Bloggasm

First there was Wikipedia. Then there was Wikileaks. Now there is Wikihistory, a wiki for time travelers.

Here are some media-related links for your perusal:

1. I’m posting this one just for the headline: Gay Porn Twins Arrested for Robbery Spree

2. Here’s a brilliant smack-down of Ben Stein’s silly documentary arguing against evolution. The best part is the retelling of how the movie reviewer was invited to the screening and then showed up after they tried to take away his invitation.

3. Well, I was as surprised as any to see that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was dating the Canadian hot female version of Godhatesfags leader Fred Phelps. But before I even got a chance to post about it, they broke up and their online cyber sex leaked onto the internets.

4. Amazon was among the first to create a “if you bought this item you might also like this item” feature. Netflix has taken it to a whole new level by creating a contest with a million dollar prize for the person or team that improves its recommendation system by 10%. Though many of those in the lead are mathematicians, a retired psychologist may take home the prize.

5. Apparently the title “Washington Post Media Critic” is a code phrase that means right-wing blogger.

6. You know you’ve read one of these NY Times articles. The journalist points out a “growing trend” that you didn’t know existed. Sometimes it just gets ridiculous.

7. Blogging is good for your social life.

And then finally, posted without comment:

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. The American Journalism Review wonders how many journalists use Wikipedia as a source, and whether it’s becoming acceptable.

2. Poor people use Yahoo. Educated people use Google.

3. NYT Makes Comma Error Inside Semicolon Article. The irony!!

4. “Sometimes I read old articles from the National Review and I think, where did that spirit of frank, open racism go?”

5. The background story on how and why the New York Times published its silly hit piece on John McCain yesterday.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is launching Wikia Search, a new search engine, on Jan. 7. Like Wikipedia, it’ll draw from crowd wisdom to produce its results. Not much has been released on how this will work exactly.

It has an advantage over Wikipedia, however, in that it won’t have to start from scratch. The site will no doubt receive a deluge of links on its launch date, and this will be a good chance for us all to be early adopters. I’m going to try my best to give it a month-long test run, though I have a feeling I’m going to resort to using Google from time to time.

It’s not that I’m against Google or anything, I think it’d just be cool to be one of the early influencers of what could potentially be a major search engine. And who knows, maybe it’ll stick.

So who’s with me?

***
Related posts:
1. An area of Search Engine Optimization often overlooked: Google News
2. Google’s employees transported to work in their own buses
3. The politics of Wikipedia

Rough Type’s Nicholas Carr reports that Google has created a semi knockoff of Wikipedia called Knol. “The big distinction with Wikipedia is that Knol relies on individual authors rather than ‘the crowd,’” Carr writes. “Each article, or ‘knol,’ will be signed and owned by the person who writes it, and articles on the same subject will compete with one another for viewer’s eyes. In contrast, Wikipedia builds a single version of each article in a communal way with many edits by anonymous contributors.”

This won’t be as successful as Wikipedia because it doesn’t cater to the long-tail editors.

For instance, I’m what you would call a casual Wikipedia editor. Every now and then I’ll be reading a Wikipedia article about something I actually know something about, and if I see an error or I have a quick sentence to add, I add it. This separates me from the hard-core Wikipedians who create entries from scratch and contribute to them heavily. I would argue, though, that the long tail editors are just as important.

With Knol, only the hard-core editors will contribute, while people like me, who don’t really have any interest in putting a lot of work into the entry, won’t be able to contribute at all.

***
Related posts:
1. The Google-fication of Facebook
2. Why newspapers might actually be in trouble
3. The politics of Wikipedia

Citizendium was created by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger as an attempt to replace “Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online.”

The project officially launched about a month ago, and Read/Write Web has a long analysis of the progress thus far, and whether the new encyclopedia is living up to its hype.

***

Related posts: Wikipedia as a news source, How journalists keep secrets, A Wikipedian’s fake “authority”

I’ve seen several articles like this one taking special note that during a major news event, Wikipedians constantly update Wikipedia articles with new information. Several media analysists are now arguing that Wikipedia is no longer just an encyclopedia, but also a news source as well.

I think there are several things wrong with this notion. To list:

1. Wikipedia articles are mostly in chronological order, while news articles use an AP style with their lede, putting the most important information on top and then working its way down. Essentially, most news articles ruin the ending in order to provide the most pertinent information first.

2. There’s no original reporting. Because of citation rules, Wikipedians have to rely on other news sources to break the news first. So you won’t learn anything from a Wikipedia article that you didn’t see on CNN first.

3. There’s no effective way for the site to alert readers that there’s breaking news. Sure, in the V. Tech shooting, people were linked to the page and more readers piled on. But when it comes to more obscure news, most people wouldn’t even be aware for awhile that the page is being updated.