In the ongoing quest to highlight the unusual, quirky but fact-based articles in Wikipedia, consider the article [[The Smurfs and communism]], which provides an amazingly detailed and well constructed comparison between “Smurfism” and that other famous -ism.

Smurf Communism for the purposes of this article refers to an internet meme that sets forth theories about the economic and political system in The Smurfs, a popular comic book and animated series originally created by Belgian cartoonist Peyo. According to various observers there are many parallels between communist ideology and practices and the way of life depicted in The Smurfs, particularly within the American animated television series.

…

The theories usually begin by citing what seem to be uncanny aspects of Smurf characters’ appearances. Papa Smurf has a wide beard, which some feel looks like Karl Marx’s. He also wears red slacks and a red cap, displaying the stereotypical color of Communism throughout the world.

It’s worth a read if you’re not familiar with the type of intriguing just-the-facts humour speckled throughout in Wikipedia.

It’s no secret that YouTube is one of the phenomenal successes of the last year, doing for video what Flickr did for photos. While both services have become showcases for the Web 2.0 trend, rumors abound that they are being overburdened by expenses for disk space and bandwidth demands with no real revenue streams to pay for it.

But one interesting effect of a YouTube’s “commentable” video clips can be seen this graduation season. Many college commencement speakers, from even small institutions, have found their words captured for posterity and available via a click and easily embedded into blogs and other commentary. One particularly controversial case was the graduation speaker at the University of St. Thomas, MN, this year.

Someone put the video up at YouTube and has prompted lively discussion. Which got me to thinking - by this time next year, you can imagine not just a few dozen commencement speeches put online, but perhaps one for each and every college and university around the country. A “best of” reel of inspirational words of wisdom across academia would be quite interesting to assemble. And how about not just the US, why not other prestigious institutions around the world. So yes, YouTube has some possibilities beyond lip sync videos, pet bloopers, extreme stunts and teen pranks. And there may even be some money in it.

Rebecca MacKinnon has been pressing Skype on its partnership with TOM.com in China. As you may well know, Skype has a TOM branded version of Skype in the PRC that filters keywords in the instant messaging portion of the application. Rebecca has asked Skype to at least disclose how much/little is being censored. The latest comment by Jaanus Kase of Skype is disconcerting:

Skype has taken a decision to have TOM Online actively manage its business in China, thus you should be addressing these questions to TOM.

It continues to astonish me what American companies are willing to let local partners do in their name (such as with Yahoo and Alibaba). Now I’m certainly not for the US Congress to step in and in the name of “human rights” punish companies that conform to Chinese censorship rules. The last thing we want is for political posturing to be mixed up with this issue.

But one would think a company like Skype would care about brand reputation, customer perception and bifurcating a product (ie. are you using Skype or TOM/Skype?). In addition, not even providing a unified front for public relations between their US and China operations makes me wonder if companies like Skype and Yahoo really know what they’re doing in this space.

While writing my book about Wikipedia, I’m often asked to name some of the more interesting articles in the online encyclopedia. So here’s the first of a series of occasional posts highlighting the quirky and interesting.

First up: [[Let us trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle]]

The article says it:

“was part of a government campaign promulgating grooming and dress standards. North Korea broadcast it on state-run television in the capital of Pyongyang. The television program claimed that hair length can affect human intelligence in part because of the deprivation to the rest of the body of nutrients required for hair to grow.”

Needless to say, this has become an amusing meme in the Wikipedia community, even inspiring a page titled, “Let’s edit our Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense in accordance with the Wikipedian lifestyle .”

The other day Slashdot pointed to a rather misguided critique of bloggers as plagiarists. The writer contends in “The New Plagiarism” that bloggers who “blockquote” and cite their sources are still plagiarists.

These sites, which for this article I’ll simply call “gray”, are generally identified by a large number of very short posts, with much of it in block quotes or otherwise directly lifted content. Though they meticulously credit their sources, bowing to more traditional rules for blog attribution, and work to add at least some original content, usually over half of their material comes from other sources.

This has caused many bloggers to worry that these grey blogs might be trying to get away with content theft under the guise of legitimate attribution. The idea being that they can create a much larger volume of content if they only have to write a small portion of it. Users will simply visit the gray blogs since they are able to provide so much more information and, due to the use of liberal quoting, the user will then have no reason to visit the original source. After all, they already have most of the critical information.

I think the author has gotten the whole idea of copyright infringement (a legal problem) mixed with plagiarism (not a legal problem, but an academic one). Regardless, what he fails to observe is that the “original sources” very much wind up being unknown to the casual readers, and blogs actually drive traffic to site, not diminish it. The Guardian Unlimited, for example, is an award winning newspaper site that gets cited in blogs and Wikipedia and has increased their exposure far beyond their print circulation in the UK. In my years of dealing with newspapers around the world, I have heard very few gripes from newspaper folks about their work being cited in chunks across the net. In fact, the Wall Street Journal looks favorably upon their reporters when their stories are cited by others.

James Carey, brilliant educator and communications professor at Columbia University, passed away in his sleep last night at his home in Rhode Island. You can see more about him at the Poynter Institute, including a podcast of comments about him. Jay Rosen also has reflected on Carey’s impact.

He was a gentleman, and when I was teaching at Columbia, he was always gracious in sitting down and talking about the nature of technology and communication. He is perhaps best know for writing about the influence of the telegraph on society, and “transmission and ritual” views of communication.

I had the pleasure of working with the communications program he started, and advised two of its PhD students. Perhaps the most humbling moment was when he left a note in my mailbox in 2000 with a portion of Norbert Wiener’s paper on cybernetics, and asked for my help interpreting a passage from it. I was not smart enough to give him a useful answer.

Prof. Carey, was always inspiring for those Friday lectures he delivered to masters students in the J-school lecture hall. It was a journalism church service for weekly intellectual nourishment within the frenzy of deadline writing and RW1 professors breathing down students’ necks. He will be sorely missed.

While this story may be old news for folks in China, Fortune magazine has a good roundup of the New Balance story in the PRC, and some of the perils of outsourcing overseas, the legal landscape and losing control over a brand. The nut graf:

Now that Western companies are pervasively outsourcing the manufacture of their products to factories overseas, they’re entrusting their precious intellectual property - designs, molds, specifications, trade secrets - to hundreds of contractors and subcontractors all over the world. It’s extremely hard to police global supply chains, and IP is leaking out through 1,000 cracks.

A good adjunct to this story is the tale of NEC, from the IHT.

The IHT reports today that the Business Software Alliance found:

…the rate of pirated software in those two countries fell four percentage points last year to 86 percent in China and to 83 percent in Russia. Still, China and Russia remained among the countries with the highest rates of piracy. The United States, with a software piracy rate of 21 percent, was the lowest.

Looks like the dinner Bill Gates hosted for Hu Jintao was for a reason. This is quite a change from the >> 90% piracy rate in China just a few years ago. Certainly the new mandate for PC sellers to require a bundled OS has something to do with this.

A curious grassroots movement has started in the People’s Republic of China - the “Not Buy House” [sic] initiative. A backlash against the overheated housing market in China? See for yourself.

i’ve been a fan of Michael Wolf’s photography of Hong Kong for a while now. His project of 100 rooms each 100 square feet in size is amazing. Take a look.