything was centrally planned, like the Soviet Economy — one of history’s great success stories, no? Now, everyone just works at it as best they can, and problems are ironed out through group consensus — or just ignored because no-one’s interested.

And by golly gosh, it actually seems to work.

A 2005 study by Nature (which is behind their paywall, so we’ll link to C|Net’s report too) found that the centrally-planned, professionally-edited Encyclopaedia Britannica is only marginally more accurate in key areas than Wikipedia.

OK, Encyclopaedia Britannica disputed [PDF file] the study, and then Nature bit back. But the core point is that the Wikipedia approach generates a product which is just fine for everyday purposes, and it does so a lot faster, with a relatively small trade-off in accuracy.

So, to get back to my main point… assuming this actually has a point…

Mostly I write about politics. A very broad range of politics. Through my ad hoc assignment of tags to blog posts, I’ve shown that John Winston Howard dominated my political writing. I suspect that everyone else’s was much the same.

Yes, 2007 really was all about JWH, just not in the way he wanted. And now, Sir, can you please bugger off out of my website? Ta.

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Corey Delaney meets Life Streaming (sort of)

Stilgherrian — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:14:08 +0000

With little energy after last night’s massive session of Silent Hunter III, I haven’t written an original essay today. Instead, let me suggest you read two things I’ve commented upon. 1. The redoubtable Laurel Papworth’s analysis of Corey Delaney’s page being deleted from Wikipedia. 2. Duncan Riley’s polemic on life streaming and whether we should still draw the line on privacy somewhere.

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Did the PM’s office edit out “Captain Smirk”?

Stilgherrian — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:57:23 +0000

“On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog,” says a classic New Yorker cartoon. True, perhaps. But we do know who owns you and where your kennel is.

The Prime Minister’s office denies that one of their own edited the Wikipedia article about Peter Costello to remove the nickname “Captain Smirk”. But IP address 210.193.176.115 belongs to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — at least it did until the reference was changed a few days after the accusation.

If you dig through all IP addresses starting with 210.193.176 you find that most of them for which data is available are front ends for a pile of government agencies — everything from innovation.gov.au and biotechnology.gov.au to coagbushfireenquiry.gov.au and search.investaustralia.gov.au. Sitting right on 210.193.176.19 is the PM’s very own website.

Assigning an IP address in the middle of this block to anyone but another government agency doesn’t make sense — from a network engineering or an administrative point of view. You reckon someone’s telling porkies?

Wikipedia has since nominated the Peter Costello article as their Australian Collaboration of the Fortnight. “Please help improve it to featured article standard,” they ask. Anyone at the PM’s office wanna lend a hand? Woof.

[A more detailed version of this article was originally published in Crikey a couple of days ago.]

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Saturday Night Trivia, Question 1

Stilgherrian — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 13:46:02 +0000

Call yourself an Australian? Cool. Does the name Vincent Lingiari mean anything? No? Well, OK, doesn’t to me either.

But, you know, I just heard Archie Roach and Sara Storer singing his story on RockWiz. And bugger me, it turns out he’s one of the country’s most important human rights activists.

Bloody embarrassing not to know that, eh?

I mean, you’re probably more likely to remember, oh, that nigger woman on a bus, who was she again?