Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Yahoo leadership - nature abhors a vacuum

As GigaOM notes in Yahoo Please Put Up A Fight

Yahoo has a staggering 500 million users. However, it does a rather poor job of monetization. The vision that Yang shared at CES last week (“At Yahoo we want to be the most essential starting point for your life”) can come true if the key activities that we perform online are channeled through its My Yahoo service. And on the financial side, each of those activities needs to be backed up by a monetization model that takes full advantage of the traffic that Yahoo consistently manages to generate and preserve.

If you have an interesting network with a huge number of users and an awful way to monetize the traffic, people divert their attentions to other interesting networks with perhaps less users and much better ways to monetize traffic.  This is particularly true if the gating point for your interest and attention is your ability to fund day-in, day-out, constant attention to a project, and account or a campaign.

Jerry and Sue, you need to show some leadership.  Make it possible for me to make money on your network.  If you can't, I'll systematically divert my attention (and my clients spend) to other networks that perform better than Yahoo.  I'll happily take good ideas from Brad and Caterina and Stuart and Les and Susan and Joshua and put them to work somewhere that will generate good cash flow.  And I'll invite anyone who was laid off or who left Yahoo to join me on the Yahoo alumni network where we can figure out what's next.

Wiki Wednesday / Ann Arbor / Nov 2007 notes

Last night was Wiki Wednesday in Ann Arbor. We met at Rendezvous on South U.

In attendance: @matth @homelessdave @edwardvielmetti griff
Regrets: @bkerr @vaguery @samrose @tedernst

The main topic was Arborwiki, it's continuing care and feeding.

I gave some results of initial local search log analysis from the new features in Google Analytics, as a way to systematically surface pages that people are looking for that aren't there or that need love.

We talked about ways to source more photos for Arborwiki, with a call to the local Flickr community. Many pages don't have pictures on them that could. The Ann Arbor District Library has an image archive, but copyrights are murky and thus most of the photos are unusable. Most Flickr people are happy to grant rights to their photos for Arborwiki use if asked.

Griff talked about ideas for putting together a local community newspaper out of Ann Arbor Alive. We worked through some of the mechanics and logistics of this including trying to figure out a hosting platform - consensus was that Arborwiki has some of the data, but that this might be an ideal student Drupal design project.

There was some brainstorming about bicycle-mounted, bicycle-powered low power FM. Dave has bike power and a trailer suitable for towing a mobile station. FCC regs (unclear on exactly which) allow some amount of low power broadcasts as long as they are non-interfering; with an Internet head-end and a network of neighborhood retransmitters you could reasonably build community radio on the cheap.

Dave suggested an area of focus around expanding the number of biographies on the site. It would be reasonable, for instance, to have a bio page for every elected official, for every person that a street was named after, and for other people with some notability or notoriety. Less clear was the relationship between people's "user" pages and people's "bio" pages for folks who are contributors.

Matt talked about maps and mapping and plugins that manage that, which appear to be evolving well. Some ideal future neogeowiki world has an infrastructure that generates KML as a byproduct of user behavior for mapping and search.

NEEDS LINKS - DO THAT NEXT - POST NOW

Wikipedia: Threat or Menace?

Bill Tozier and I went to see Marshall Poe's talk at Eastern. Here's impressionistic notes on it. It's missing most of the links (sorry).

--

notes from Marshall Poe talk at Eastern Michigan University.

On the screen: "Sigismund von Herberstein".

intro: "informed about wikipedia, active participants in the creation of knowledge through wikipedia"

sponsors: history, philosophy

full house, or at least mostly full.

no t-mobile signal, and no open wifi; and therefore no way to ask twitter for a password for the emich wifi. and no power at the desk. so there might be limits to what I can do online, and I do have paper as a backup.

second speaker introduces marshall poe. "marshall poe is no charlatan". phd from u cal berkeley. taught at harvard, nyu, now at iowa. field is russian history, became aware of his work. many teaching awards including at harvard. many publications. numerous. various. books, articles, reviews, "the russian moment in world history" princeton university press. book sold well, translated to swedish, greek, russian. forthcoming. scholarly, very scholarly. vast number of reviews. publishing online "later then published by large publishers". book forthcoming called "wiki world: the globalization of knowledge in the 21st century" based on atlantic monthly.

suggested that grad students read and bring up to academic standards the set of russian history articles. "wikipedia is junk", "don't want to encourage it any more". contributor to using the internet for scholarly purposes. (hm, have any of his articles been done for assistive media? check on this). memory archive, have people write down their own memories. former moderator of the early slavic studies list. cofounder of new journals dealing with russian history. scholar, teacher, leading thinker. ability to communicate effectively scholarly insights to the general public.

(applause) (applause)

"sigismund freiherr von herberstein". "the columbus of russia". for my sins I spent my youth studying this individual. surfing the net, found wiki. who else is interested? Phaedrus86. Doesn't saw a lot about himself. Computer programmer in New Zealand...who else is interested? "I was just kind of interested." History degree, read his books. Send him Christmas cards. Revelation in 2001, found a person who was not a professional who was also interested.

A lot of people know a lot of stuff, and not recorded, and when you die it will die with you. Wikipedia is a way for you to say what you know. Knowledge is not something you can take with you. You can contribute, collaborate with millions of other people in building the greatest repository of knowledge the world has ever known.

History of wikipedia
What it is, how it works
How to use it for your own purposes

1. Nupedia. 1998 start, 2000 copy on archive.org. Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger.2000/04/07. Academics work really slowly. Didn't work.

2. Sanger meets a wiki person (who?). Wiki, collaboratively. Great idea. Implemented it on Nupedia, nothing happened. Academics said "you've got to be kidding". Mass defection, pissed off all the academics. Project is at an end.

3. Sanger. Let's just let anybody edit it. Wales: Ana Kournikova web ring, big in 2000.

Discovered quite by accident that there was a lot of people who were aching to edit encyclopedia articles.

Professors said "this is going to be crap". Maybe they're right, but they're not, they're not right.

Wikipedia 2001/03/31: Not terribly flashy, bad logo "accident with Illustrator".

Now: enormous: 2m+ English, 256k+ Svenska.

Everyone is dumping everything they know into it.

Wikipedians.... "there's a whole group of people who don't do anything except fix commas".

Alexa 9% of the net: 240m people use Wikipedia on any given day.

"What is this thing, facebook of which you speak? In my day it was called Friendster."

who is bigger than wikipedia? youtube, google, but not facebook or myspace.

edit, revert, edit, revert, add, add, cite.

Beyond Talmudic, beyond Byzantine - they go on and on and on about these things.

What is on Wikipedia *should be* correct, because it's the public.

"The legendary water tower".

Every meaningful object of experience has a page on wikipedia.

"History of the heavy metal umlaut."

Wikipedia in academia:

Wikipedia is a conversation, not an entity.

Take a dog to the beach. "Too useful to go away".

"There's some crazy dude in New Zealand who's going to do that for you."

How should you use wikipedia? Very carefully.

"For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia."

What do you do:

1. Register. Why would you want to be anonymous on the web? So you can hide. Because you hide if you're doing bad stuff.

(note to self: register on arborwiki, register on wikipedia, register on great lakes wiki....)

2. Build a reputation. Simple: act well, other people notice that you act well. similar to ebay. "reputation management system".

3. Formal mechanisms to engage wikipedia. Use wikipedia as a course assignment.

(mapoe, that's a cereal I used to eat when I was a kid)

Using the wiki as course management software - Marshall Poe at Iowa - let John Lawler talk to him about this !)

* don't plagiarize
* cite your sources
* don't make stuff up

H-RUSSIA

WikiProject Russian history

"Go there and add and contribute".

"Make sure everyone knows everything."

---

It was a great talk, and it was good talking with him afterwards. I gave him an a2b3 sticker, so if you're in Iowa and you see one of those say hi.

Marshall Poe (Iowa, Atlantic Monthly): Wikipedia: Academia's Friend or Foe, Eastern Michigan University, Thursday Oct 25 2007, 7pm, 201 Pray-Harrold Hall

Marshall Poe is speaking in Ypsilanti tonight (oct 25 2007). Here's his interview in The Atlantic: Common Knowledge: Marshall Poe on the marvels and pitfalls of Wikipedia, the fastest-growing encyclopedia in human history.

EMU is hosting a year-long lecture series on "Wikipedia and Academia." The first lecture/discussion (by yours truly) will be tomorrow night (Thursday, October 25) at 7 pm, in 201 Pray-Harrold Hall on the EMU campus. The subject will be "Wikipedia: Academia's Friend or Foe?"

Next semester there will be three more lecture/discussions:

-Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia; founder of Citizendium), "Wikipedia, Citizendium and the Future of Online Collaboration"
Thursday, February 7, 7pm, EMU Student Center Auditorium

-Andrew Keen (author of Cult of the Amateur), "The Dangers of Wikipedia"
Thursday, March 6, 7pm, EMU Student Center Auditorium

-Katherine Walsh (member of the WikiMedia Foundation Board of Trustees)—Title TBA
Thursday, April 10 7pm, EMU Student Center Auditorium

If you have questions, please contact me.

Marshall Poe

Technorati Tags: emich, ypsilanti, michigan, wiki, wikipedia, law

Scott Johnston, JotSpot PM - Future Direction of Google Apps

from the Ann Arbor SPARK site:

Hi-Tech Tuesday
The Future Direction of Google Apps
Sponsored by: Ann Arbor SPARK

Presenter(s): Scott Johnston, Product Manager for JotSpot

Date: Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Time: 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
5-5:30 p.m. - Registration and Networking
5:30-7 p.m. - Program

Location: SPARK Central
330 E. Liberty
Ann Arbor

Cost:
Member $0
Nonmember $25
Student $5

Join Scott as he talks about the future direction of Google Apps. He will discuss how businesses can use Google Apps to give employees powerful communication and collaboration tools that will help bring their productivity to the next level. He will also present on how service firms can use Google Apps to extend their offerings to customers.
Scott Johnston is currently the Product Manager for JotSpot as they work to integrate their products into Google. Scott was the VP of Products for JotSpot when it was acquired by Google in November of 2006. Prior to JotSpot, Scott was the Director of Engineering for Kintana, a start-up in the IT process automation space. Kintana was acquired by Mercury Interactive in 2003.

Scott graduated from Brown University with an Sc.B in Electrical Engineering and Computer Hardware Design.

Scott grew up in Ann Arbor and is an avid Michigan Fan. Scott is currently attempting to erase the first two football Saturdays of '07 from his memory.

Technorati Tags: google-ann-arbor, google-apps, jotspot, ann-arbor-spark, ann-arbor-usa, drupal

Participatory Media / Collective Action

Via Paul Hartzog - this course announcement at Berkeley's SI, taught by Howard Rheingold:

The syllabus for Participatory Media/Collective Action is now available. Xiao Qiang and I will teach the class at UC Berkeley's School of Information (course description) on Fridays, 9 AM-Noon, beginning Sept 1. The class will be in South Hall, but we don't have a room assignment yet. This will be a very hands-on course, with active blogging, wiki work, tagging, and podcasting. Guests will include Marc Smith, Joshua Schachter, and others. Limited to 15 students, with preference given to graduate students.

seen on Smart Mobs.

ECAR/Burton Study Analyzes Trends in Social Software

thanks to Kim Bayer for this pointer:

Trends in Social Software

Mike Gotta with Peter O’Kelly, 44 pages

Adoption of blogs, wikis, tagging, bookmarking services, folksonomies, social networking software, and media-oriented services (e.g., podcasting) has been extraordinary over the past few years. Information technology strategists must assess this “social software” to understand its applicability within higher education. Burton Group, an ECAR partner, believes that the intersection of multiple trends across consumer and enterprise markets will have long-term implications (e.g., informal learning and community building). This study presents issues, trends, analysis, recommendations, and details.

ECAR is the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research -

The mission of the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research is to foster better decision making by conducting and disseminating research and analysis about the role and implications of information technology in higher education. ECAR systematically addresses many of the challenges brought more sharply into focus by information technologies.

Google spreadsheets vs Wikicalc

I am signed up for the Google spreadsheet early trial. The one test I did for it - upload an Excel worksheet, make some edits, send it to someone else through Google - worked as I expected.

The strength of this offering is the very simple sharing model it enables; you can have any arbitrary group of people very easily share access read only or read write to a worksheet.

The biggest weakness is that it's slow - really slow - at least on my Firefox / iBook G4 combo. Serious spreadsheet junkies will want a local client, at least for the bulk of their data entry and edits. I'd hate to do a lot of typing in it.

The compelling alternative path to this is WikiCalc, where you have all of the sharing environment of an enterprise wiki + spreadsheet functions. Read more about WikiCalc + Socialtext on ZDnet

Disclaimer: I am a Socialtext shareholder and founder.

Technorati Tags: wikicalc, socialtext, spreadsheet, excel

MemoryWiki and The Remembering Site: Online memoirs

MemoryWiki and The Remembering Site are two online systems devoted to capturing and collecting stories from people who have lived first hand through history. Give them both a look if you have your own story to tell.

Thanks to historian and writer Marshall Poe (keeper of the MemoryWiki) for the link. The pages include such accounts as the Michigan vs. Ohio State Riot from 2002 in Columbus, O. (Let's hope there's not a similar riot in 2005 here in Ann Arbor, MI - the big game is today.)

Marshall and Lou Rosenfeld and I had a good breakfast at Zingerman's where we talked about this and all manner of other things. He's moving to Ann Arbor this spring into one of the few single-family homes in the Old Fourth Ward.

Technorati Tags: memoir, football, michigan, annarbor, ohiostate, ohowihateohiostate, memorywiki, wiki, columbus, ohio

Wiki in Worldcat, Gary Houk

Jenny at "The Shifted Librarian" writes:

I’m in Dublin, Ohio, at the TechConnections conference to give three presentations tomorrow (blogs, RSS, and social bookmark managers), but I arrived just in time today to hear Gary Houk present on the topic of “Connecting Users to Library Services in an Amazoogle World: Trends in Information Discovery and Delivery.”

Wiki in WorldCat

* Want to capture user input in structured ways; will be a pilot test this summer
* User will be able to enter comments, recommendations, reviews, etc.
* Side note: this is exactly what I noted they could do at NEASIST in May!

thanks Jenny for the good reporting!