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02 Nov 08

The march of the web-enabled amateurs - FT.com / Digital Business - October 8 2008 - Lawrence Lessig:

www.ft.com/...76-11da-853a-00000e2511c8.html - Preview

wikipedia web-enabled LAWRENCE-LESSIG user-generated-content open-source collaboration

Call it the age of the amateur: one who works for the love of what he does, and not for money.

13 Mar 08

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium

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kevin-kelly wikipedia

I hate to say it but there is a new type of communism or socialism loose in the world, although neither of these outdated and tinged terms can accurately capture what is new about it.

23 Dec 07

Google Preparing To Launch Game Changing Wikipedia Meets Squidoo Project

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google google-knol knowledge-sharing wikipedia

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Google Knol takes aim at Wikipedia

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google-knol knowledge-sharing wikipedia

11 Dec 07

Why Yahoo! Answers is a librarian's worst nightmare. - By Jacob Leibenluft - Slate Magazine

a great comparison of yahoo-answers and wikipedia

www.slate.com/...2 - Preview

collective-intelligence wikipedia yahoo-answers

A Librarian's Worst NightmareYahoo! Answers, where 120 million users can be wrong.
By Jacob Leibenluft
Posted Friday, Dec. 7, 2007
9 more annotations...
- Like Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia isn't perfect. But for savvy browsers who know how to use it, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of factual information.
- Wikipedia's greatest virtue is that it is self-editing and self-correcting.
- They focus users' energy on revision rather than addition. By contrast, Yahoo! Answers is more devoted to quantity than quality.
- If new information becomes available or a new user devotes energy to making improvements, then a Wikipedia article will get better even years after it's first posted
- The small, almost obsessive community that built Wikipedia created a culture of reliability.
- This system highlights the site's greatest strength and its greatest weakness: Everyone gets credit for answering, but there's not a huge push to make sure the answers are right.
- As its devotees would point out, Yahoo! Answers allows you to ask questions Wikipedia would never touch. Many of the site's users are simply looking for advice, local knowledge (like a restaurant recommendation), or an opportunity to start a discussion.
- The lesson Yahoo! Answers teaches is that, for millions of people on the Web, it's less important to get a good answer than to get someone to listen to your question in the first place.
- Related in Slate
  In 2005, Paul Boutin reviewed Wikipedia, calling it a "Real-life Hitchhiker's Guide" to the galaxy. In 2004, Clive Thompson assessed online communities struggling to create art. Christopher Beam suggested ways to cobble together a search engine that trumps even Google. Michael Agger examined Wikiscan, the Web site designed to unmask "Wikipedia vandals."

06 May 07

How do we know what we know ? - Edge 208

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authoritative edge knowledge larry-sanger research science wikipedia

18 Mar 07

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The amorality of Web 2.0

www.roughtype.com/...the_amorality_o.php - Preview

bloggin mainstream-media media new-media opinion roughtype webe2.0 wikipedia

Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.

But I don't want to be forced to make that choice.
In "We Are the Web," Kelly writes that "because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture." I hope he's wrong, but I fear he's right - or will come to be right.
17 more annotations...
- Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.
- But as the Web matured during the late 1990s, the dreams of a digital awakening went unfulfilled. The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune. And when the new millenium arrived, it brought not a new age but a dispiritingly commonplace popping of a bubble of earthly greed. Somewhere along the way, the moneychangers had taken over the temple. The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not transformed us. We were the same as ever.
- In a profile of Internet savant Tim O'Reilly in the current issue of Wired, Steven Levy writes that "the idea of collective consciousness is becoming manifest in the Internet." He quotes O'Reilly: "The Internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at [New Age HQ] Esalen in the '70s - except we didn't know it would be technology-mediated." Levy then asks, "Could it be that the Internet - or what O'Reilly calls Web 2.0 - is really the successor to the human potential movement?"
- Levy's article appears in the afterglow of Kevin Kelly's sweeping "We Are the Web" in Wired's August issue. Kelly, erstwhile prophet of the Long Boom, surveys the development of the World Wide Web, from the Netscape IPO ten years ago, and concludes that it has become a "magic window" that provides a "spookily godlike" perspective on existence. "I doubt angels have a better view of humanity," he writes.
- This isn't the language of exposition. It's the language of rapture.
- The Cult of the Amateur
  
  Now, lest you dismiss me as a mere cynic, if not a fallen angel, let me make clear that I'm all for seeking transcendence, whether it's by going to church or living in a hut in the woods or sitting at the feet of the Maharishi or gazing into the glittering pixels of an LCD screen.
- My problem is this: When we view the Web in religious terms, when we imbue it with our personal yearning for transcendence, we can no longer see it objectively. By necessity, we have to look at the Internet as a moral force, not as a simple collection of inanimate hardware and software. No decent person wants to worship an amoral conglomeration of technology.
- Might, on balance, the practical effect of Web 2.0 on society and culture be bad, not good? To see Web 2.0 as a moral force is to turn a deaf ear to such questions.
- To Kevin Kelly, Wikipedia shows how the Web is allowing us to pool our individual brains into a great collective mind. It's a harbinger of the Machine.
- In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper.
- At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in "collective intelligence" will begin to manifest itself. When will the great Wikipedia get good? Or is "good" an old-fashioned concept that doesn't apply to emergent phenomena like communal on-line encyclopedias?
- Nice piece! I don't disagree with most of it. Except for the very last paragraph, which is really the only paragraph dealing with the point of your story. That the web, machines, and maybe even technology are not moral.
  
  I've changed my mind on this. I used to think technology was neutral -- just a tool -- you could use it for good or evil. Pretty standard belief for us nerds. But in spending the last three years trying to figure out what the greater meaning of technology is I've reluctantly concluded that technology is a moral force (for the good). I'll need a whole book to make that argument (if I can) and that is what I am working on.
  
  But you have to agree it is an important and vital question. I hope you continue your investigation of it.
  
  Posted by: Kevin Kelly at October 11, 2005
- Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.
- The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time.
- The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call "the mainstream media."
- I'm all for blogs and blogging. (I'm writing this, ain't I?) But I'm not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere - its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation.
- Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from - and, yes, more important than - what bloggers can do.

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