The Wisdom of the Wiki

“While dot-coms and blogs have hogged the spotlight, an intriguing bit of software called Wiki actually deserves the gold medal for best trust-building tool,” writes Peter Morville.

In a Wiki, anyone can edit (or delete) any page or create a new page. This is the ultimate in decentralized content management.
I first encountered the wacky-world-of-wiki several years ago when EricScheid launched the IAwiki. I checked it out and wrote it off as too messy, too bottom-up, and too vulnerable to virtual vandalism.
However, the IAwiki has evolved into an amazing resource for the community and a living experiment in emergence and socially constructed navigation. Eric’s trust led to creation of a public good.
My second Wiki encounter came during the formative stages of AIfIA. While some of us met briefly at the lovely refuge by the sea known as Asilomar, most of the collaboration leading to creation of this new organization happened via email and the AsilomarWiki.
In fact, we used the AsilomarWiki as a private fund-raising tool, creating an IndividualCommitments page, where each of us could pledge to donate money to cover the legal and accounting costs associated with incorporation of a nonprofit organization.
It felt scary to manage money in such a fluid medium, and yet this mutual openness and vulnerability led to a strong sense of shared trust. We raised several thousand dollars in less than 24 hours, and a few months later, AIfIA was born.
So, now that I’ve transformed from cranky skeptic to true believer, I’d love to see more people discover the wisdom of the wiki. That’s why I was excited when Ed Vielmetti and some other smart people formed a startup called Socialtext to help organizations take advantage of wikis, weblogs, and other social software solutions.
I’m glad to see so much innovation in the realms of web credibility research, social network analysis, and social software design. There’s lots to learn and lots to share. I hope to be traveling on trust for many years to come.

What did you like about the seder? What did you learn?

Judith’s astonishing hand-dipped chocolate-covered strawberries. Judith keeps trying to attribute credit to the high quality of the choclate. As if the strawberries decided, on their own, to leap into a bowl of chocolate, which, on its own, decided to melt.
Hearing the four questions asked by Hannah, who is 2.5 years old, abominably mischievous, and clever.
Betsy’s question about personal expererience of Dayenu: which good things in life would we appreciate, even if they were not accompanied by other good things.
Dan observes that Haggadah has to tell you which team to root for. He notes that most of the Egyptian soldiers drowned in the Red Sea were probably conscripts.
Reading about the seder’s origins in the form of the Greco-Roman symposium, including multiple courses accompanied by wine, vegetable hors d’oevres, reclining posture, prepared questions, and counting things as a conversational gambit (Four Sons, Four Cups of Wine).
Judith quotes R. Nachman, via A Night of Questions. When you are about to leave Egypt — Any Egypt — do not stop to think: “but how will I make a living out there?” One who stops to “make provisions for the way” will never get out of egypt.
Learning the terms for male body parts in sign language, at varying levels of formality and politeness. (You had to be there).
Betsy’s skill at abbreviating with spirit.
Judith’s long and eventually successful quest for wine glasses; Dan’s long and eventually successful quest for the Passover food processor.
Cooking and schmoozing with Judith and Dan (the reason to have a good-sized kitchen with multiple countertops).
Will post if I remember more.
What about you?

Passover, culture-hacking, and the DMCA

“Whoever elaborates in telling the story of the exodus from Egypt is to be well-praised.”
The tradition of the seder is to retell the story, interpreting it in a some way that comes alive for the participants.
* political
* psychological
* dramatic
* exegetical
* musical
With cheap printing, photocopying, and now internet connections, there’s a new tradition of compiling custom Haggadahs.
Humans interpret and remake culture. That’s what we do to make life interesting and meaningful.
Except (under the current US legal scheme), where a few people have copyrights on the myths of our culture, can extend those copyrights forever, and can prosecute people who want to share and modify their culture.
Imagine if the Rabbis took a copyright on the Haggadah, and the copyright was extended forever.
Passover’s a festival of liberation.
Next year, free culture.
Have a happy and creative holiday.

Weblogs for Business Marketing

In Crain’s B2B Marketing Magazine, Rich Karpinski writes about the use of weblogs in business marketing.
The article cites Macromedia, iView Multimedia, Cape Clear Software, and Collaxa as companies using blogs to communicate with customers.
The article talks about the challenge of using a personal medium in a way that keeps the company’s marketing message, and the value of using blogs to communicate with a human voice.
via Doc Searls.

The value of buddy list mapping

As linked by Slashdot, BuddyZoo provides statistics about your AIM buddy list.
With it, you can:
* Find out which buddies you have in common with your friends.
* Measure how popular you are.
* Detect cliques you’re part of.
* See the degrees of separation between different screennames.
This kind of map, I think, would be more useful in a flexible, open environment than in a rigid, closed environment.
In a rigid, closed environment, like American high schools, people already know what cliques they’re part of (jocks, nerds), and don’t have a lot of choices about changing them.
In flexible environment, you could visualize groups that you were a small number of degrees of separation from, and join the group, by participating in an activity, joining a conversation, or getting an introduction.
In an open environment, you might learn things about the social network that you didn’t already know.

Routing around the DMCA

A University of Michigan researcher on computer security has moved the results of his PhD research to a server in the Netherlands, and bans US readers from accessing the research. This is in response to a nasty new state law that makes it a felony to possess software capable of concealing the existence or source of any electronic communication.
Here in Texas, we’ve been fighting this bill on the ground.
These bills pass because:
* the MPAA proposes them
* the legislators don’t understand the implications of the bills’ broad language.
* people who understand the problem don’t speak up.
If one of these bills has reared its ugly head in your state, follow the EFF link for resources, and speak up.

Human Routers and the Value of Networks

Jon Udell writes about the value of overlapping scopes in networks of people, and the particular value of individuals who are able to bridge scopes.

If I am seeking or sharing information, why do I need to be able to address a group of 3 (my team), or 300 (my company), or 300,000 (my company’s customers), or 300 million (the Usenet)? At each level I encounter a group that is larger and more diffuse. Moving up the ladder I trade off tight affinity with the concerns of my department, or my company, for access to larger hive-minds. But there doesn’t really have to be a tradeoff, because these realms aren’t mutually exclusive. You can, and often should, operate at many levels. [Practical Internet Groupware]

This suggests another layer in Ross Mayfield’s network valuation.
The value of a network isn’t just in its size, and the number of potential groups.
The value of a network is also in the connections among the different groups.
I wonder if there are optimal values?
* Too tightly coupled, and there is groupthink, with little diversity and innovation.
* Too loosely coupled, and it is more difficult or impossible for the group to behave in an emergent fashion –to reach agreement, to co-ordinate action, to swarm around a big idea,
The cool thing is, with networked media like weblogs and wikis, it should be possible to experiment and measure.

I don’t get Blogshares

Blogshares is a fantasy market where you bet on shares of bloggers, and the value of your shares is multipled by the number of links to the blog.
I totally don’t get this game.
It takes political-network blogging, and makes the rich get even richer by betting on top players. It’s the power-law squared.
There’s no way to win unless you’re Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan.
If you’re a blogger, and want to win the Blogshares game, and you’re not Andrew, then you bet against your own blog, and drive the value of your own shares down.
By contrast, if you’re “just blogging”, then you can win if you have more readers than you would reach by email. You can win if you meet people through comments that you wouldn’t have otherwise met. You can win by building relationships in the social and creative networks, even if you’re not Susannah Breslin talking about pornography.
In sports, if you’re not an Olympic athlete, you can play on a local team, or you can run for personal records and fitness.
Why play games that you can’t win, any way you look at it?