It’s July 1, and in China the ominous deadline to implement the Green Dam/Youth Escort internet filtering software has been postponed, to much rejoicing by Internet users in the country.

To outsiders, this must seem quite puzzling. Why would China’s “totalitarian” system need to back down on this?

This should be seen as a case study on how the complexities of China’s decision system is much more nuanced than what a “Communist” regime would suggest, and the role of citizen deliberation in a new, upwardly mobile, aspirational, IT-savvy China.

While the outside world sees the PRC government in absolute control, in reality the heavy handed, top down authoritarian system rides on a delicate balance of, bottom up public consent that supports the state’s legitimacy.

Here’s why Green Dam illustrates this quite well.

China’s Internet filtering is by far the most advanced in the world in terms of precision and scale. But until now, it happened in the “cloud,” in far off intangible spaces through two main vehicles:

• One is through massive domestic Web site content regulation through revokable Internet Content Provider licenses (ICP). Operators have to self-censor through technical or human means to please the authorities regarding general guidelines on taboo topics. Keywords are banned and discussion topics are forbidden. In some cases, explicit timely edicts are required, such as for significant June anniversaries, sensitive political meetings (People’s Congress) or poor construction standards in Sichuan earthquake zones. Even with these, China’s netizens have come up with clever tricks and puns to get around many of these automated filtering systems.

• The other is the Great Firewall, the blocking of what foreign Web sites China users can surf. The implementation is clever, in that restrictions show up as technical errors (connection reset, site not found/unreachable) and curb behavior through uncertainty and doubt about a site’s reach-ability, rather than fear. You don’t know whether it’s the Internet acting flaky, or whether a site is actually being filtered. Tech-savvy users can trivially circumvent this.

But you don’t need perfect censorship to have effective censorship. Both these systems do quite well for the PRC government in keeping the 3T1F topics outside the mainstream, and ensuring that the government is not embarrassed by reporting on its incompetence.

The key, here is that both the domestic and international filtering activities happened in the cloud, the ether, the machines that comprise the Internet. It wasn’t in your home and it didn’t intrude beyond the cable to your desk.

Green Dam suddenly put the specter of restriction, surveillance and control in your home.

With that one stroke, which probably seemed like the next logical innocuous extension of the censorship regime for PRC bureaucrats, the government took the big miscalculation of crossing into the the private space, and the personal property of China’s citizens. And that’s where the outrage came.

This was the camel’s nose into the private tent of Internet users. A poll on China’s major sites (Sina, Netease, et al) all showed over 3/4 of respondents said Green Dam was not necessary or a bad idea.

(NB: China is not the first or the only government wanting to censor Internet traffic for content. Australia’s Clean Feed proposal to covertly filter out sites at the ISP level has been under fire from their netizens, and was unceremoniously put on hiatus as well. Most public schools and libraries in the United States implement content filtering at some level. This is not a uniquely China issue.)

What the authorities in China didn’t realize was how serious that breach of boundary would be.

I knew it was going to be a tough road for Green Dam when it appeared the MIIT initiative was not a unified effort. Before leaving for my travels, I did commentaries with the Associated Press, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera and others, making the point that even China’s official news outlets were openly questioning Green Dam’s legitimacy. The new Global Times newspaper, which has been rather frank about other issues, led off with serious questions about the software’s safety.

Then came the big one.

China Daily, the official mouthpiece of the government, was publishing criticisms of Green Dam shortly after it was announced, even publishing Photoshop’ed illustrations of netizens mocking the system. (”Outrage over bid to tame Web“, China Daily, June 18, 2009)

One picture it included with the article was a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” multiple choice question describing Green Dam as “spyware” with “systemic flaws” that could be “exploited by hackers.” Another cartoon shows a gray hand of censorship coming from the computer screen and stiff-arming a computer user in the face.

It was clear at this point, the Green Dam initiative was from a smaller portion of the PRC bureaucracy, and not from the highest levels. China Daily would have never published something so critical if it was of the highest-level of agenda pushing.

China’s netizens were speaking, and the media and government were taking notice (and with higher ups looking the other way). So while this was not democracy in action, it certainly was something in action.

At TEDxShanghai last month, I described the phenomenon of Wikipedia and Twitter forming the basis of a new online commons where global netizens come to share and reinforce memes across geographic and social boundaries (SlideShare presentation). For years, enthusiastic faith-based technology enthusiasts hoped the Internet would bring democracy to any place it touched. This has been spectacularly elusive. On the flipside, some viewed the new Web 2.0 social revolution as “socialist”, “collectivist” and at worst, Maoist. That’s been inaccurate as well.

Instead, I describe the new borderless, socially agile, activist associations that crop up on the Internet as a new system of ‘deliberative adhocracy’. Alvin Toffler, and later Cory Doctorow, used adhocracy to describe a new form of rule based ephemeral associations that “capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results.” (Waterman)

Whether it’s as massive as #IranElection to bring global awareness to its politics, or as small as #MotrinMoms to discuss outrage at an insulting advertisement, we now have an online information commons (Twitter) and knowledge commons (Wikipedia) that supports a space for the new distributed Zeitgeist. In China, obviously there are other analogs (Twitter clone Fanfou, Baidu Baike, BBS forums, et al.) but the effect is the same. To see deliberative adhocracy in action look no further than the Human Flesh Search Engine that metes out social justice in the absence of a strong rule of law in China.

Readers familiar with my book will know I described how a Wikipedia Revolution changed forever how we deal with free access to knowledge and its production. I will however, be quite Burke-ian in my pronouncement about the Internet’s effect on China.

Revolutions are sudden overthrows and disruptive repudiations of the status quo. China has a terrible modern history with revolutions, with more of them going bad than good. The rule law is sometimes described as when “reason trumps politics.” To China’s authorities, the Internet is being used in a deliberative process that fulfills that role. It is not perfect, nor prevalent enough to ensure social justice on a large scale. However, it is a huge step forward for a country that is convinced that after a century of turmoil, that any step must take safety and efficiency into account.

The hiatus for Green Dam, is the standard face-saving way for the government to back down. There is a good possibility it may come back in another form, watered down or otherwise. But for now, China’s netizens are having their day.

“Scientists have more faith in Wikipedia than national print media”

That’s one of the takeaways from a recent poll of nearly 1000 toxicologists when they were asked  how various media outlets cover their specialty: the representation to the public of chemical risks. (The poll was conducted by STATS, The Center for Health and Risk Communication at George Mason University, and the Society of Toxicology)

Given the common lament that Wikipedia shuns “experts,” and information is produced by people “off the street,” the results are intriguing when you look at the numbers for other professional and “mainstream” media outlets. From the report synopsis:

WebMD and Wikipedia were seen as significantly more accurate in the way they presented chemical risk than any other media source.

·         56% say WebMD accurately portrays chemical risks

·         45% say Wikipedia accurately portrays chemical risks

·         By contrast, no more than 15% say that leading national newspapers, news magazines, and television networks accurately portray chemical risks.

·         Over 80% say that leading national newspapers, news magazines, and television networks overstate chemical risks

[...]

…only 15 percent described similar coverage in the national print media (i.e., the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal) as accurate. This figure dropped to 6 percent for USA Today and 5 percent for broadcast network news.

At a press conference at the National Press Club to release the preliminary results of the study, Dr. S. Robert Lichter, who conducted the survey described the Wikipedia finding as an indictment of the mainstream media - ” it’s disturbing that someone off the street seemingly can do a better job than the media.”

I’d take issue with the fact that Wikipedia is simply the product of random person “off the street,” but it is a real shift in what we consider authority and how reliable information can be produced.

Even the best performer, WebMD, gained the approval of only about half the toxicologists who were surveyed which should be a bit surprising in itself. My (full disclosure: unpaid, uncompensated) commentary as it appeared in the report:

“This reminds me of the Nature study [link] that was done in December 2005 where it found that on average, Britannica had 3 errors per article, and Wikipedia had 4 errors,” Lih says by email. “It was surprising because Wikipedia did much better than expected, given its foreign work process and Britannica did much worse. People had presumed a certain level of accuracy from Britannica’s reputation, and it was knocked down from that pedestal. To me the WebMD and Wikipedia results here are similar – they’re much closer than what one would expect. Wikipedia doing better, WebMD doing worse.”

But perhaps the most interesting part was not WebMD, but that the daily professional print media came up so short in the eyes of these experts. It seems to reinforce the old adage: “Journalists do a pretty good job of covering things, except for subjects in which you’re knowledgeable.”

The commentary for Columbia Journalism Review contributor Alissa Quart was insightful about why the MSM approach (reporting science as a storyteller for the masses) is perhaps systemically flawed:

“Journalists fall into storylines, because that’s how we write. There are three narratives, that we use, which can make us great but also get us into trouble – one narrative to please our editors, one to please our readers, and one which leans toward our sources, because we identify with them. WebMD and Wikipedia contributors are disconnected from most of those narratives – maybe they are trying to please certain readers, but they aren’t ‘the reader.’ Their model of knowledge doesn’t ask for stories, or sentiment or people.

This is a really good observation that meshed well with my views about the role of public relations and the dangerous media narrative driving scientific reporting. Quart and I arrived at the same conclusion.

In short, argument trumps aesthetics. Lih, an engineer by education, concurs. The clash of narratives “also says something about motivation, in that the mainstream press will be driven by reports, PR bring shoved at them, and also the market and the desire by editors (in a top-down manner) to demand reporters find a story in the latest research, even if in the greater context of the field, it doesn’t warrant so much attention. In that sense, Wikipedia’s motivations are different, in that the ‘crowd’ helps moderate and even dampen the type of ‘recentism’ that is so pervasive in news coverage.”

The overall summary can be found at the Stats.org site, or you can view the full PDF.

TALK: China’s Manufacturing, Economy and Foreign Reserves
SPEAKER: James Fallows, The Atlantic and author of Postcards from Tomorrow Square

DATE: Saturday, May 16, 2009, 2pm to 5pm
LOCATION: Beijing, Renmin University, Room 509, Ming De Main Building, Entrance A1

Renowned author and commentator James Fallows of The Atlantic, in one of his final talks in China, will reprise some of his major themes on China’s economy and its future. Event sponsored by Renda School of Finance and Worldview Global Consulting. Talk will be in English with Chinese translation.

DIRECTIONS:

By taxi: Go to the West Gate of Renda (3rd Ring Rd to Suzhou Bridge exit, on Suzhou Dajie and you will see Renda looming in red brick on the right after 1 km).

Walk through the West Gate, take a left into the giant courtyard. You will see Entrance A 1 slightly to the left of center.  Take elevator to 6th floor and walk down one flight (Chinese conservation measure: no up service to first five floors).

Renmin Mingde Building

View Larger Map

Kindle 2 (photo by ShakataGaNai, CC-By-SA)

Just one month after our household welcomed the beautifully designed Kindle 2 to supply the latest books while we live overseas, out comes the Kindle DX, the version that promises to provide 8.5″ x 11″ viewing pleasure, and has been put forth as possible savior for the college student and the newspaper industry (with the emphasis on “paper”).

The inevitable march towards electronic paper is exciting, as the screen on the Kindle is gorgeous when it comes to displaying static pages. However, I fear this may not be so much “digital papyrus” as it is “digital pyrite” — the new media version of fool’s gold. There’s several reasons why.

If you don’t own a Kindle, you may not know how s-l-o-w the screen is to refresh. We’re talking page-to-page times that take more than one full second. Because of the technology used, the process of turning the page means having to flip and invert all the pixels before presenting the next page, creating an X-ray-like flashing effect. This is not so bad for reading that crime novel serially as you spend 15-20 seconds per page. But for the browsing, searching and scanning mode one uses as a newspaper reader and college exam crammer, I’m afraid the lag time and flashing effect providing a rather jarring experience.

Second, interactivity has some ways to go on this device. It’s not Amazon’s fault per se, but we’re so used to iPhone’s touch screen experience that anything less than that feels like a handicap. The Kindle’s screen is not touch sensitive, so I often find myself having to slap my own hand away from interacting directly with the page. Instead, you’re stuck with a very “1.0″ four-way tiny joystick, that seems so yesteryear when you have something like Google Earth on iPhone that makes you feel like a demigod as you spin, rotate and fly around the globe while you slip and slide your two fingers on the glass.

By now you know the Kindle is a monochrome device. With Kindle 2’s paperback-sized screen, black-and-white only isn’t a liability. But as an alternative to college textbooks, the lack of color becomes problematic. Given that some of the most expensive books the Kindle might replace are biology, science and medical textbooks, the lack of color diagrams and illustrations reduces the prospects people will convert to the DX device. Add to this, the rumors that Apple is working on a iPad — a larger screen version of an iPod touch-like device — and suddenly Amazon’s device may look a generation behind as people will find a general computing device with a large color screen a better value.

Which brings us to the price. People have gasped at its $489 price tag for a dedicated-use, monochrome device that lacks even a decent Web browser. At that pricepoint, many decent sized netbooks are available that provide much more functionality and not much more bulk.

Will Amazon DX sell? Of course it will, it’s a sweet early adopter device that makes lots of folks drool. Leo Laporte of TWiT.tv said his 75-year old mom fell in love with the Kindle, and felt she could take up reading again because of the large adjustable font size. That’s a great Mother’s Day gift for her. And no doubt with its built-in networking with Whispernet, it will be a great device for end users who don’t like interacting with a PC.

Will Amazon DX sell in quantities that will make a difference to the textbook and newspaper market? I can’t see that happening with this model. The lack of color, the lack of extendibility and its failure to be a general purpose tool is a big drawback. Some will say that the Macintosh with a black and white screen changed everything back in 1984 when everything else was color. But the Mac had so many more paradigm shifts even with a lesser screen. The Kindle doesn’t do the same. It mimics paper and the most basic version of a printing press, in a beuatiful form factor. But that’s about it. It’s not a game changer, though it might just make the newspaper industry think there’s some overtime to be played.

This Monday at 1:30pm (East coast US time) I have the privilege of speaking with Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki concept, to discuss The Wikipedia Revolution on the Yi-Tan Weekly Tech Call hosted by Jerry Michalski.

Among the things we’ll talk about:

• How has Wikipedia affected the world?
• What lessons can we take from it?
• What are Wikipedia’s next frontiers?
• What do wikis say about human nature?

Please find the details on how to listen and join the conversation at the Yi-Tan site.

An IRC Chat will be available during the call at freenode#yitan, here. On Twitter find the hashtag #yitan.

For those who don’t know Jerry Michalski, he is mentioned in the first line of my book, The Wikipedia Revolution and was the one who first introduced me to Wikipedia. So this is a nice way to see the whole thing come full circle!

Those in the San Francisco area are invited to talks TODAY about my new book “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia” (Hyperion). The talk at UC Berkeley will address academics, and the one with the Wiki Wednesday group will get deeper into the technology/wiki culture.

Feel free to tell anyone who might be interested! All are invited.

“The Wikipedia Revolution” by Andrew Lih
http://wikipediarevolution.com
REMINDER: Talks in the San Francisco Area, April 1

Berkeley, April 1, 2009, 4pm
UC Berkeley, School of Information, 202 South Hall
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/20090401lih

San Francisco, April 1, 2009, 6pm
Wiki Wednesday, Citizen Space, 425 Second St., #100 (Ground floor)
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2143776
http://www.socialtext.net/wikiwed/index.cgi?san_francisco_april_2009

SUMMARY: The Wikipedia Revolution is the first narrative account of
the remarkable success story of the “encyclopedia anyone can edit.”
Andrew Lih, a Wikipedia editor/administrator, academic and journalist,
tells how the Internet’s free culture community inspired its creation
in 2001, and how legions of volunteers have emerged to create over 10
million articles in over 50 languages.

REVIEWS of The Wikipedia Revolution:

“It’s a terrific book.. Andrew tells the story historically, providing
tons of context and background.” - David Weinberger, Author,
Everything is Miscellaneous

“It was riveting–a total page turner. I thought I knew Wikipedia
inside and out yet I learned something fascinating on nearly every
page. Bravo.” - Chris Anderson, Editor in chief, Wired Magazine

“Other books have surfaced… but Lih’s authoritative approach covers
much more.” -Publishers Weekly

“An easy, nontech, intriguing read about a Web “miracle” that today
rivals the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” -Booklist, Starred Review

“Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City” by Noam Cohen
The New York Times [link http://bit.ly/14ONna]

“Everybody Knows Everything” by Jeremy Philips
Wall Street Journal [link http://bit.ly/BtfO]

“All in good faith” by Sam Leith
The Spectator (UK) Lead review [link http://bit.ly/mUj7R]

Significant announcement by Jimmy Wales today:

In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely. It’s something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader.

But for now, we will be closing the doors on the Wikia Search project (as of March 31, 2009) and will be re-directing and refocusing resources on other Wikia.com properties, especially on Wikianswers. Join me there to help provide freely licensed answers to all the world’s questions.

If you remember, Wikia Search was launched (press release) in January 2008 to be somewhat federated: using publicly crawled data via ISC.org, it was an example of “open general search index” that anyone could use. It was an interesting idea to share the crawling, and have competitive innovation on top of it.

At the time the Wikia press release heralded the cooperation:

“We believe that a completely open foundation must drive the future of search, following the same principles as the Internet and Web that it builds upon,” said Jeremie Miller, founder of Jabber and Wikia Search Architect. “Search is becoming one of the most powerful tools humankind has ever created—only transparency and open participation will protect these tools from abuse.”

For now, that experiment is over.

There are some great nuggets of information in hard to find corners of the Internet.

In Noam Cohen’s recent blog post on the death of Encarta, Tom Corddry who “ran the team that created Encarta” has some reflections on the product. Instead of hiding in the comments section, I’m reprinting it here.

I ran the team that created Encarta, so I’m standing up to say a few awkward words at its graveside memorial service. Encarta, may it rest in peace, deserves to be remembered more for its quality than you suggest. Your sources repeat several notions that were never true of Encarta-first, that the content from Funk and Wagnall’s was “low quality” compared to Britannica, and second that the value added by Microsoft was primarily “graphics and sound.” The text from Funk and Wagnall’s was far superior to Britannica’s as a starting point for a digital encyclopedia, because it was much more nearly “structured data,” meaning that the architecture of the text was very consistent from one article to the next. This allowed us to add a lot of “contextual” value–to compute the relatedness of every article to every other article, and build what was at the time a uniquely useful set of links and navigational tools across the entire content. Britannica, by contrast, was a bloated mishmash, a consequence of its long tradition of having articles written by many different celebrity authors. (I ghost-wrote one myself, in fact). By the standards of the print encyclopedia world, Microsoft invested heavily in expanding and updating the content of Encarta right from the beginning. We consciously invested in the contextual value just described, in expanding the core content, in creating the world’s first truly global encyclopedia, and in an efficient update cycle. We had enough “multimedia” in the original product to keep the reviewers happy, but focused on the overall usefulness of the whole product much more than on the relative handful of video clips, etc. I’d argue that within its first five years, Encarta became the best encyclopedia in history: it had tremendously consistent quality and usefulness across a very broad range of topics, and added a great deal of value by the relationships it illuminated between topics. All of that has been rendered a bit quaint now, but in it’s day it was an accomplishment worthy of a graveside toast. Encarta had more than “the potential” to unsettle the print encyclopedia business–it pretty much destroyed it. Print encyclopedias were dead, thanks to Encarta, before Wikipedia existed. We expected from the beginning that Encarta would eventually be superceded by online information-seeking. As brilliant as Wikipedia is, I don’t think that Wikipedia by itself killed Encarta. I think the Web as a whole made Encarta obsolete. I hope treasured old copies of Encarta will live on for a while in remote corners of the world, where people have scattered access to computers but little or no connection to the Web–school libraries in Africa, for example. In those places, even out-of-date copies of African Encarta, the only Encyclopedia of Africa ever published, will live on, and Joe Biden will forever be newly-elected. I’ll drink to that.

— Tom Corddry

UPDATE: Corddry’s second post also provides some insight on his time with Encarta.  Thanks to Sage Ross for the tip.

In response to Randonneur, post 15, a bit of explanation: Print encyclopedia editorial groups, even in their heyday, were actually quite small, and much of their work from year to year was devoted to removing content in order to make room for other content. The size of the multi-volume sets was fixed, so every word added had to be offset by a word subtracted. Since it was also expensive to touch more pages than necessary when making changes (a printing fact of life), the editors ingeniously found ways to remove content as close as possible to where they were adding content. Need a big new article on Bosnia? Better find stuff to cut from the articles about Bosporus or Boss Tweed. The senior editors at these publications estimated that at least half of the total editorial effort was devoted to this sort of non-value-adding work. At Encarta, by contrast, nearly all the editorial work added value–writing new articles, updating, expanding and improving existing articles, and, of course, adding the sorts of elements that computers could support that were truly valuable: the sound of a bassoon, the way gravity works in orbital models, and so forth. At its peak, the Encarta editorial staff was roughly four times the size of any of its print competitors, included many of the best people from those competitors, and was devoting much more effort to actual new and better content. Then there’s the whole international aspect… all print encyclopedias were highly nation-specific. Encarta was always global. In practice, this meant a core of universal content with “extensions” in each national area, and global licensing of content, which further increased the value created by the editorial staff. This model also works brilliantly for Wikipedia. By exploiting its advantages, The Encarta team, over a period of a decade (late 80s to late 90s), created a body of content that offered greater scope AND depth than its print competitors, then tossed in the advantages of navigation, multimedia, integrated updates, and low price. As a result, more copies of Encarta were sold, by far, in its 16-year run than were sold of all print encyclopedias combined in their several-century run. It reached many more school children world wide than any encylopedia had ever done before it. Wikipedia has since expanded greatly on that reach, and is a far superior resource, as long as you recognize the inherent uncertainty about accuracy–but even that is a useful lesson for life: there’s no such thing as ultimate authority. My reference to “treasured copies” doesn’t expect too much sentiment in the first world, just continuing usefulness in the third world, where computers are spreading faster than the Internet, and even an outdated copy of Encarta may be the best source of accurate information in the whole village.

— Tom Corddry

The news came as I happened to be finishing up a visit to the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco. Jay Walsh told it to me: Microsoft is closing Encarta down.

Wow. I had to say I was a bit surprised. Not shocked but surprised.

When I got a look at Microsoft’s announcement it was classic: generically non-useful public relations boilerplate:

Why are these Encarta Web sites and software products being discontinued?

Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.

Microsoft’s vision is that everyone around the world needs to have access to quality education, and we believe that we can use what we’ve learned and assets we’ve accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology solutions. In doing so, we feel strongly that we are making the right investments that will help make our vision a reality. [link]

But everyone could see the elephant in the room — Wikipedia obliterated the need for anything like Encarta’s paid firewall encyclopedia online.

If you look back to a previous post in January, you’ll see that Wikipedia had 97% of the online encyclopedia traffic, and the rest shared 3%. Ouch.

Now why was I surprised?

Because Microsoft could have kept it going indefinitely, given its cash pile and the “Windows Tax” paying for everything. With this being such a prominent example of “free” trumping commercial and proprietary, I do wonder if this makes for a victory that might give spiritual comfort to others in the free culture movement. What’s next in Microsoft vs Linux, Microsoft vs OpenOffice, MPEG vs Ogg and other battles?

Interestingly, Encarta was a product that was always meant to be a throw-in: a me-too product that enticed consumers as part of the Microsoft suite when buying a Dell or Gateway PC. It was never destined to be a standalone moneymaker. Add to this, the fact that Bill Gates founded Corbis as a photo and video archive, and bought the prized Bettmann Archives, and Encarta suddenly had a wealth of visual multimedia features. Its rich interactive features were far ahead of others, and it had rights to the most important historical photos of the last century. It was more a showcase than a business. It was an old school model in a new media world.

It’s not that Encarta didn’t try to change.

In March 2005, Microsoft tried installing wiki-like features by soliciting input from the readers (p 204, from The Wikipedia Revolution):

“We’re about to roll out a new set of tools that will make it far easier for you to suggest revisions in Encarta. By the time of our next post, we should have the new tools up and running, and we’ll be looking to you to help us help you.”

If you have never heard of the Encarta Feedback function, it’s with good reason. It never developed much beyond the public announcement. The Encarta staff produced a  six- month report with a sample of the types of feedback they were getting, but the last mention of Encarta Feedback was on their blog on September 28, 2005. Today most links to this feature are defunct, without a trace of this  wiki- like experiment on Encarta’s pages.

It’s important to note that the bells and whistles of the visually rich Encarta didn’t win out in the end. It was the instantly updated, always available free content of Wikipedia that grabbed eyeballs and links. All that resulted in sky high Google rankings. And because it was free, it could be molded to fit mobile devices, translated to other languages and be adapted for the end user.

Add it to the case studies of yore: 8-track vs cassette; Digital Audio Tape vs MiniDisc; Beta vs VHS. The lesson? High fidelity rarely wins out with consumers. It’s all about convenience, availability and ease of use.

There is a loss to the world with the absence of Encarta’s historic images. Because Wikipedia has a strict “free” edict on content, especially images and multimedia, it will always be at a disadvantage in having visuals that are unique and under copyright protection. For that, the community will have to wait until copyright runs out on those materials. Technology may be fast, but that’s one area that will be slow.

Oh, and by the way: no surprise, the Wikipedia article [[Encarta]] has already been updated to reflect its passing, likely by a very smug, grinning editor.

I was on a recent panel at SXSW doing Business in China for Fun and Profit, which turned out to be a popular draw, as people were madly Tweeting little nuggets of wisdom we were spouting on stage. It was made more lively because the scheduled panelists (Kris Krug, Robert Scales, Sage Brennan, Christine Lu and myself) were complemented by familiar China Twitterati and quasi-panelists Kaiser Kuo, Elliott Ng and Chad Catacchio. It helps that Christine Lu threw a great SXSW pre-party in Shanghai that got us buzzing beforehand.

The best writeup is at CN Reviews, and James Fallows follows up with some additional insights on my comments. I wish I could have someone as smart as James Fallows always annotate my talks. You can also see the Twitter tag of #sxswchina for the audience chatter.