Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert - "McLuhan prefigured the Internet era in a number of surprising ways. As he said in
a March 1969 Playboy interview: 'The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the Logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of harmony and peace' ... Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of 'authority', 'authorship', and even 'knowledge' ... Knowledge is growing more broadly and immediately participatory and collaborative by the moment."
posted by kliuless
on May 29, 2011 -
90 comments
The McKinsey Global Institute has published "
Internet Matters: The Net's sweeping impact on growth, jobs, and prosperity" [70 Page PDF or just the
Summary]. "On average, the Internet contributes 3.4 percent to GDP in the 13 countries covered by the research an amount the size of Spain or Canada in terms of GDP, and growing at a faster rate than that of Brazil... For governments, investments in infrastructure, human capital, financial capital and business environment conditions will help strengthen their Internet supply domestic ecosystems." Found on Marginal Revolution where
Tyler Cowen has a few interesting comments.
posted by Blake
on May 26, 2011 -
8 comments
According to recent studies, arguing on the internet is now the second most popular leisure activity in the world, just below shopping and just above sex. But how many of those who spend half their lives debating God versus Atheism or Climate Change on a message board or blog really know how to win
those arguments? Now, for the first time, anonymous internet guru Noseybonk reveals the ploys, tactics and strategems of Blogmanship: the art of winning arguments on the internet without really knowing what you are talking about. Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4,
Part 5.
posted by shakespeherian
on May 20, 2011 -
67 comments
PBS's excellent weekly news magazine,
Need to Know,
explains why European broadband speeds are racing ahead of the USA. Britain now has 400 broadband suppliers with service available for as little as $6/month. Bonus: Harvard's Berkman Center
reports on broadband supply trends around the world.
posted by anigbrowl
on May 13, 2011 -
53 comments
Founded in 2004 as a place to catalog LiveJournal drama rejected from Wikipedia,
Encyclopedia Dramatica rapidly became the premier site on the web for all manner of
lulz. Intended
"in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary," ED grew into a sprawling crowdsourced compendium of memes, subcultures, communities, personalities, and the endless feuds and controversies spawned by
4chan and
other anonymous imageboards. While comprehensive, the site developed a reputation for nastiness -- full of "ironic" (?) racism, gratuitous porn, organized attacks on other sites, and disturbingly thorough dossiers on perceived enemies, all dripping with vicious snark (just check out
their entry on MetaFilter). But now, after more than six years, it appears the troll has become the trolled. Founder Sherrod "Girlvinyl" DeGrippo, allegedly
disillusioned by the site's
legal woes and
nihilistic trajectory, has
permanently shuttered the site and replaced it with
OhInternet, a slicker, cleaner, Web 2.0 effort modeled after more respectable internet guides like
Know Your Meme (which recently sold to
Cheezburger Networks for a cool
$N million, discussed
here).
Backups and mirrors abound, but as for the source? Pool's closed...
forever.
posted by Rhaomi
on Apr 15, 2011 -
85 comments
Here’s what we think the Editor Trends Study tells us: Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new editors were still active a year after their first edit. Post-2007, lots of people were still trying to become Wikipedia editors. What had changed, though, is that they were increasingly failing to integrate into the Wikipedia community, and failing increasingly quickly. The Wikimedia community had become too hard to penetrate. -
The Wikimedia Strategy March 2011 Update discusses wikipedia's declining ability to retain new editors. Meanwhile the case of the
deletion (and restoration) of the article on the
remarkably notable Old Man Murray highlights the bad decisions that can occur when insular admins and editors favor deletionist sentiment and bureaucratic rule-waving over the input of outsiders and a basic level of research.
posted by Artw
on Mar 11, 2011 -
96 comments
Security-in-a-Box.
A complete guide to digital security for advocates and human rights defenders (and for you too!). It includes all the info and tools you'll need for anything related to personal digital security.
Mobiles in-a-box: Tools and tactics for mobile advocacy.
Message in-a-box: Everything you need to make and distribute your own media.
NGO-in-a-box: Set up you NGO using free and open-source software.
[more inside]
posted by lemuring
on Feb 28, 2011 -
14 comments
"Unlike the link ... likes are arguably easier to create. Moreover, they are explicit endorsements rather than implicit ones. Therefore, they carry more weight once they are pulled through the lens of our friends. More so than links, this new network of signals allows content to find you, rather than you having to go find it. The rise of likes, just as links before it, will create all kinds of new businesses. And we're just getting started."
Are likes poised to replace links as the Web's primary signal? Then again, it just might be
getting out of hand.
posted by bayani
on Feb 22, 2011 -
47 comments
Social news site
Reddit recently held their
"Best of Reddit 2010" awards honoring key players in the site over the last year, including the progenitor of
the Rally to Restore Sanity, the clever drive-by cartoonist
Sure_Ill_Draw_That, unofficial image host
Imgur, and feel-good story of the year
"Today you, tomorrow me." But perhaps most interesting was the winner for Best Big Community:
FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU! Originally inspired by 4chan's popular
Rage Guy meme, F7U12 (for short) is a clearinghouse for user-made web comics, slice-of-life affairs that
tell a story or
share a common frustration using
a small collection of crudely drawn yet highly evocative facial expressions. Several have become small memes in their own right -- the wily
Trolldad, the doormat
Okay, the prideful
Fuck Yea, the melodramatic
Gasp. And
one comic, inspired by the warped text randomly generated by
reCAPTCHAs (
previously), has given us
Lord Inglip --
god of
a dark religion now
rivaling FSM whose
cryptic commands marshal
loyal armies of
gropagas,
falcows,
Sellicks, and...
canary into exploits both
monstrous and
inconvenient (
timeline,
wiki). Obey him --
or else! More fun with F7U12:
rage face origins,
rage faces in real life,
Twitter feed,
search comics,
create your own (
alternate).
posted by Rhaomi
on Feb 8, 2011 -
168 comments
IPv6, a newer version of the Internet Protocol that most of the net will convert to during the next few years due to "address exhaustion" with the current IPv4, (
previously,
previously) has a variety of advanced security features in it. Once IPv6 is fully rolled out and all the technical people are familiar with it, computers connected to the internet will be much safer from some kinds of hacking - but
until then we may be in for a bumpy ride.
posted by XMLicious
on Feb 1, 2011 -
60 comments
The
final tranches of the net addresses used by most people are about to be allocated, raising the prospect of a web that isn't world wide. In the
next few days the last big blocks of the net's dwindling stock of addresses are about to be handed out. These are the days when
IPv4 dies and is replaced by
IPv6. The deadline arrived a little earlier than expected (
previously).
posted by twoleftfeet
on Jan 29, 2011 -
79 comments
"
Dear Plasticians,
As you may know, January 15th will be our 10th anniversary.
Unfortunately, Plastic will shut down a month from then, around February 15th (exact date to come)."
[more inside]
posted by iviken
on Jan 17, 2011 -
112 comments
Superguy was a forum for the posting of original, comedic fiction based loosely on superheroes and related concepts. ... It existed during the birth of the modern Internet culture, and survived much longer than many similar groups, diminishing in activity only when the webcomic trend became widespread. ... It is one of the longest running collaborative shared universe projects on the Internet.
posted by Joe Beese
on Jan 13, 2011 -
1 comment
We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies. - Google's Chrome is will be joining Firefox in
no longer licensing the MPEG-LA H.264 video codec favoured by Apple and Microsoft for use in the HTML5 <video> tag (
previously).
Not everyone is seeing this as a good thing.
posted by Artw
on Jan 13, 2011 -
145 comments
