Clay Burell's Bookmarks

Now,
this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street
corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be
careful there after dark." But it's something society knows
without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source
where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're
certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in
starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may
not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to
try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the
authorities who might have it now."

Maybe
this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of
social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't
pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that
this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's
illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone,
with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough
of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough
of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you
couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago

So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath
that question was another thought, this one not a question but an
observation. In this same conversation
with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and
as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers.
Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."

At least they're doing something.

Did
you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get
off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I
saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every
half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at
my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I
had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is
none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel
of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's
not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your
basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal
experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if
Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.