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August 29, 2004
Wikipedia Reputation
Ross commented on Wikipedia's reputation here.
The core issue of collaborative editing, that of accuracy and trust, has reached a point in debate where research is needed to advance the practice of content use and development. Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globle offered a Wikipedia criticism in July, calling it One great source — if you can trust it:
Posted by Xiao at 07:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 28, 2004
关于维基百科的争论
Joichi对维基百科的辩护是情理之中，开源项目的明星得到一些争议也不是坏事。
最后终结这一辩论的不会是词汇，而是数字。
Posted by Xiao at 04:12 PM | TrackBack
Political protesters hear call with text messaging
Via: Smart Mobs:
A well written article by Noah Shachtman for the Chicago Tribune on how the mobile phone has become a tool of choice for US political organizers with some quotes from Howard.
some quotes from Howard.
And when activists by the thousands gather in New York City to protest at the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday, cell phones will get their biggest workout yet as activist instruments.
Mobile-engaged masses don't just connect differently; they act differently too. SMS alerts over cell phones have enabled demonstrators to shift tactics, deploy resources and respond to the police, just about instantly.
"It allows us to react more quickly to a situation as it's happening. Text messaging lets everybody be on the same page, at the same second," said Rachael Perrotta, a 24-year-old organizer from Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood.
Law enforcement officials concede they're having trouble keeping up with these fast-moving, cell-connected groups.
"Now, they can actually coordinate tactics, create a feint. They'll start a demonstration in one place to draw the police, while their true objective is in another," said Charles "Sid" Heal, a crowd-control specialist and 29-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
"There's nothing we can do right now to counter them," Heal said. "They're in a digital age, and we're still in analog."
Dozens of overlapping mobile-messaging groups will connect protesters in New York. General broadcasts from the activist collective CounterConvention.org will let demonstrators know about events throughout the day.
Volunteer medics will use an SMS service called TxtMob to coordinate first-aid treatment for demonstrators. Smaller bands of activists will use TXTMob as well to track the movements of key Republican officials, including President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
"We'll have roving mobs wherever Bush and Cheney are at," said CounterConvention.org's William Etundi.
Activists also will be able to document the demonstrations for themselves, using the digital cameras commonly embedded in today's cell phones. These pictures then can be instantly uploaded to a Web site, Moport.org , which is creating a photographic record of the convention protests.
Rheingold, sees mobile phones' political impact stretching far beyond demonstrations.
"They'll be used to coordinate activities in real time in the streets at the convention. In November, they'll be used to get out the vote and for poll watching," he said.
"It'll change politics now and forever more. This is the first stirrings of it."
Posted by Xiao at 10:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 26, 2004
MoveOn and the politics of grassroots mobilization
Gary Wolf in Wired magazine: A quiet couple in Berkeley, California, got sick of being ignored by the system. So they built a new one. How MoveOn.org changed the face of fund raising, brought P2P to political advertising and reinvented...
Via: New Media Musings
Marshall McLuhan believed that new media cannibalize their predecessors: Writing preserved stories that had been spoken or sung; television was visual radio; on the Internet, people send each other letters. McLuhan's point is that you can't simply look at the content of a medium to judge its effects, for the contents will, at first, be traditional. Instead, you have to look at the context and the way the contents are consumed.
Which is more important, the medium or its contents? In the case of MoveOn, this is a testable hypothesis. If McLuhan was wrong, then MoveOn, next year, will be merely the sucked-dry remnants of a gigantic fundraising list, expiring in the aftermath of the campaign. If McLuhan was right, then MoveOn will continue to evolve and grow, assimilating all the familiar forms of politics into itself, extending them, heightening their impact, and using the material of yesterday to produce tomorrow's unpredictable effects.
Posted by Xiao at 10:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Web 2.0
John Battelle's Web 2.0 conference is on a wide range of topics, including RSS and Web publishing, online and search marketing, social networks, blogs, wikis, and much more.
Posted by Xiao at 12:24 PM | TrackBack
August 25, 2004
Collaborative knowledge gardening
Jon Udell's article: "with flickr and del.icio.us, social networking goes beyond sharing contacts and connections."
You were not impressed by the first generation of social networking software, but this time can be different. According to Jon, "del.icio.us address specific activities that benefit from an informal, diverse network of people. Flickr, as I would explain it to my friends and family, is a way to easily upload and share digital photos. And del.icio.us does the same thing, only for Web bookmarks. "
Posted by Xiao at 04:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 23, 2004
Whale culture and CAS perspective
This is from Mayer-Kress's work in 2000. "Culture can be viewed as one manifestation of an emergent, self-organized structure of a complex, adaptive system. (Strogatz 1994)......In cultures without written language, songs play an important role in preserving the community's collective memory......recurrent structure and patterns in humpback whale songs that are similar to musical themes and motives in human songs. "
Gottfried Mayer gave better introduction on this subject:
"About thirty years ago it was recognized that Humpback whales are capable of elaborate songs lasting more than fifteen minutes, about five times longer than songs that humans remember to sing. Since then a number of researchers have tried to understand why they are doing this over and over again for a number of months during breeding season. During that time the songs -organized in well reproducible phrases and themes that even seem to "rhyme"- slowly evolve in a manner similar to human songs: variations are introduced, some phrases are shortened and dropped, new ones introduced etc. For the rest of the year, whales are manly busy traveling to the high latitude feeding grounds apparently forgetting about the songs. But once they are back in the breeding grounds the singers all start singing again the same songs right where they left them at the end of the previous season. Because of the temporal coincidence of breeding and singing it was speculated that females are attracted to the best singers. Careful experiments using playback of the latest songs showed, however, that instead of flocking around the singers the females rather avoid them and take off with the non-singing jocks among the whales. Are the songs perhaps some form of Humpback Whale Blues? "
Posted by Xiao at 07:03 PM | TrackBack
August 21, 2004
How Participatory Journalism is Being Used Now
From Rebecca's Techjournalism News: "JEFF JARVIS is now talking.
He begins by summarizing what makes blogs unique and new.
"news is a conversation."
"Mass market is dead. The mass of niches is going to take over media."
Mary Lou Fulton shows us the participatory community news site, Northwest Voice, a project by the Bakersfield Californian. It uses a set of software tools developed by iUpload. The site's citizen journalism model is not unlike South Korea's OhMyNews. It is not a blog.
"Posted by Xiao at 09:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Another article about RSS
Mark Pilgrim Wrote "RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way. "
Here is his article.
Posted by Xiao at 09:22 PM | TrackBack
Unconventional economists and sociologists who study markets
Peter introduced some unconventional economists: "Examples of economists in this group include Bob Frank (interesting past books include _Passions within Reason_), Robert Shiller (_Irrational Exuberance_ - yes, he's the guy who coined the phrase that was then used by Greenspan), Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis (formally of the famously heterodox econ department at U Mass Amherst, now associated with the Santa Fe Institute), Marcel Fafchamps (does quantitative empirical research on social capital in informal economies), and Ernst Fehr (so wonderfully talented and creative that he's done work on everything from reciprocity to the hormone oxytocin).
Examples of sociologists doing great work on economic matters include Mark Granovetter, Ron Burt, Wayne Baker, and Brian Uzzi. Social network analysis and social capital are common themes among these sociologists."
Posted by Xiao at 08:10 PM | TrackBack
On bridge builders
Ethan Zuckerman's "Making room for the third world in the second superpower" provided another angle for the digital democracy theme in Jim Moore and Joi Ito's essays.
"Solving the caring problems will require a focus on bridge builders: expatriates writing about their adopted nations for their countrymen at home; Peace Corps, Britain's Voluntary Service Organization and other volunteers blogging about their countries of service; exchange students; non-governmental organization workers. These people are well positioned to tell us about events in other nations in terms we can understand...one of the most productive steps the weblog community could take to ensure its inclusiveness is to arm people living outside their home country with weblog tools.."
Posted by Xiao at 07:44 PM | TrackBack
密码中的密码
丹布朗流畅地谈论“历史是由赢家写成的。”
相对论，不确定原理，复杂系统理论，物理学要告诉我们什么呢？信仰呢？达芬奇的密码呢？
为什么女神在两千年来的基督教文明里消失了？
久违了，罗浮。
Posted by Xiao at 12:54 PM | TrackBack
August 19, 2004
RSS is....
Dave Winer said in his new blog on RSS. To him, RRS is...
"1. A format.
2. Content management tools that generate feeds in the format.
3. Aggregators and readers that subscribe to the feeds.
4. Search engines and utilities that crunch the information and ideas.
5. Services from technology companies like Microsoft and Apple.
6. Authoritative publications like the BBC, The New York Times, CNET, InfoWorld, PC World, Time, Wired, Salon, Yahoo, Reuters -- that distribute news and opinion in RSS.
7. Many thousands of weblogs covering virtually every aspect of life on this planet.
8. A vast and growing community of thinkers, writers, educators, public servants, and technologists.
The revolution of RSS is what people are doing with it, what it enables, the way it works for people who use technology, the freedom it offers, and the way it makes timely information, that used to be expensive and for the select-few so inexpensive and broadly available.
RSS is the next thing in Internet and knowledge management. "
Posted by Xiao at 03:55 PM | TrackBack
August 17, 2004
庐山烟雨浙江潮
庐山烟雨浙江潮
未到千般恨不消
及至到来无一物
庐山烟雨浙江潮
－－苏轼
Posted by Xiao at 08:16 PM | TrackBack
August 16, 2004
Organizational Metaphors
Metaphors shape the ways in which we conceptualize and understand the organizations we investigate. They shape the research questions we ask, and the methods we use to answer those questions. They privilege certain issues while concealing others.
In industrial era: organization as machines,
1970s: organization-as-living systems
1980s: organization-as-cultures
1990s: organization-as-computers
Today: 'It's the network, stupid!"
Posted by Xiao at 09:10 AM | TrackBack
August 13, 2004
听雨
摇动的吊床，夜色遮没了近处的树木；雷雨如注，空气里浸漫着草地和海潮的气息。
夜雨是一种提醒：与景色相比，声音和气味能更亲密地触摸灵魂。
Posted by Xiao at 09:10 AM | TrackBack
August 12, 2004
Two Interviews
Via M2M, Ross blogged the Business Week interview with Howard, said he was "trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Weblogs, open-source software development, and Google."
There is also an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on Slashdot, it is excellent.
What methods have you found that work best for getting people not only involved in contributing, but also keeping them contributing to the Wiki?
Jimmy Wales:
Love. It isn't very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it's a very very important part of what holds our project together.
I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We're doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way.
It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. It is my intention that free textbooks from our wikibooks project will be used to revolutionize education in developing countries by radically cutting the cost of content.
Those kinds of big picture ideals make people very passionate about what we're doing. And it makes it possible for people to set aside a lot of personal differences and disputes of the kind that I talked about above, and just compromise to keep getting the work done.
I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
Posted by Xiao at 01:46 PM | TrackBack
Peace & Laziness
This is a wonderful message from Peter.
Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walden. I hope you won't mind if I offer a brief taste below:
"Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases, he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quick-sands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.
...
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time save nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nice tomorrow."
peace & laziness,
Peter Kollock
This reminded you that two months ago, John Updike also had an article called A sage for all seasons on Guardian. Updike wrote:
In a time of informational overload, of clamorously inane and ubiquitous electronic entertainment, and of a fraught, globally challenged, ever more demanding workplace, the urge to build a cabin in the woods and thus reform, simplify, and cleanse one's life - "to front", in Thoreau's ringing verb, "only the essential facts of life" - remains strong.
......Thoreau's recognitions endeared him to the revolutionaries of the 1960s: he saw the violence behind the established order, the enslaving nature of private property, and - a trend even stronger now than 40 years ago - the media's substitution of "the news" for private reality. "Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous." The word "reality" rings through Walden : "Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance... till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality ... Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business."
Posted by Xiao at 10:18 AM | TrackBack
August 08, 2004
Tanglewood
Your first time to Tanglewood. Impressed by Kayhan Kalhor's "Gallop of a Thousand Horses." A truly beautiful piece.
On the Road
Ozawa Hall
Music and documentary image just do not go together. Important lesson for any experiment trying to mix different sensational experiences. Instead of enhancing each other, you may end up distracting from each other. It may very well kill the flow.
Posted by Xiao at 09:38 AM | TrackBack
August 04, 2004
Whaling Musuem
New Bedford: once the world capital of whaling industry. Thousands of men lost in the high seas, and more than million sperm whales and other whales were gone during 19 century for the greed of accumulation. All these are being called "historic interaction of humans with whales worldwide" here.
Who were those ones on those whaling ships?
"Some were there for escape. Some others were their for destiny."
Posted by Xiao at 11:16 AM | TrackBack
August 01, 2004
Ungulates
Whales, dolphins, and porpoises branched out from the group of animals called ungulates during the Paleocene period (57-67million years ago) and returned to the aquatic environment 50 million years ago. Our best guess is that they went back into the water to access rich food resources and to escape fierce competition on land.