Relevant History

BuzzMachine

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting idea on BuzzMachine:

If I were a reference publisher, a library association, a university, a media company, or a foundation, I’d take Wikipedia as raw material and vet entries, perhaps even charging for the service: On demand or on the basis of traffic and links, I’d go in and vet already-written pieces and bless that version of it. Then maybe I’d publish a book from it....

Now that I think of it, this might have been a nice business model for the shrinking Britannica. It might still be.

Certainly Britannica had (and maybe still has, despite pressures to the contrary) one of the most elaborate, nay detail-obsessed, fact-checking processes I've ever seen in my life. Of course, to some degree the Britannica Internet Guide was supposed to provide a degree of certification-- though there seems to nothing left of that project but some aging awards badges on various sites....

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia

Paul Hawken Interview, July 2002

A couple years ago, I did a long interview with Paul Hawken about his then-new company, Groxis (now Grokker). For a while I thought about doing an article, or even a short book, on zooming browsers and the next generation of computers interfaces. For various reasons I didn't, and the interview itself didn't get circulated.

Recently, though, Paul got in touch and suggested that I should publish the interview. The transcript is published after the jump.

Technorati Tags: business, design, environment, search, visualization

Libraries and IT centers

How many college or university libraries have incorporated the outreach / training / service functions that were once handled by college computing centers? At one time, people were talking about how computers and the Internet would make libraries obsolete; but a quick Google search on "library and technology center" yields some 15,000 hits. Admittedly this is a very coarse search, but it suggests that more than a few institutions have folded the functions together.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace

Quote of the day

"Imagine if television were actually good. It would mean the end of everything we know." (Marvin Minksy)

Quoted by Bruce Sterling in his short, precient "The Future of Cyberspace: Wild Frontier vs. Hyperreal Estate."

[To the tune of Sea Level, "Midnight Pass," from the album "Best of Sea Level".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace

Quote of the day

[Found this in my drafts folder-- don't know why I didn't post it way back when.]

The point of cyborg-like extensions or prosthetics won't be to make us more like robots, but more like people.

From City of Sound:

[T]he most interesting things about the products and devices emerging today is their ability to create or contribute towards a sense of self - both in terms of the product and the owner. As products get smarter in terms of being aware of their behaviour - in some senses, becoming reflexive - and as their raison d'être gets increasingly close to personal, social functionality - in some senses, becoming involved in presentation of self and the behaviour of the users - there is huge potential to build devices which become increasingly, personally meaningful, which can adapt to personal context and preference like never before.

[To the tune of Yoshinori Sunahara, "Life & Space," from the album "Take Off & Landing".]

I keep repeating myself

I've been working on this piece on the future of collective intelligence, and almost at random, came across the review I wrote of The Social Life of Information a couple years ago. The last paragraph jumped out at me, as it basically talks about what I'm trying to get a handle on now:

[T]he challenge of producing, storing and managing information is as old as civilization itself; the term "information age" threatens to be as meaningless as "architecture age" or "transportation age." Most attempts to describe today's information age have drawn most strongly from either intellectual history or philosophy. "The Social Life of Information's" emphasis on the importance of organizational learning and tacit knowledge suggests that to a degree that no one has yet appreciated, the history of information is an institutional history, rather than an intellectual one: It needs to be told at the level of libraries and archives, businesses and publishers, universities and corporate research labs. (Perhaps it's no coincidence that the first book on library management and the last book on classical memory systems, which had been used for millenniums by orators and scholars, were published within a few decades of each other in the 1600s.) It also suggests that the really significant technologies driving large-scale social and economic change today may not be those created to assist individuals but may instead be the tools for organizational learning, creativity and remembering. The information age is represented for most of us by consumer products like the cell phone and Palm Pilot, but perhaps it is corporate databases, project management and collaboration software and data mining tools and search engines that will be the real levers that move the world.

I can't decide if this kind of thing is good, a proof of consistency and an ability to think for a long time about something, or a warning that I've run out of ideas.

Quote of the day

Quoted on Matt Chalmers' Web page:

For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory but for recollection, - for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.

You are providing for your disciples a show of wisdom without the reality. For, acquiring by your means much information unaided by instruction, they will appear to possess much knowledge, while, in fact, they will, for the most part, know nothing at all; and, moreover, be disagreeable people to deal with, as having become wise in their own conceit, instead of truly wise."

Plato, recounting the response of the Egyptian god Thamus to Theuth's invention of letters

[To the tune of Gin Blossoms, "Hey Jealousy," live recording from the Internet Archive, 01-24-2003, Agoura Hills, CA.]

More in Wikipedia

Matt Jones has an interesting idea about using information design to make the authority of Wikipedia articles easier to judge.

Bob McHenry on Wikipedia

Bob McHenry, my boss at Britannica, has an article in Tech Central Station on Wikipedia, or as he puts it, "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia"."

Not surprisingly, he's skeptical of the long-term value of Wikipedia, for some obvious reasons:

To put the Wikipedia method in its simplest terms:

1. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can submit an article and it will be published.

2. Anyone, irrespective of expertise in or even familiarity with the topic, can edit that article, and the modifications will stand until further modified.

Then comes the crucial and entirely faith-based step:

3. Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.

[via Victoria]

SIMS lecture series

It's probably silly to puff a lecture series that you've spoken in, but I'm very impressed by the fall lineup for UC Berkeley SIMS' Distinguished Lecture Series. It's a very diverse, interesting group of speakers, and a good audience-- even though Berkeley has SO many different things going on, it's easy for people to get overloaded and just hang out at Cafe Milano. Check it out if you're there.