sj's Longest Now [v.1]

Southern Indonesia. One? two? underwater quake[s, 3 minutes apart]. Potential for a tsunami in the next 3 hours. Forbes, English Wikinews

I just snagged an InstaSet AM/FM Clock radio with blue display, to replace my aging red display, in the hopes that some proto-Doppler effect would rub off on me. (It must have worked; today, without even plugging it in, I was up at 7am, and literally itching for 9 to roll around so I could start making business calls… a rarity since I stopped running my own shop.)

It has a mini clockchip that’s installed on manufacture; keeps the time for three years. No setting. Has decent speakers, decent reception, no annoying antennae-extension. I plugged it in, the radio tuned in. The default alarm time was 8:25AM, fine by me. The tuner and volume-wheel were sensitive and nicely done. The buttons for switching times and modes were cheap and stuck, moving jerkily; I’m glad I won’t have to press them often. What a beautiful piece of junk.

Surfwax Inc is a 7-year-old search portal and knowledge-tool provider with atrocious website design and a love of bizarre nomenclature, which has brought you such well-known marvels as
Nextaris, the all-in-one search/upload/store/social-networking portal, and the infamous Surfwax Scholar Plagiarism Guard.

They regularly receive praise for their featureset from such prominent critis as SearchEngineWatch’s Gary Price, and [cl]aim to offer “the best grip on information from the Open Web,” and have been offering visitors “Look-ahead” auto-complete searching for a while. Now they offer look-ahead wiki searches as well, and claim over 600,000 Wikipedia terms (perhaps this means that ~80,000 terms are not counted in the official article count; if they were including all redirects, it would be more like 900k terms).

I was going to share with you a little something about Hieronima de Paiva, a Portuguese jew and Elihu Yale‘s companion in Madras (now Chennai), but I don’t have time right now. Instead let me note that the English Wikipedia reached its 500,000th article yesterday, about the Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union.

Articles were being written at a much higher rate then usual today, peaking at 150 per hour as the milestone approached. For comparison, the previous full 24-hr period of editing saw the creation of 915 new articles.

Modern debates about public v. private wifi outlays, and whether municipalities and dictatorial! monopolistic! governments should be involved, look pretty silly when viewed with the proper perspective… Glenn Fleishman highlights this in a recent essay with an excellent thought-experiment about electricity.

Reasoning by parallel analogy is wonderfully satisfying. (Even if reasoning by poor analogy is often the opposite…) All of this isn’t to say that municipal wifi control is the way to go — only that the standard arguments against it aren’t worth much.

In the March edition of WIRED, Daniel Pink has managed to turn a few personal meetings, a bit of leg-work (including a trip to the sparse Foundation headquarters in Florida), the stray historical quote and a bit of prognostication, into a poetic piece on Wikipedia. He refers to the project as the latest stage in mankind’s longstanding desire to “tame the jungle of knowledge”.

Titled “The Book Stops Here“, the piece’s layout runs to six pages, mimicing those of a gold-edged, leather-bound book. The frontispiece, showing Wales gazing levelly over a large stack of Britannica volumes and — are those the 2001 Florida Statues? — is coupled with a set of beautiful sketches of six active wikipedians (Angela, Bryan Derksen, Carptrash, Kingturtle, Ram-Man, and Raul654), whose stories are woven into the article.

Pink deals quite well with the nuances of community collaboration, good faith, administrators, stewards, and developers, and brilliantly captures vignettes of individual contributors and motivations.
Perhaps the one bit of internal culture he gets slightly off is the tone of the admiration community members show towards founder Jimmy Wales — the cheerful irony that accompanies the term “God-King” in wiki circles, is unlikely to carry over to an audience used to hearing the term associated with infallible emperors of times long past.

The one glaring omission in the article is an acknowledgement of the project’s unparallelled multilinguality. The only mention of other languages is a single sentence discussing the size of the encyclopedia — “Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.” Surely that 60% of the project deserves more than a nod. Similarly, other Wikimedia projects go unremarked, though WikiCities gets a few paragraphs.

Charles Van Doren‘s 1962 essay, “The Idea of an Encyclopedia” in “The American Behavioral Scientist” is called in to wrap the piece up (Van Doren later became a senior Britannica editor):

“[T]he ideal encyclopedia should be radical. It should stop being safe…. what will be respectable in 30 years seems avant-garde now. If an encyclopedia hopes to be respectable in 2000, it must appear daring in the year 1963.”

Pink’s conclusion? “You can’t evaluate Wikipedia by traditional encyclopedia standards.” Nevertheless, he feels the project is “about to become respectable.”

Other great quotes from the article:

• “The God-King drives a Hyundai.”
• “Wikipedia requires that the perfect never be the enemy of the good.”
• “Among the nearly half-million articles are tens of thousands whose quality easily rivals that of Britannica or Encarta.”
• “One night he corrected an error in an article… his first inhalation of Wiki crack.”

Slashdot has a story about it.  The New York Times (NYT article, 2/11) wrote about it.  Blogs and IRC chans are buzzing about it.  Meta even has a page about it, one out of only 3,000.   What’s this all about?  Google has offered Wikimedia
some hosting.  People seem to think this is the first hosting
donation (it’s not), or the only such offer in the pipeline (there are
at least 3 others), or that only the few and the proud can offer
hosting at all (anyone with a small colo facility and goodwill can do
the same).

Just to clear things up a little, here is an overview of Wikimedia partners and hosts.  And a separate page where anyone can offer to host Wikimedia content.   There are already a handful of good static mirrors, a center in
Paris donating  machines and hosting (handling requests from the
UK and northern Europe), and a hosting deal being worked out with an educational group
in the Netherlands.  Google is just more exciting because they’re
so damn cool, and because they can move quickly if something is worked
out (in contrast, the Paris arrangement spent almost half a year in
limbo between the acceptance of their offer and the first transfer of
traffic to the new location).

See also presroi’s thoughts on the matter.

Just reading an old prediction by Nick Negroponte, the savant and seer currently pushing forward a $100 laptop initiative. 
A fascinating read, about how he was sure the most active users of the
internet today would be appliances and gadgets and toys… also a
reminder that as a society of thinking creatures, we’re far from the
centered and peaceful self-awarenesss that would lead to sober
predictions about the future.  Danger, Will Robinson…

For instance: if you really want to make $100 machines for the world,
design systems with easily-separable, interchangable parts.  Don’t
rely on your own vision of a hundred million machines to provide
spares for people; assume they will have their own spares.  You
don’t have to make ‘laptops’ with catch closures on the monitors (which
break) and monitors tightly integrated with the body (with hinges that
break) and embedded keyboards (which get crumbs in them and eventually
need to be replaced).  There’s nothing magical, or even
attractive, about the standard modern image of a Lap-Top
computer.  Just make the whole collection small and light, make it
fit into a cloth bag, and make it easy for people to get by with the
most prevalent spare parts.

A few people seem to already have started blogging the conference, creating programs for the attendees and pre-linking to this blog
as a resource for transcripts.  I don’t know if I’ll have time to
upload transcripts during the day, however, so barring finding a good
log-bot, you may have to actually be on IRC to read the
proceedings. 

I’m at the Berkman conf for Internet and Society today, and mmm, is it
a mixed crowd.  Geeks, politicians, students and faculty of all
stripes.  I have to run out again, so can’t stay for much of the
Biz lecture, but I’m sure a lot of people will be blogging it today.

There was, however, a distinct shortage of people live-transcribing
what was going on, either on irc or elsewhere.  I have yet to see
a blog with more than just a passing quote… which is a real
shame.  We should not let the luxury of having the bandwidth for audio and video feeds (note that they still fuzz out, break, drag on and on) preclude traditional, highly transferable and searchable, methods of archiving.  It’s like the pending archival doom of the digital age, redoubled upon itself.