www.dpingram.com

I find it very interesting that Facebook is getting so lauded, and getting so much success, from opening up its API to allow external developers to create new apps that leverage the Facebook platform. And I totally agree its a GREAT startegy.

When you make software there is an enormous feeling of competitive pride and ownership in what you produce, but in this wiki mass-collaborative world its true that no matter how much resource you muster you simply cannot compete with the mass of creative talent and production resource that exists outside of your own company.

The move by Facebook brings to mind the fundamental decisions that IBM and Apple made right back at the start when they were developing and marketing their personal computers. Apple figured that if it kept its intellectual property to itself it could reap all the rewards from the emerging personal computer market. IBM took the opposite approach and licensed its IP to other manufacturers to make PC that were clones/compatible with their PC standard. Who won? Well, though Apple is gaining ground, I’d say that IBM won the first 25 years of this battle.

The same could be said for Palm, who decided they would keep their proprietary Palm OS to themselves and own the whole market. Wrong. Though Palm is far better than MS Windows Mobile, MSWM can be licensed by any hardware manufacturer, and so Palm simply cannot compete with the sheer number of competitions.

So, with Facebook openning up its API, how can it not get thousands of developers writing apps that leverage its platform. OK, so they cant charge for those apps themselves, and some of those apps may well be competitive with internal projects, but they see the bigger game. At a stroke Facebook has recruited thousands of new developers, for free, who will go on to make Facebook THE BEST of its kind. There is NO WAY that MySpace or others can keep up with them.

It takes a brave decision to do this, to loosten the reigns, but thats what todays wiki mass-collaborative market is all about. It is those companies that are brave enough to recognise this that stand the VERY BEST chance of winning.

Jason Dowdell, of Marketing Shift, writes….

No where does user generated content have potential for greater impact than in local search. People who live in a neighborhood are the best qualified to provide information and keep it up to date, but it has been slow going so far.

Yahoo has been adding UGC to its Local site, include allowing people to update listings, submit reviews, photos, and ratings, (per SearchEngineWatch although for some reason the participation from the user community has been tepid at best. I’m guessing that because there are so many options (Google, InsiderPages, CitySearch), that users are splitting up their contributions, which results in a less than comprehensive service anywhere.

OA is here

DI> I propose the reason that takeup from the user community has been “tepid at best” is not because of all the choice, as Jason suggests, but because Yahoo and others still want to exercise editorial control. On Yahoo etc you can suggest a change, but it still all gets funnelled through their editors so you dont see your change immediately. With no immediate ‘reward’ we’re less likely to take action. The fear of innacurate updates and vandalism that drives Yahoo et al to insert editorial control is exactly the same fear that Nupedia had before they became wikipedia. It shoudln’t work but it does. Its down to a simple principle that its easier and faster to clean up (or revert) the vandalism than it is to commit it. So, Yahoo is going some way, but its not far enough. Open up editorial control to the users, you may be surprised what you get.

Its been reported that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is planning to launch a new search engine next year, to be called Wikiasari.

He’s clearly aiming for Google. He says:

“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

The new company will be the third business division of Wikia, the for profit company that Wales founded in 2005 and is now led by CEO Gil Penchina. The other two business units are the main Wikia wiki site itself, and the recently launched OpenServing product.

Wikia has raised over $4 million in capital, including a recent round by Amazon.

OA is here

US mobile carrier T-Mobile has launched a Wiki site for its Sidekick users. The Wiki style of software is most commonly known for its use in the online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. The Sidekick Wiki site, located at Sidekick.Wetpaint.com, is a community based website where all of the content will be written and maintained by Sidekick customers. While T-Mobile will not be creating the content on the site, they say that T-Mobile reps might occasionally “pop” onto the site’s discussion forums to answer some questions.

The site offers a number of features to Sidekick owners, such as “Me & My Sidekick” and “Pimp My Sidekick”, where people can create personal profiles as well as swap tips for customizing their devices. As is the case with other Wiki sites, users can add their own pages as well as make changes to existing pages on the Wiki site.

OA by Michael Oryl is here

The word wiki is derived from a Hawaiian word meaning fast (Ward Cunningham actually got the idea from the Wiki-Wiki Cab Company which he saw when he walked out of Hawaii airport), but Joel Spolsky disagrees. In fact I agree with him, the syntax of wiki’s is not easy for people to get to grips with. He says….

I was recently talking with a friend about setting up a Wiki for his co-workers, to share information and ideas. But his co-workers are not tech people, and we both decided that the Wiki markup would be too much of an obstacle.

I know there are ways to shoehorn WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE into a Wiki, and some have rudimentary editors built in. But most Wikis seem to encourage the use of some special syntax. I found a presentation on Wikipedia (http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:CS1) which makes this philosophy explicit. They even suggest an editor which shows formatted text along with the Wiki codes, so people can be sure to understand the semantics of the markup. I quote:

“Vision: computer literacy should involve understanding the difference between the model and the view.”

My question is: are they nuts? I’m a decent computer programmer, and even I hate trying to remember the Wiki syntax. For tables it’s a joke. No normal person wants to use this. It’s hardly better than HTML, plus if you write something in Word or Excel first, you have to take the time to convert it to markup.

Wouldn’t a decent WYSIWYG editor be an improvement, even if it’s more difficult to program? You could strip it down to the basics, and use styles (a la Word) to put in the semantic information like headers and outline levels. If we want to encourage more people to edit web pages, why not allow them to use tools they already understand?

(Granted, maybe it’s good to have Wiki markup as a barrier to entry for sites like Wikipedia, to discourage vandalism. But this isn’t true for all sites.)

his OA is here

The founder of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is launching a service offering free tools for people who want to build community websites. Jimmy Wales has said his company Wikia.com will offer software, storage and network access and that website creators can keep advertising revenue.

Wikia is the commercial counterpart to the not-for-profit Wikipedia site. Wikipedia was founded in 2001 and is seen as a serious rival to commercial online encyclopaedias.

Wikipedia is a net success story
Businesses have started to embrace the wiki model to allow employees to collaborate and communicate about projects, while special-interest groups are also using them to share ideas.

“It is open-source software and open content,” Mr Wales told the Reuters news agency.

“We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue.”

Thirty thousand users have posted 400,000 articles so far on Wikia.com sites.

Mr Wales believes the falling cost of computers, storage and network access will mean success for the service.

“It is becoming more and more practical and feasible to do,” he said.

“We don’t have all the business model answers, but we are confident as we always have been that the wisdom of our community will prevail,” he said.

OA is here

From Techcrunch…

Wikio, a user-contributed news company, launched Wikio.com, Wikio.de, and Wikio.es at the LeWeb3 conference in Paris today. The three new sites are aimed at the US, Germany, and Spain, respectively.

Wikio has been live in France and Italy for a few months. They have 600,000 French users and 100,000 Italian users.

Wikio is a hybrid between user-added and editorial-added news and blogs. They have an editorial staff that ranks and contributes stories but they also allow users to add and rank stories, much like Digg. User voting is balanced with editorial voting and stories are ranked accordingly. Pierre Chappaz, founder of Wikio, developed the site based on his belief that Europe needed a Digg of its own.

OA is here

Amazon Pays for Wiki Wisdom

If you’re at all Internet-savvy, there’s an excellent chance you know about the user-created Web encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It’s come under fire from dozens of sources for inaccurate postings, including Comedy Central’s late-night snarkmeister Stephen Colbert.

These critics have a point: Wikipedia isn’t entirely reliable. But it is a great place to start researching just about anything, thanks to the ease with which community participants can share information. That, in turn, has attracted a huge following: Wikipedia has more than 1.5 million articles published in English.

The founders noticed. In 2004, they created a company called Wikia to take advantage of the open-source technology used to create Wikipedia. Since then, the firm has attracted an all-star roster of investors, including Netscape and Opsware (Nasdaq: OPSW) founder Marc Andreessen and Lotus founder and Second Life backer Mitch Kapor, both of whom contributed to the firm’s $4 million first round of funding.

Now you can add Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) to the list. Earlier today, Wikia announced that the e-retailer had become the firm’s first corporate investor, committing an undisclosed sum. (It’s probably not less than Wikia’s $4 million first round.)

On the surface, this adds legitimacy to an evolving, open-source business model. That’s certainly how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos saw it, saying in a statement that Wikia had “cracked the code for user-generated content.”

Maybe so, but I see this in a larger context, as the value of content continues to evolve. When media empires controlled everything — some would argue they still do — the value of a piece of content could be correlated to its source. A report from NBC News was inherently more valuable than a report from your local paper.

Now, value is created via network effects. Credence and authenticity matter as much as, if not more than, the source. That’s why I think investors are willing to pay extraordinary sums to buy up the most authentic and relevant communities. Witness News Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS) $580 million buyout of MySpace, or Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube.

Perhaps Bezos says it best: “Amazon has always believed in giving the customer as much information as possible so that they can make the purchase that’s best for them.”

That’s good to know. It’s also good, Jeff, that you recognize that the communities that hold the greatest sway over your customers are not managed by you or your partners, but instead by Wiki-wielding rebels. Best not to stand in their way.

OA by By Tim Beyers (TMF Mile High) is here

Wiki-vandals
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 in News by Justin Raimondo

I didn’t know I had a Wikipedia entry until about a year ago. I discovered it by googling my name — a vice that I’m sure most writers indulge in, some more than others. I tried to abstain, or, at least, not indulge too often, but the temptation to go back and see how the entry was evolving was — is — a bit too much for me to resist. Because, for those who don’t know about Wikipedia, anyone is free to edit and re-edit entries: they are also free to create new ones, to add and subtract, in a cybernetic demonstration of the Hayekian theory of spontaneous order. Entries are changed as knowledge develops. and new facts are discovered.

That was how I came to witness the “edit wars” waged on the territory of my entry. Go here to see the long history of that sometimes bitter conflict, an epic battle carried out by such Wiki-warriors as “WillbeBack,” “Huysmanns,” “Darth Jesus,” and a host of others too numerous to mention here. Suffice to say that some — most — editors were constructive: that is, they worked to refine and expand my entry, adding new biographical details and describing my work and ideas, rather than editorializing. Wikipedia has strict rules about that: it is the great sin of POV (pushing a Point of View), and repeated instances can result in the suspension or even explusion of the miscreant from the realm of encyclopedic knowledge that is Wikipedia.

An “edit war” occurs when there is a dispute that goes back and forth, with rival factions battling for hegemony: in such cases, when even a persistent minority-of-one can vandalize an entry at will, an entry is locked down, frozen, so that only registered Wikipedia members can edit it — and a close watch is kept on the premises for any sign of POV-pushing.

OA is here

In his blog Nathan Zeldes writes…

…whether one can trust the content of Wikipedia, or any Wiki for that matter. The answer, to my mind, is a qualified yes – you can trust it all right, after doing the “checking thing” to determine how trustworthy any specific article is. I’ve done a good deal of research using Wikipedia, and I always cross-correlate it with other sources (making sure they didn’t copy from the same place as the Wikipedia author!) and subject its content to my own analysis. I never take content at face value… but by now I can derive a good idea of its worth in fairly short order.

The important thing, though, is to remember that the same thing applies to Real Life. My volumes of the Britannica appear very authoritative, but in addition to the many articles that are dated – nobody can change their hard copy when the world evolves – there are no doubt those that are simply in error. They may have been authored by experts, but experts can and do err too, often with dire results. Just read the newspaper! Con artists, too, existed long before the Internet. The principle of Caveat Emptor always applies, whether one is buying used cars or online knowledge; and arguably, the online world provides much better tools for validation of your seller – if you know how to go about it. Like in the real world, many poor souls lack this knowledge and pay the price.

The interesting question is not which encyclopedia is perfect – none is – but rather which one is more useful at the end of the day, Wikipedia or the Britannica? Personally I believe that for a naïve reader the Britannica would be safer; but for a web-savvy reader, one equipped to examine the information critically, Wikipedia can be far more beneficial, given its considerably greater scope and its superb facilities for self-correction. Doing research in this medium can be outright exhilarating… and - unlike the Britannica - if you find anything dated or erroneous, you can correct it then and there for the benefit of all humanity!

Nathan’s original and full article is here: http://blogs.intel.com/it/2006/12/wiki_s_and_online_knowledge_ca.html