Science Library Pad

Wikipedia pages created

Here are some of the Wikipedia pages I have created.  You can get this information when logged in to Wikipedia on the Contributions page, by checking "Only show edits that are page creations". Or construct the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=username&namespace=&tagfilter=&newOnly=1&year=2017&month=-1

• February 21, 2006 - National Science Advisor (Canada)
• June 12, 2006 - Council of Canadian Academies
• June 24, 2006 - Canadian Association of Research Libraries
• May 2, 2008 - Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite
• April 5, 2009 - Data.gov
• July 10, 2009 - PubMed Central Canada
• March 5, 2016 - International Open Data Day
• March 6, 2016 - Institute for Science, Society and Policy

Globe's Public Policy wiki - letting in sunlight?

Using TikiWiki software, Mathew was able to pull it together rather quickly. The first issue the [Globe Public Policy] wiki approached was the pending Canadian economy and federal budget. They posted several opinions of economists and other policy advisors, as well as “briefing notes.” Then they asked their registered users to comment, edit and vote on them using the wiki tools. In two weeks they attracted over 100,000 page views, with 800 individuals signing up to vote, comment and edit.

Sunlight Foundation blog - Globe and Mail’s Public Policy Wiki - January 30, 2009

NRCan uses Web 2.0 to improve collaboration

In his posting Canadian Government Launches Internal Wiki, Library Boy points to an interesting article in a magazine I had never heard of, Networked Government .ca

Challenges of change

Breaking down barriers to create an open and collaborative work environment comes with barriers of its own:

§         Fear of the unknown
§         Varying rates of acceptance
§         Trust
§         Reluctance to change
§         Indifference
§         Official languages
§         Inappropriate use. 

There is risk in each, but none as great as the risk of not proceeding.   

For employees reluctant to contribute their content on an open forum, the team encouraged them to use the Wiki to share non-sensitive information only. Allowing groups to create their own separate work spaces on the Wiki would only perpetuate the very barriers collaborative technologies were trying to break down – limited knowledge sharing at an enterprise level and lack of integrated content. Organizing information based on organizational hierarchy was purposely not replicated to allow subject classification structures based on content to emerge.

Collaborative Revolution - Networked Government .ca - October 2008

Italics in above article mine.

In strongly hierarchical organisations, such as some libraries, people often identify more with their group or organisational silo than with the entire enterprise.  Also these silos may represent areas in which specific control or budget is allocated, and it is traditional corporate culture not to want to share control or resources.

Enterprise Architecture and enterprise-wide collaboration can try to break through some of these silos, but as the above article states: "Changing the culture is much more difficult than implementing new technology."

Government of Canada launches official wiki for federal employees

The Government of Canada has launched an official wiki for its employees.
You probably won't be able to access it if you're outside the gc.ca domain.
They are inviting people to participate as wiki "gnomes".

The url is

http://www.gcpedia.gc.ca/

Via Michael Ireland on CISTI's internal Tech Watch - Government creates own version of Wikipedia - Ottawa Citizen - October 29, 2008

semantic library - planning the training

In the model of Five Weeks to a Social Library, I see in my FriendFeed today a posting from Fiona Bradley about putting together a Semantic Library training program online.  It's still in the initial planning stages, you can have a look at the program outline at

http://semanticlibrary.pbwiki.com/Learning-Program

The wiki is open for people to sign up, you just need to enter the password you'll see at the bottom of the login screen.

For those of us who deal more with academic content, I think semantic concepts and Semantic Web services may become even more important than social networking is right now.

(Whew, I got through all of that without saying "from Library 2.0 to Library 3.0".)

Describing the Semantic Web can be a bit complicated, I think of it as enriching our current text content on the web so that machines are able to do more processing for us - enabling us to build much more powerful scientific search and reasoning systems.

As I said in my presentation Building SkyNet for Science, invoking (and extending) Ranganathan and Noruzi: "every web resource its machine reader" (slide 13).

Previously:
September 08, 2008  semantic search thoughts

Knol - Google losing view of web?

I think Google has climbed up so high on their knoll that they have lost perspective on what makes the web work.

Let's see what they have to say about Knol in Blogger Buzz

Blogs are great for quickly and easily getting your latest writing out to your readers, while knols are better for when you want to write an authoritative article on a single topic.  The tone is more formal, and, while it's easy to update the content and keep it fresh, knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content or threading.

Introducing Knol - Blogger Buzz - July 23, 2008 (Emphasis theirs.)

Both the concept and the implementation of this are wrong on so many levels.

1. After we've worked hard to put forth the position that you can present serious science and ideas in a blog, Google says, nah, blogs are just quick and easy jottings.
2. Who is Google to say what the tone of a Knol is?  Is there going to be a Knol Tonemaster?
3. Knols aren't designed for continuously posting new content?  So ideas are all graven in stone?

In addition, Google is hacking away at the web in various ways.

4. The entire Knol is nofollow.  You can't have a web if search crawlers don't follow links.

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />

5. The Knol search engine is utter shite.  It gives different results depending whether you're logged in (i.e. blessed by Google) or surfing anonymously (i.e. unknown by Google, an outcast).

Check this out.

Exhibit A: When logged out.

No results found for digital photo
No results found for geocoding
No results found for akerman

Exhibit B: When logged in.
Results 1-1 of about 1 for digital photo
Results 1-1 of about 1 for geocoding
Results 1-2 of about 2 for akerman

What the heck?  That's not the way people expect a search box on the web to work.

6. In Wikipedia, making a link to a relevant topic is as easy as [[topic]] - the topic doesn't even have to exist yet, someone can come in later and click to create it.  In Knol, making a link to a relevant Knol... doesn't exist in any easy way.  You're supposed to search for URLs and make links.
7. You're supposed to create authoritative articles with references, but many of the examples are just formatted text.  Which is to say, references that don't even link anywhere.  Isn't the whole point of the web supposed to be that you FOLLOW a link to check the referenced source?
8. Given that it has no concept of bibliographic reference metadata, it's no surprise that there are no features to link into the scholarly literature whatsoever - not even a quick way to insert references from Google Scholar, Zotero or RefWorks.  No DOIs, no COINS, no nothing.
9. On Google, PageRank IS AUTHORITY.  Higher in the results, higher (implied) authority.  This may not be right, but it is true.  How do you gain PageRank?  Well, for one, you write a blog (or create a website) which has lots of content.  Lots of good content.  People like that content, people link that content.  PageRank accrues... to your site.  I'll say that again: PageRank accrues to your site.  So instead of blogging, Google thinks you should put your knowledge in a Knol, where PageRank will accrue to... wait for it... knol.google.com
10. Not only are you supposed to give away your PageRank, and your ability to give PageRank to others (through having your links followed), you can't even discover a community of clicks.  What's that?  Well it goes like this.  Joe Biglibrarian's never heard of me.  I link to him and write something reasonable (one hopes).  He sees the incoming clicks from my readers in his web stats.  He reads my thing.  He writes a post.  And so it goes.  Webstats may not be a perfect community discovery mechanism, but it is a part of it particularly in the early days of your blog.  Knol provides no webstats whatsoever.
11. Not only does Knol remove you from your click community, its advertising focus gives you a deliberate disincentive to direct traffic to other sites.  Links to other sites = lost AdSense revenue.  The ideal ad-revenue Knol has no links to outside sites other than the ads themselves.

Google says

Knol will be a great new way for you to share what you know, inform people about an issue that is important to you, raise your profile as an expert in your field, and maybe even make some money from ads.

I'm sorry Google, but that's not only not true, the entire Knol system and "introducing Knol" tone show a total lack of understanding of the current state of scholarly blogging, a total absence of support for scholarly citation and linking, and a surprising disregard for critical existing aspects of the web architecture.

If you want to make Knol a system for presenting authoritative information, you might want to look at how scholars do it in modern web-enabled scientific articles (about which, more to come in a later posting).

Knol - thinking about authority

A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.

http://knol.google.com/

So by its own assertion, right at the top of the Knol page, Knols are about authority.
But they've made an interesting choice, which is to attach authority to authorship.
This is a model that we understand quite well, since it is the classic Britannica model.

So if you want to organise knowledge this way, it's quite easy, you get Learned Persons to write articles in their areas of expertise.  There are, however, multiple problems with this approach:

1. You actually have to get them to write.
2. You get a tremendous management problem as you try to scale out from a handful of articles to millions.
3. Just because someone is very learned in one area (e.g. Ph.D. in Physics with accompanying publications) doesn't necessarily mean that he or she has any expertise whatsoever in another area (e.g. climate change).
4. We only have "authority structures" for a small number of areas (related to issue #2 above).  You can probably find an authority in Evidence-Based Medicine (and indeed the Knol on that topic is quite learned).  But who is the authority on say... Gnolls, obscure mythical creatures?

So Google has created an odd hybrid system.  It's seeded with some articles mostly from medicine, but it's open to anyone.  A system that claims authoritativeness, with no mechanism to verify this, other than a weak name-verification procedure.

Uniquely identifying authors (and producing a global authority file, to use library terminology) would have been an interesting problem to address, but it is not dealt with.

The actual problem they appear to be trying to address is not one of authority, but of certification.  They're focusing on credentials, when the focus should be on proof.  As best I can deduce the argument, it goes something like "on Wikipedia anyone can author, anyone can make changes, and anyone can challenge anything".

Part of this is simply a cultural issue.  There is a culture war in America, and partisans on either side use sophistry to try to prop up their arguments, leading to endless rounds of dispute.  However Wikipedia has at its core the most elegant of mechanisms to address this:

{fact}

This tiny bit of wikicode is so foundational that I think it perhaps gets overlooked.  What it does is put in a link that says "citation needed".  This little piece takes Wikipedia from an open brawl, to one of the most powerful engines promoting scientific thinking in our time.  It says simply: "I don't care who you are, demonstrate with evidence that your statement is true".

To retreat from this is to retreat from reasoned discourse.

Why?  Well, I have to turn to Wikipedia

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Clarke's First Law - Wikipedia: Clarke's three laws

(You can also amuse yourself with Wikiquote: Incorrect predictions.)

To put it another way: authority is a weak predictor of truth.  Only evidence is a strong indication of truth.

This brings me to the another flaw in Knol - the ability to cite evidence is laughably weak.
The Knol idea of a reference is... a URL with a title, that is autonumbered.  That's it.
Let's compare: Wikipedia has an entire page on Citing sources, and an entire page of metadata-rich Citation templates.  Knol has

Search Results:
No results found for citation

or more generously, it has a help page on Adding References with the example

Are you kidding me?  It's 2008 and scientists are enthusiastic about creating a semantically-rich web, and you provide a box to construct a numbered A HREF?  No DOI input?  No bibliographic import or awareness of bibliographic metadata whatsoever?  Where's the authority in that?

Even worse, rather than the single-article Wikipedia model, where everyone must work towards a consensus, Knol encourages a marketplace of competing isolated viewpoints:

What if someone else has already written an article on that subject?

No problem, you can still write your own article. In fact, the Knol project is a forum for encouraging individual voices and perspectives on topics. As mentioned, no one else can edit your knol (unless you permit it) or mandate how you write about a topic. If you do a search on a topic, you may very well see more than one knol in the search results. Of course, people are free to disagree with you, to write their own knols, to post comments and ratings.

http://knol.google.com/k/knol/knol/Help

Great, so all the people with over a century of evidence supporting the benefits of immunization can balkanize off in their own Knol, while the nutjobs who think immunization is some government conspiracy can have their Knol, and each community can rate their respective Knol highly.  How does that help anything?

The problem is that Knol has focused on authorship, and not certification.  What demonstrates the law of gravity is true is a preponderance of evidence, not some sort of individual gravitas.

Now there certainly is something in ranking and commenting that helps us to get at certification, but the mechanism provided is simply too weak.  Certification is some combination of general review, authoritative review, ranking, and ranking of the rankers.  Certification must work on a consensus item.  You may think this is abstract, but for example in astrophysics one camp of researchers put the Hubble Constant at a much higher value than other group, and each research "camp" would consistently release research supporting their number.  I can tell you this in part, not because I have a perfect memory, but because I can extract

The value of the Hubble constant was the topic of a long and rather bitter controversy between Gérard de Vaucouleurs who claimed the value was around 100 and Allan Sandage who claimed the value was near 50.

from the Disputes over Hubble's constant section of the consensus article on Wikipedia about Hubble's Law

Now tell me, what do you think you would get if instead, each of these groups had created its own Knol about the Hubble constant?

SIDEBAR: Problems with Knol

• There is no way to permalink to a comment.  If you have lots of comments, you will have to page through them to find what you want.
• There is no way to see all the comments that a person has posted, that is, to get from their profile to their comments.
• Despite it supposedly being all about you, the author, there is no way to get any page hit stats (which would tell you where you were being linked from, and what search terms were reaching your page, amongst other things).

SIDEBAR 2: Amusing Knol front page

"Who needs a search engine? Ctrl+F" line on main Knol page (i.e. telling you to use your browser's in-page search to find something... which I should mention is actually Splat-F on the Mac)

END SIDEBARS

To wrap up this discussion, let's talk about Gnolls.  (I have to admit, much of this posting was prompted simply because I was amused by the idea of doing a Knol about Gnolls.)

Search Results:
No results found for gnoll

http://knol.google.com/k/knol/system/knol/pages/Search?q=gnoll&restrict=general#

So, who is the authority about Gnolls?  Are we to search the publications of the Academy of Gnoll Studies?  And if you are the authority about Gnolls, what benefit do you get from putting up a Knol, rather than demonstrating your knowledge through blog and forum postings on sites that you control (or that are part of your community of interest), or perhaps writing a book?

Similarly, if you know some tidbit about Gnolls, where are you going to contribute that sentence?  Do you want to put it in front of millions of Wikipedia eyeballs, or do you want to attach it to a Knol that you hope will get rated and linked and searched enough that it will rise above the other Gnoll Knols so that people actually see it?

Whither the Gnoll, that sadly neglected second-tier monster, lost in the shadows of its better known competitors, Goblins and Gnomes.  A pretty obscure topic, one would think.  Yet there is the Wikipedia page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnoll

with paragraph after paragraph of information about Gnolls from the historical to the modern, from Lord Dunsany to World of Warcraft.  (If you want further reading, Dunsany's story is online: How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles.) 

So this is how Wikipedia beats Knols:

• it provides a platform to develop consensus in a single article about a topic, with a focus on citations
• its citations have rich metadata
• it provides a platform to share "microknowledge"
• it provides a big enough Crowd so that you get some Wisdom
• it encourages cross-linking of topics, so you begin to see a web of knowledge

In this case, I think the Wisdom of the Crowd is going to beat the authority of the individual.

I hope that Google will learn from this and refocus to more interesting areas including:

• author identification, impact, reputation, and peer networks - and how to make those all open and portable
• much more powerful systems for ranking, rating, and discussing any web page (including a Knol) - as well as ranking the rankers
• knowledge certification
• creation of semantically-rich knowledge bases

Previously/Related:

July 23, 2008  probably the 1000th Knol post you've seen today

June 22, 2007  Community peer review in Wiki environment - Christine Chichester - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

June 22, 2007  my presentation at ICSTI 2007 Nancy - Web tools for peer reviewers and everyone.  Also see video of this presentation (RealVideo).

In general all of the ICSTI 2007 presentations.

March 02, 2007  soft peer review

June 21, 2006  my article on peer review for Nature

probably the 1000th Knol post you've seen today

Because, as they say, self-plagiarism is style[1], I will quote myself

As for Knols, anyone who thinks Google's initiative is about anything other than the fact that Wikipedia has no Google ads is barking up the wrong tree.

Science Library Pad - Wikipedia death watch? - January 2, 2008

I'm pretty sure I remember Google saying something about "authoritative content blah blah" but the reality is that (like Wikipedia) anyone can create a Knol.  The main difference is you are the page admin, so (if you want) you can decide whether to accept or reject any edits that anyone else makes (or deny non-author edits entirely).

And, oh yeah: AdSense ads.

So you can contribute to Wikipedia, a vast and interlinked set of pages with high traffic.
Or toss your Knol out into the wind and hope it is gently lofted to the top of search results.
They're not very keen on you using a Knol to drive traffic to your site

We don’t allow pages that have the primary purpose of redirecting visitors, acting as a bridge page, or driving traffic to another website.

http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/content-policy/si57lahl1w25/13#

It would seem it does open up yet another front in the spam battle.
In theory with Google Docs you could create docuspam, I guess knolspam is the next frontier.

I don't see any restriction against embedding a web tracking code, however it looks like it removes any JavaScript.  (To be specific, while it remembers JavaScript you enter in the HTML edit view, it strips it out when it actually renders the page.)  The info you can get from just an HTML tracking code is quite limited.  You can also get a small amount of information from your AdSense reports.  But you won't be able to see e.g. what search terms were used to find your page.

You can get way more control and statistics, while still being able to get AdSense revenue, by just setting up your own personal pages on a webserver, or by using other sites that give you more flexibility in content creation (e.g. permitting JavaScript).  They make a big deal about a Knol being attached to an author.  Well for one, my Wikipedia edits are already attached to my user name, and for two, what's more personal than publishing something under my own name in my own web domain instead?

It seems to me this is mostly about ads, and secondarily about drawing you even further into the web tracking dream: you're always logged into Google, they know every search you make, every email and document, and now they will know your particular areas of expertise, and topics of interest.  Seems like lots of benefits for Google...

CBC Spark Wiki + library tech

CBC's radio show Spark has a wiki.

we're really pleased to announce the Spark Wiki. We hope it will complement this blog and the radio show (and podcast). Right now, it's an experiment: a place to collaborate on story ideas, suggest guests, music selections... whatever. It's a many-to-many form of communication, and I'm really excited to learn how we can use it to make more participatory, collaborative radio.

from the Spark Blog - January 09, 2008

You can see a vaguely related discussion from Globe and Mail Video, "CBC's wiki experiment".  It seems to me they might have been better off talking to someone directly at Spark.

The wiki itself is at

http://www.socialtext.net/spark/

There is a Spark story proposal up for Libraries and technology but it hasn't had much activity.  If you'd like to hear about library tech on Canada's national radio, maybe you might consider adding some ideas or suggestions of people for them to interview.

TeacherTube studycast: Rock meets Lichen

One of my friends is a middle school teacher who tries to find ways to usefully integrate technology with his teaching.  This is an animation his students made, "Rock meets Lichen"

http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=b818fffa3e8045eb95a6

You can find all of their studycasts on his wiki at

http://studycasts.wikispaces.com/Studycasts

NLA announces Library Labs

The [National Library of Australia] has recently opened this "Library Labs" wiki space:

https://wiki.nla.gov.au/display/LABS/Home

The aim of this space is to let our colleagues know what we are doing, to invite comments, questions and feedback and to provide a space for discussion and collaboration.

We have started to redevelop our digital library services using a service-oriented architecture and open source software solutions where these are functional and robust.  We are also aiming to take a common ("single business") approach to collection management, discovery and delivery.

We are interested in forming a community of Australian business analysts and developers who are working on similar problems and who are interested in  interoperable, standards-based solutions. We are also interested in working with colleagues at an international level to provide prototypes and testbeds for new and emerging standards.

via Warwick Cathro
Assistant Director-General, Innovation
National Library of Australia

JotSpot wikis disappear from the net

If you want to know how synergistic the Microsoft-Yahoo merger would be (and if, somehow, you have forgotten the giant disaster that was the Time Warner-AOL merger), you have no farther to look than Google's success with even tiny acquisitions.

Like say, JotSpot.

Which, after being bought by Google, had exactly zero visible improvements made to it, until today, when there was a rather visible change: it dropped off the net.

Instead, there's a Network Solutions domain capture page.

Not surprisingly, there is some consternation in the JotSpot Help group http://groups.google.com/group/jotspot-help This is a good reminder about the risks of living "in the cloud" (I have quite a lot of work put into pages in my JotSpot wiki, they had better be coming back online).

UPDATE: Someone somewhere pushed the right button and the wikis are back.  Needless to say I will be saving copies of my private pages (the public ones at least would have been recoverable in Google search cache).

edit Science 2.0 at Scientific American

Widely reported, but anyway

Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in "networked journalism," in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.

The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it's my feature story on "Science 2.0," which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.

So consider yourself invited. Please share your thoughts about the promise and peril of Science 2.0

You can add your thoughts at: Scientific American - Edit This - Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? - January 9, 2008

It has some interesting discussion on the reputation issue

"The peer-reviewed paper is the cornerstone of jobs and promotion," says PLoS ONE's Surridge. "Scientists don't blog because they get no credit."

The credit-assignment problem is one of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of blogging or any other aspect of Science 2.0, agrees Timo Hannay, head of Web publishing at the Nature Publishing Group in London. (That group's parent company, Macmillan, also owns Scientific American.) Once again, however, the technology itself may help. "Nobody believes that a scientist's only contribution is from the papers he or she publishes," Hannay says. "People understand that a good scientist also gives talks at conferences, shares ideas, takes a leadership role in the community. It's just that publications were always the one thing you could measure. Now, however, as more of this informal communication goes on line, that will get easier to measure too."

The acceptance of any such measure would require a big change in the culture of academic science. But for Science 2.0 advocates, the real significance of Web technologies is their potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication, toward the kind of openness and community that were supposed to be the hallmark of science in the first place. ...

Meanwhile, Hannay has been taking the Nature group into the Web 2.0 world aggressively. "Our real mission isn't to publish journals, but to facilitate scientific communication," he says. ...

Indeed, says Bora Zivkovic, a circadian rhythm expert who writes at Blog Around the Clock, and who is the Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE, the various experiments in Science 2.0 are now proliferating so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. "It's a Darwinian process," he says. "About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread."

Here's what I left as a comment:

As I wrote in a recent blog posting, in the online world one has to think about both reputation and attention.  In the traditional print journal world, the only way to get attention was by first gaining reputation through publication.  In the online world, I would argue particularly for young scientists, the amount of attention they can get (from search hits, incoming links, and others reading their blog postings and wiki entries) can be invaluable in finding collaborators, and in building an "online reputation".  This means there is a challenging balancing act between waiting to gain reputation through traditional journal articles, versus taking a risk and being more open, and gaining both attention and reputation through the digital medium.  In my experience (as a non-scientist), the opportunities opened up by blogging have been much greater than I could ever have imagined, and the responses are more rapid and more numerous than I get when I publish in a journal.

Wikipedia death watch?

I didn't even know the Globe had "podcasts".  This one has some thoughtful musings about Wikipedia.

It's all very wonderful, but it's not on a path to perfection.

As for Knols, anyone who thinks Google's initiative is about anything other than the fact that Wikipedia has no Google ads is barking up the wrong tree.

There is a bit of a battle for Wikipedia's soul, between those who are happy for it to be an encyclopedia of everything, like me, and those who want it to be Very Serious Citable Work.  For example, I find it very convenient to go to WIkipedia to lookup Cylon model numbers, while The WikiPowers That Be are beginning to tag such pages fancruft.

Andrew Keen and the demise of authority - TVO's The Agenda

TVO's The Agenda had Andrew Keen on, followed by a panel about the changing nature of authority.

You can watch the video, it's linked from The Agenda - Video, it's the Nov 8 2007 show (I do wish people would provide permalinks for these JavaScript popup things).  Their new video player has no time indication, so unfortunately I can't tell you when the second segment on authority starts.

UPDATE 2007-11-12: You can get the audio for Keen and for authority directly from iTunes, as well as see the entire page on Agenda audio podcasts.  The video is also available, see the video podcast page as well as the Keen and authority videos.  ENDUPDATE

Keen basically said "the kids today are too dumb to separate truth from truthiness", from which he draws the conclusion a better system would be elite gatekeepers providing "professional" content.

I still don't quite follow his idolisation of the mass media.
Journalism used to be ok, but you have to go way way back to the early days of TV to find much quality content (and maybe even then it was mostly garbage, I've only seen the highlights from those days).

There was no Web at all in the 70s, 80s and early 90s, do you want to go back and look at some of the professional mass content let through by the gatekeepers Keen lauds?  Good lord man, it was shite, particularly the TV and movies.  We have TV shows that are 10x better now, thanks to a fragmented market.

It's particularly telling to see Keen's visceral reaction of distaste to a video of a Google VP talking about the promise of Web 2.0.  I'm not convinced Keen is motivated so much by a love of "professional" content as by a hatred of Silcon Valley utopianism (possibly related to his being a former Valley entrepreneur).

In case you're not aware, Keen wrote a book called The Cult of the Amateur, which is basically All Hail Mass Media and The Professional Classes.  Which, as I said, would be a more convincing argument if both the media and the professionals had been delivering us amazing content, rather than a lot of commercial pop-cultural lazy garbage.  The amateur cult on LibraryThing has rated the book 2.5 stars out of 5, which is quite a low rating.  Personally I thought it was such utter nonsense I couldn't manage more than a one sentence review.

That being said, I am not a relativist.  I think there are absolute moral and physical truths.  I think all this cultural relativism is baloney.  Science is not one belief system amongst many, there is no "believing" in DNA, as much as post-modernist "professionals" would like to assert.  But where I disagree strongly with Keen is that only the elite authorities have access to this truth.  Professionals can and do spout utter nonsense.  Amateurs can say things that are self-evidently true.  Truth is not relative, but it is equally available.

The most notable weakness of Keen's critique is it is not the public that has been pushing the truthiness agenda, indeed quite the opposite, it is the unwashed masses who have been seeking out BETTER ways of finding factual content, through rigourously referenced Internet postings, while the minor forces of leftist cultural relativism and the major forces of right-wing "when we make a statement it becomes inherent truth" have been leading the Assault on Reason.  Indeed my major beef with Al Gore's book of the same name was that it got diverted into being an anti-Bush diatribe, when the topic of the systematic assault on truth led by the right and supported by the "professional" mass media is one of the biggest and most important stories of the decade.

In fact, so adamant are the Internet amateurs about high-quality content, in the absence of such from the mass professional media, that I think it may be damaging Wikipedia.  There are two competing visions for Wikipedia.  For me, I'd like it to be the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  What Keen sees as a flaw, the fact that its entry for "truthiness" is as meticulously referenced and detailed as its entry for "truth", i see as a strength.  Here's the thing: the Wisdom of Crowds benefits most from... a crowd.  That means a few big central sites can get much better information as there are many more eyeballs checking for bugs.  I have long been dismayed by the decline of USENET, because it used to be one central place you could go to ask a question or start a discussion and get useful responds (yes, along with ridiculous flame threads, but those were manageable).  Now if you want to find info about a digital camera, or ask a question about physics, you're faced with dozens and dozens of fragmented discussion groups and web sites.

Wikipedia can and does address that fragmentation for general knowledge, in the same way that IMDB does for the specific topic of movies.  And at a certain level I agree, very technical items about Battlestar should go on a BG wiki, Warcraft on a Warcraft wiki, Trek on a Trek wiki etc.  But there are lots of general items that still benefit from being in the larger WIkipedia community.  There is a big tension right now unfortunately about what level of "notability" warrants a Wikipedia page.  I would set the bar fairly low - it's tremendously useful for me to do a search on Number Eight and get a nicely curated Wikipedia entry. 

Unfortunately Wikipedia seems to be moving in the other direction.  Sci Foo was challenged for notability (although it survived).  Number Eight is marked as trivia (although the notice has already moved from the top of the page to a miscellany section).  The problem with this is it's going to undermine content creation.  The great thing about Wikipedia is you can put up a starter page about your particular interest, and there are enough people in the crowd that it often builds up into a useful entry.

Anyway, those are my amateur thoughts, in my blog that has created more interesting connections for me than I probably could have ever gotten from an entire lifetime of writing more professionally crafted content for major media venues. 

Turning back to the TVO episode that started this all, the panel on authority that follows Keen is ok, I wish their points had been made a bit more clearly and sharply, they were a bit drifty, but the gist is that questions of truth have been pondered by philosophers since the dawn of philosophy, that the decline of authority (in particular of respect for authority figures such a doctors and teachers) started long before the Internet, and that most people are perfectly capable of separating nonsense (like say Keen's book) from quality content (like a good Wikipedia entry).

Previously:
October 13, 2007  The Wrath of the Professional: more anti-Internet nonsense
October 24, 2006  Maclean's: the Internet sucks

four years of Internet Librarian wikis

I have a fond place for Internet Librarian since blogging it in 2004 is what started off this blog.
I must say I was a bit disconcerted to arrive in a giant conference hall in 2004, snap open my laptop, and look around to see... people writing on paper notepads.

I am however really impressed at the librarian uptake of conference reporting over the net since then, whether it's blogs, wiki, Flickr etc. and I would now say in my experience at a wide variety of conferences over the past four years, librarians are now one of the most accomplished groups in terms of Internet-enabling conferences.

You can view some of the progression in the wikis

http://il2004.xwiki.com/ - started by me, post-conference
http://internetlibrarian.pbwiki.com/ - Internet Librarian 2005
http://il2006.pbwiki.com/
http://il2007.pbwiki.com/

Internet Librarian 2007 will be October 29-31, 2007 in Monterey

Community peer review in Wiki environment - Christine Chichester - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

This is very cool stuff, if they ever manage to make it all work.

Christine Chichester - Knewco Inc.
"Community peer review in Wiki environment"

http://www.wikiprofessional.info/

? OmegaWiki

goal: distill down every unique scientific concept to a unique identifier (the "knowlet")

Many challenges in current biomedical research
* volume of data
* complexity
* distributed systems and databases
* incompatible data formats
* multi-disciplinary
** multi-linguality

[Brazilian Portugese sp etc]

*** ambiguity of terminology
* inability to share knowledge

"Too much to read" indicates major trends

* from reading to consulting
* from reading to meta analysis
* from texts to facts
  ... to central and community annotation

Synonym issue

difficult homonym disambiguation issue: use context
- first order symantic enrichment

a knowlet is a triple
* types
  - facts
  - wiki annotation
  - co-occurrence
  - concept profile match
  - sequence similarity
  - co-expression

build an association matrix for large data sources

- disambiguation of author names
[Dr. somebody has algorithms]

1 million disambiguated authors
- from MEDLINE

1 million for genes, drugs and ?proteins

Assignment of protein function and discovery of new nucleolar proteins based on automtic analysis of medline
Martijn Schuemie, Christine Chichester, Frederique Lisaceck, Yahoo Coute, Peter-Jan Roes, Jean Charles Sanches, Barend Mons
Special issue Systems Biology in Protemics, 2008 (in press)

put discovered hypotheses into WikiProf and then if approved into e.g. swissprot

WikiProteins
WikiMedical
WikiPhysics
Wiki Authors
...

databases
- uniprot
- GO gene ontology
- intact
- NLM UNMS???  UNLS?

runs on OmegaWiki which uses MediaWiki

[knowledge space knowlet thing]

Wikiproteins Peer Review: ??? automated selector/requestor for peer review of annotations ???

blogs, wikis and libraries, oh my

LITA BIGWIG (Blogs, Wikis, and Social Software IG) is pleased to present the first ever online, unconference at ALA Annual 2007. The Social Software Showcase will be occuring around and during Annual. We have gathered eleven librarians and leaders in the field to present on cutting edge technology and social software. Regardless of where you are in the world, you will have the opportunity to view and discuss the presentations on the official Social Software Showcase Wiki.

...

We will have a Twitter feed

http://www.twitter.com/bigwig

More great work by libraries adopting and promoting new web technologies - I have to say I'm impressed by the speed at which things are moving.

from LITA Blog - Social Software Showcase, sponsored by BIGWIG

The presentations aren't up yet, but they will be by the time ALA gets underway at the end of June.

Wikipedia on linking to blogs and unworthy self-links

Wikipedia:External links

Links normally to be avoided

11. Links to blogs and personal webpages, except those written by a recognized authority.

Advertising and conflicts of interest

Due to the rising profile of Wikipedia and the amount of extra traffic it can bring a site, there is a great temptation to use Wikipedia to advertise or promote links. This includes both commercial and non-commercial sites. You should avoid linking to a website that you own, maintain or represent, even if the guidelines otherwise imply that it should be linked.

mashup platforms and SOA

Most businesses have yet to tap the potential of mashup technology. It requires an IT department that's bought into the service-oriented architecture approach, so that it's simple enough to mix, match, and change the data sources they're delivering to users in the form of mashups, says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink. Some sort of governance is needed to dictate who can create mashups, who has access to the data collection tools, and what mashups can contain. And governance requires technology investment in identity management systems to regulate data access.

InformationWeek - Mashups Make Their Way Into Business Apps--Slowly - February 17, 2007

Some related mashup platform sites:

IBM QEDWiki - "QEDWiki is a browser-based assembly canvas used to create simple mash-ups."

Yahoo Pipes

Microsoft Connected Services Sandbox - with a particular focus on telecom services
There is a Developers Contest, prizes are reported to range from $2500 to $25,000.

Tech to Watch in 2007 Horizon Report

They identified six technologies with time-to-adoption of between one and five years.
In addition to their analysis, they provide a useful list of web links for more information on each topic.

UPDATE: Probably I should link to the report (PDF). ENDUPDATE

Of most interest to me was "The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication".

New forms of scholarship, including fresh models of publication and nontraditional scholarly products, are evolving along with the changing process. Some of these forms are very common—blogs and video clips, for instance—but academia has been slow to recognize and accept them. Some scholars worry that blogging may cut into time that would otherwise be used for scholarly research or writing, for example, or that material in a podcast is not as well researched as material prepared for print publication. Proponents of these new forms argue that they serve a different purpose than traditional writing and research—a purpose that improves, rather than runs counter to, other kinds of scholarly work.

I also found it interesting that they separated "Virtual Worlds" (e.g. Second Life) from "Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming".  I think these categories are too often combined, whereas I find they are quite separate experiences, as I described in Second Life, Warcraft, and SOA.

As with last year, they had a Horizon Project Wiki

http://www.nmc.org/horizon/wiki/Main_Page

They also have tagged bookmarks in del.icio.us under hz07, and invite others to add to their tagged collection

http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07

via Stephen's Lighthouse

Previously:
February 26, 2006  New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE 2006 Horizon report

Wikis, blogues, folksonomie et autres

Links from a presentation given by Élisabeth Lavigueur in Quebec

Liens de la présentation du 9 février 2007

Amapedia - Amazon Product Wiki next generation

I'm not sure this effort is going anywhere, but what I find interesting is the amount of content that Amazon is able to get customers to contribute for free.

http://amapedia.amazon.com/

via Ten Thousand Year Blog

Previously:
November 26, 2005  Behold the power of Wikizon: Amazon adds ProductWiki

updated Council of Cdn Academies Wikipedia entry

When I created a Wikipedia entry for the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), as part of my quest to understand the federal science & technology advisory structure, and then subsequently criticised some
changed to the entry, I never imagined it would start the following chain of events:

- the CCA contacted me by phone to discuss my concerns
- they invited me to their offices (in downtown Ottawa) to discuss further and also, as it turned out, to talk a bit about science in the Web 2.0 world in general
- after a couple rounds of proposed revisions, they invited me back to their offices to help with the updating of the entry

Amazing the way that the Internet enables unexpected connections.
My kudos to Katherine Levitt who did the revisions and the actual Wikipedia text entry.  I just provided some critique, my perceptions of good Wikipedia etiquette and minimal syntax guidance.  I appreciate the warm reception they gave to my comments and ideas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Canadian_Academies

Tapscott on collaboration and Wikinomics in the Globe

Don Tapscott has the great fortune to get not one, not two, but seven articles in a series in the Globe based around his ideas in his new book Wikinomics.

The third article is out today.  I will update this post as the rest come out.

UPDATE 2006-12-30:

Part 4: The New Alexandrians

I wasn't able to extract a lot of meaning out of this, other than

A shared research infrastructure, in turn, allows project participants to harness insights and resources from thousands of university researchers, and hundreds of company researchers, too.

These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology -- breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders.

So keep that thought of shared infrastructure, shared platform in mind.

See next posting for part 5.

ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2007-01-02: The final two articles. ENDUPDATE

Part 3: The Prosumer Revolution - Life game a signpost for future

in Rosedale's business, customers do 99 per cent of the work. His "product" is a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG, for short) called Second Life, a fascinating world where more than 400,000 participants socialize, entertain and transact in a virtual environment fabricated almost entirely by its users.

In fact, Second Life residents are far more than just "users." They assume virtual identities, act out fictitious roles and activities and even create virtual businesses that earn some 3,100 residents an average net profit of $20,000 a year.

The end sentence is a bit misleading.  "earn some 3,100 residents (out of a total user base of over 2,000,000)" might have set the context better.  Yes, I'm still bitter that I only have a dollar.

Second Life is no typical "product," and it's not even a typical video game. It's created almost entirely by its customers -- you could say the consumers are also the producers, or the "prosumers." After all, they participate in the design, creation, and production of the product, while Linden Labs is content to manage the community and make sure the infrastructure is running.

It's interesting to see that the "prosumer" terminology continues to gain ground, after being introduced so long ago by Toffler.

Part 2: Ideagoras - A new marketplace for ideas

In addition to broadening and deepening its own proprietary networks, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These combined efforts led to hundreds of new products on the market, some of which turned out to be hits. In the process, Mr. Lafley and his managers like Mr. Huston transformed a lumbering consumer products company into a limber innovation machine.

I'm all for collaboration and external sourcing of innovation, but make no mistake, collaboration is hard.  Think about how difficult it is for you to communicate ideas within your own organization, to people who already have some common context.  I spend person-weeks every year doing this, with only limited success.  Now imagine trying to extend that conceptual integrity outside of your walls.

Part 1: Peer Pioneers - Get your mass collaboration road map set

Though it is unlikely that hierarchies will disappear in the foreseeable future, it's clear that the traditional business enterprise is no longer the sole engine of wealth creation in the economy.

The quintessential example of mass collaboration is Wikipedia -- a collaboratively created encyclopedia, owned by no one and authored by tens of thousands of enthusiasts.

See, this makes me dubious right away.  Wikipedia is a very finely tuned collaboration engine with an actual number of active contributors that is very small.  Businesses need to be very wary of the idea that they can just wave some collaboration wand and get useful results.

Not part of the series, but effectively Part 0: The Net Generation is entering the workforce

According to New Paradigm's research, N-Geners are used to more choices in their everyday lives than previous generations, whether it's which of the thousand songs they want to listen to on their iPod, or which blog read. They thrive on the freedom to chose, yet are not naive when it comes to the boundless determination of marketers to sell them stuff. They are especially discriminating when it comes to evaluating companies and what they sell, and will not buy from — or work for — one with a poor reputation.

The traditional approaches to planning, decision-making and information transfer are painstakingly slow to this group reared on instant everything. They are incredibly well-connected and can tap into a huge network of their peers, either through their instant messaging contact lists or through social networks. Nothing stays secret for long. N-Geners don't take well to the hierarchical and authoritarian management style; they like to work in teams, collaborate, so that problem solving becomes a communal task. They expect to be involved in decision making.

There is a Wikinomics Blog.

Previously:
November 24, 2006  the Wikinomic Generation