Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Our community blog launches

Our town of Ripton launched a blog last month.  I'm very proud of this.  For one, it's great to learn more about my community than I already knew.  For another, it's another case of Web 2.0 tools used for connection and community awareness.

Please do check it out.

Expanding and thinning virtual worlds

Google Spreadsheets are a kind of virtual world: so argues Tony Walsh in a provocative post.  Users experience a persistent, modifiable world, presence indicators of other users, and so on.  As commentators argue, this is really true of decently functioning groupware.  Heck, book-based fictional worlds are virtual worlds in this light, especially when fan communities are involved.

It's a useful probe, in Macluhan's sense, an idea to provoke.  It might remind us of the long history of text-based virtual worlds, forgotten far too often today.

One commentator chez Walsh picks up on something I've been arguing for a while.  There are many ways for Google Earth to combine with other tools to form virtual worlds.  And that could be huge, when it starts happening.

Tag cloud for Twitter

Experimenting with a tag cloud visualization for my Twitter feed:

Resized a bit to fit this display.  Fuller image at my Flickr feed.

(via Louise's Academic Innovation)

Participatory mapping for US forces in Iraq

US soldiers in Iraq can use social software to fight insurgents, by adding to a collaborative mapping platform.  TIGR is designed to surface information in bottom-up, web 2.0 fashion.

John Arquilla offers a good critique, noting that the institutional structures within which soldiers work haven't changed.  A familiar issue to educators, yes?

(via Nicholas Carr)

Seesmic: hello world

I finally started Twittering on Seesmic. Er, using Seesmic, to record a hello world.  Owain makes a cameo.  I'm "bryanalexander."

A few thoughts: viewing is quick, as is recording.  The rotating menu isn't too clear at first (the conversation button being in the middle of the screen?). I found myself trying to isolate and work with Twitter elements.

Swarmphones, DIY CCTV

The Swarmphones project lets multiple mobile phones ad hoc coordinate to capture media and share results.

The software employs Bluetooth, a short-range wireless technology included in many modern phones, to automatically share information and let the phones collectively analyse events that they record. This provides a platform for a group of phones to act as smart network capable of, for example, spotting intruders or identifying wildlife.

The Grinding blog notes that this is being open sourced, to deliberately let people make what use of it they can.  “I think this would be best used in other places, when it becomes open source other people might brain storm and find the killer app.”
Imagine:

• Instant surveillance, swarming a target of opportunity - suspect, marchers.
• Instant sousveillance.
• Street theater, if the media capture can be then played from the same or related devices.
• Fear and panic - will my phone be repurposed by bad people, the CIA, my boss?

(via Grinding)

Third Life: Intel CES talk

"Third Life" is what Intel's CEO is calling his CES keynote this week.  Not too much in common with our third life discussion last year.  Instead it looks more like social networking plus virtual worlds, maybe  with a dose of augmented reality, more likely anticipating faster wireless connections between devices.

Twittering Bhutto's assassination

Twitter was used for information and responses around Benazir Bhutto's assassination this week.  There's a classic mix of journalism sites using Twitter (Breaking News) with individuals tweeting to point towards more information, confirm reports, or react.

Dennis Howlett argues that the tweet cycle is faster than the blog one, with implications for business.  I'm with Doc Searls on this, who sees it as "proving useful for getting some live information out to some people.".

(via Doc Searls)

Dopplr leaves beta, opens to world

Best error message I've gotten all week: I asked Dopplr to label one destination as "San Antonio."  Somehow the site comes up with this instead:

Not even close!  I wonder how Dopplr made that connection.  And it still wants to put me at a city one hour from home.

Otherwise, the service is doing well, now that it's launched out of beta. So far it's decently fast, elegantly designed, polite, and usable. 

I started using it in beta this summer, and will keep playing with it over the next few months. It's good to see coworkers and professional contacts in there.  Next, the mobile version.

I'm http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/BryanAlexander, for any interested fellow travelers. 

knol versus Citizendium

After posting about Google's knol pilot elsewhere, I wanted to emphasize one aspect here: one competitive thrust is against Citizendium.  The far larger target is Wikipedia, of course, given its huge prominence, influence, Google search ranking, and deeply felt bad reputation.  But Citizendium is closer to knols in several key respects, as several commentators have noted (Ars Technica, for example).

Although it draws on the wiki approach, Citizendium's key difference is articles whose primary content is created by "real names and guidance by expert editors."  Those two features - names and experts - are crucial to knol, and not at all to Wikipedia. The naming is major issue for some critics, such as historians, trained in sourcing content.  knol emphasizes naming even more prominently than does the Citizendium, if the Googleblog sample picture is any guide.

This approach certainly draws on web 2.0 personalization, and even the social graph notion.  But in terms of informatics, this represents a clear move towards named, identified sources, which should appeal to many educators and scholars.  If this takes off, and Google's previous experience with Answers might give us caution, Citizendium will be seriously threatened.  Google's vastly greater name recognition, integration with other services, and growing education presence will see to that.  As Ars Technica notes,

While Wikipedia itself is diverse enough to survive, smaller projects like Citizendium could find the going much tougher.

Larry Sanger takes a different tack.  First, he argues that Google's primary target is Wikipedia, which would certainly make sense when it comes to market share.  Second, he thinks that knols won't come anywhere near competing with his Citizendium, since

Google is entering head-to-head competition with Wikipedia — not so much with the Citizendium (thankfully, we have a different niche: quality)

I'm not convinced that knols won't compete on that level.  It's hard to get at the project now, given its secrecy, but this seems to be precisely where Google hopes to compete.  Listen to the blog post:

Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.
(emphases added)

The selection mechanism is mysterious at this point, and the post avoids the term "expert", but that seems to be the angle of approach. 

Sanger goes on to argue that knols won't attract a great deal of participation, but this is not altogether convincing.  He sees a

lack of buy-in from the free culture crowd. Many of the sort of people who contribute knowledge to projects like Wikipedia and the Citizendium are likely to be very skeptical of a giant corporation organizing such a project

We're waiting for Siva Vaidkyanathan to offer his first take on this, but Google's sheer range mitigates against an anti-corporate-informatics movement scotching knols.  Far too many people are into the Googlesphere, especially given how relatively few would be need to knol.

Moreover, as Peter Suber and others have noted, the Googleblog sample image (sampled to right) hints that Creative Commons licenses are possible, perhaps by user choice a la Flickr.

Further, it's not realistic to rule out self-interest in knol creation.  Many would be motivated by the possibilities of Google ad lucre, especially if Google results push knols to the top of results lists.  Ditto for reputation growth.

Again, I'm not writing about knol-Wikipedia competition in this post.  Nor am I suggesting that the Googlesphere has targeted Citizendium as a major competitor.  I am not celebrating our knol overlords, nor discounting either another failure, a la Answers, or the possible effects of an anti-corporate movement against Googlized informations.  Instead, the point is simply that knols are a real threat to Citizendium.

Should we check stats in a year, comparing knols and Citizendium?  Perhaps number of articles, or word count, or some stab at user base.