• Cool announcement: Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services http://bit.ly/GYkRq includes Wikipedia, Freebase, Genbank, others #
• Waiting for #slicehost to fix double hardware failure. Surprising lapse/FAIL on otherwise impressive service #
• Sad: Rocky Mountain News publishes last edition Friday. US newspaper industry in alarming disarray #
• With all these newspaper shutdowns, have to wonder what happens to their news archives #
• RT @Web2AsiaRumor: MySpace to Close China Doors http://snipr.com/cq5o1 #
• Consumer Reports: 10 best cars. http://bit.ly/S4MFp Only Detroit car is Chevy Avalanche pickup which gets 20hway/14city #

• RT @digitalchina China Unicom + Apple agreement: watch the rise of the iphone in China: http://ping.fm/vrmH7 (Wow, huge move) #
• One dead, 20 injured in Turkish Airlines plane crash in Amsterdam http://bit.ly/8qOZa #
• FWIW, I flew Turkish Airlines from Asia and thought they were modern and safe. OTOH, I’ve been flying PRC-based airlines, so… #
• RT @mikebutcher: Weird to be following @nipp as he tweets live from the Amsterdam plane crash. Like being there. #
• Dreamhost having major bad hair day: DNS slowness/lookup failures http://tinyurl.com/dgfr3z #
• Glad I spent the time to move my sites/blog to Slicehost; Dreamhost having major pains #
• RT @rmack The Berkman Center launches Herdict Web: Help track censorship around the world:http://is.gd/kOJl #
• Working on audio book of Wikipedia Revolution. How to pronounce names of Wikipedians is an art, not a science http://bit.ly/6Tkp8 #
• “Twitter first to publish dramatic crash pictures” http://bit.ly/cJk4E CNN says “stole a march on traditional media” #
• Each SXSW panel will have a unique Meebo Room where attendees can add their thoughts live and in real time http://bit.ly/eBBCu #
• With all the heavy scripting sites one loads in a browser: Gmail, Meebo, Facebook, et al. No wonder Firefox dies slow death every 24 hours #

• Going to SXSW Shanghai event: http://sxswshanghai.eventbrite.com/ attendees get two months of Boingo Wifi, nice! #
• Ouch: DetNews outs Obama economic team driving foreign autos. http://bit.ly/r9LTl Geithner:Acura, Orszag:Honda. Obama? Ford #
• Hopeful thought of the day: Wikipedia created/blossomed during recession of 2001; lots of available labor in post dot-com bust #
• More people should know about Sandboxie. Use it as wrapper when running Chrome, testing untrusted apps http://bit.ly/Ro4z #
• Latest political rumor: “Former Wash. Gov. Gary Locke Likely To Commerce” http://bit.ly/zAODT #
• Just got first ten hardcopies of Wikipedia Revolution book shipped to me in China http://bit.ly/6Tkp8 #
• Commentary by @sreenet “India is too great a country to have its reputation made or broken by a single movie” http://bit.ly/ofity #
• APM Marketplace: Should “[Ii]nternet” be capitalized? http://bit.ly/kE1Qe BBC, Wired say no; Assoc Press says yes. Me: yes #
• Interesting to see a president say, “How are you, man?” with soul while coming down the aisle #nSOTU #
• Dick “I haven’t seen Obama’s birth certificate” Shelbyshakes President’s hand, and tries to tell something to him #nSOTU Guesses? #
• Nice inspirational “we will emerge stronger than before” from Obama. Let’s just hope for getting back to par… #
• #nSOTU That Republican non-standing section is looking pretty small #
• Have to imagine avg American’s confusion on “energy” and “China” comment, and they zoom in on Energy sec. Stephen Wu #nSOTU #
• Wonder if Obama will announce his entire cabinet and econ. team will dump their foreign autos, and buy American only #nSOTU #
• Re: parenting, someone just sent me “Jenna and Tonic” by instant message http://bit.ly/lP0bO #nSOTU #
• RT @pblackshaw: Streaming on Whitehouse.gov is 2-3 seconds ahead of TV networks – a TWITTER ADVANTAGE! http://www.whitehouse.gov/live/ #
• Sad we have to say what should never have to be clarified “..we do not torture.” #nSOTU #
• Just saw Obama hug Lieberman on way out of chamber #nSOTU #
• RT @anamariecox: I hope Bobby Jindal’s underwear is made of steel because I bet he is shitting bricks. (LOL) #
• Watching reactions from Shields and Brooks on PBS Newshour http://bit.ly/9oj7T #nSOTU #
• Bobby Jindal #jindal Ouch, used car salesman speaking style a bit offputting #
• RT @orthopod: Jindal sounds like he’s reading a picture-book to a young child #
• #jindal Does his “fiscal discipline, smaller govt, personal responsibility” have any resonance in this day/age? #
• #jindal David Brooks on Jindal’s speech: Did “not so well…” “Disaster for the Rep. party” #
• Gut feeling re CNN/Facebook partnership and instant polling: flawed, as you’ve got a demographic profile you don’t really understand #
• Lost in the shuffle: Senator Durbin calls on Burris to resign. Does that mean we should stick a fork in him? http://bit.ly/nihUh #
• #jindal Get ready folks, we’re starting to see a Bobby Jindal v Kenneth from 30 Rock meme getting full steam http://bit.ly/130yhf #
• Apple would do itself a favor by not assuming average consumers know what “Leopard” and “Tiger” are. Even I get them mixed up #
• Good to see economist Joe Stiglitz on CNN doing post-mortem analysis, even if he has to share stage with Ed Rollins #
• RT @jayrosen_nyu: Expense to print /truck the Chronicle is 2x the $7.75 to subscribe wkly http://is.gd/kJA1 What does that tell you? #
• Reluctant to install Security Update 2009-1 to get to use Safari 4, given reports of CPAN getting munged afterwards. May just bite bullet #

There’s an interesting post at Sunlight Labs that takes a good hard look at the advent of communnity-in-a-box content management systems, and whether they’re worth the trouble when compared to more flexible “frameworks” like Django and Ruby on Rails that provide more primitive but customizable components. Actually, the title of the post is more forceful than that: “Content Management Systems just don’t work.”

He observes that CMS’es often have “opinions” that are an artifact of the original intentions of the creators, which often stand in the way of it becoming an effective tool:

the problem with a full scale Content Management System is that it has too many opinions. Those opinions were though of by somebody other than you and the needs of your organization. The more developed a content management system (or any piece of software, really) the more “opinions” it has. And the more “opinions” it has, the more likely one of them is going to really tick you off.

He talks about Recovery.gov and its use of Drupal. I’ve used the latter on small sites, and it got me up to running speed faster than I could have done myself. I’ve also used Joomla with a crew of 20 collaborative journalists. But I get where he’s coming from, because in the end, the training and the coercing of the CMS to do what I wanted was rather painful. If I had to run something larger, like Recovery.org, his advice would be to hire someone fulltime, and use a framework. Given how many sites Clay Johnson has overseen, and how many different systems he’s used, it’s a valid concern.

For a great example of visualizing the current economic credit crisis, see this project by students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

http://www.crisisofcredit.com/

If you’d rather see it as a YouTube video (which loaded faster for me) see: Part 1 and Part 2.

It’s part of a new animation/explanation aesthetic we’ve been seeing on the net for the last few years. When I get a chance, I’ll post more about this. In the meantime, Google “knife party what barry says” and “motrin moms” to get the idea.

This kind of content would be quite fascinating to see in Wikipedia, as it is the one clear area where Britannica and Encarta, mostly on CD and DVD format, have an advantage. Their multimedia features and video clips make it a much more graphically rich experience.

It is notoriously tough to do animations and time-line based media as a collaborative effort. Kaltura is one of the folks who have tried to work with the Wikimedia Foundation to bring collaborative, Web-based video editing to the community. It would be great to see more.

John Markoff has a weekend story in the New York Times titled “Do We Need a New Internet?”

He provides anecdotes from influential security and Internet experts, but it comes off as a disconnected set of observations about IP addressing, security, privacy, botnet infection. Unfortunately, i’s a story with grand ambitions but without a logical thread.

From the very first sentence, the premise is problematic. He introduces us to the  Morris Internet worm (though oddly doesn’t mention it by name) which clogged the fledgling Internet in 1988.

Markoff concludes, “Since then things have gotten much, much worse.”

I was rather surprised by this. Some estimate the Morris worm affected 10% of computers then, but its impact was much greater since those machines were the hubs of timesharing and e-mail activity at coporations and college campuses in an age before laptops and cheap client computers.

I was working at the university computer labs in 1988, and since then I haven’t seen anything as massively disruptive as the Morris worm was in proportion to the user community. It had nearly every college system administrator scrambling during that time. The homogeneity of computer systems (UNIX systems running a variant of the BSD distribution) meant the worm’s job of infecting and propagating was rather simple, as it exploded out of control to jam computers and networks. Today, we have a wide variety of hardware and operating system software that has changed the nature of the risk so that an Internet-wide threat on that scale isn’t likely. Yes, on today’s Internet there are many more hosts and a wide array of threats. But characterizing today’s situation as “much, much worse,” than that massive Internet outage of the 80s is an odd claim.

One commenter in the geek ghetto of Slashdot said, the majority of the problems Markoff talks about “are almost entirely a Windows phenomenon” hooked up to always on broadband connections. Yet, Markoff doesn’t even mention this and only mentions Microsoft once in passing. More relevant would be explaining to readers how MS had been shipping insecure, dangerous Internet Explorer configurations for years out of the box by allowing ActiveX controls to be downloaded and executed off the net, no questions asked. Even in recent years, the firm’s reaction to known security holes has been sluggish (as has been the case with Markoff’s example, Conficker). One could also argue Microsoft’s new Genuine Advantage system makes things even worse by withholding system updates unless Microsoft can verify a Windows installation as a legit purchase. What this means is pirated Windows installations serve as persistent infected zombie bot-net computers. (Anyone concerned about these issues must listen to the Security Now podcast with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson. They do a great job explaining all these issues.)

When it comes to solutions to the problem Markoff has posited, it gets no better.

Consider this buzzword-heavy, information-light paragraph about a project called Clean Slate:

That has not discouraged the Stanford engineers who say they are on a mission to “reinvent the Internet.” They argue that their new strategy is intended to allow new ideas to emerge in an evolutionary fashion, making it possible to move data traffic seamlessly to a new networking world. Like the existing Internet, the new network will almost certainly have no one central point of control and no one organization will run it. It is most likely to emerge as new hardware and software are built in to the router computers that run today’s network and are adopted as Internet standards.

Confused? I’ve read these lines five times over, and still don’t understand what the explanation is about. This is perhaps my general lament about the NY Times’s technology reporting. Too often, when trying to simplify their points for the layperson, they strip out so much information that it flummoxes both novices and experts.

There is a legitimate debate about the future of the Internet in terms of privacy and safety, but it is  more robust than this 1300 word story conveys. (See books like The Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain.) Markoff touches on issues all along the OSI stack, from application level issues to low-level network architecture problems. But it’s not a cohesive argument for a “New Internet” per se.

After my previous post about the new MTV show “How’s Your News”, which is based off a documentary of the same name about a mentally disabled crew of street reporters, I was heartened by a good exchange with one of the fathers of the reporters and the show’s creator. It was one of the better blog exchanges I’ve had here since I started.

A few interesting outcomes: first, the [[How's Your News]] article was started by User:Staeiou after he saw me mention this post on Twitter. It hasn’t had many edits yet. I had the pleasure of meeting Staeiou in Alexandria, Egypt where he talked about academics’ critiques of Wikipedia.

Second, apparently User:Ikip seems to agree with my view, and [[Chewbacca defense]] has been restored as a standalone article, so far without objection. This has always been a dilemma when I was doing academic research on Wikipedia — commenting about topics and policies absolutely has an affect on the articles and community outcomes. From the social science aspect, it is in fact problematic to be involved in the community in which you’re observing. From the journalism side, the dynamic is different since it is a practical field of study.

If you read the full discussion in the previous post, you will note we came to clarify that my mention of ” stumpy, disfigured and badly groomed ’special needs’ journalists on camera” was meant as my implication of how MTV was portraying the reporters. Again, if that was read as my personal opinion, I apologize. That was not the intent at all.

That said, I’m still skeptical about MTV’s motives on airing the show, especially when they market it as a “Docu-Comedy.” It may be that there is room for different interpretations of the “comedy” — that people come for the spectacle, but go away with appreciation. Hearing from Ken Vest and Arthur Bradford helped to convince me the roots are genuine and the project is respected in the circle of families of the disabled. I hope MTV ultimately keeps with that spirit.

Wikipedia has had its detractors when it comes to the great topics of the humanities: history, art and the classics. Some of it is indeed justified.

But what is rarely disputed is that Wikipedia is without peers when it comes to the strongholds of the net roots: tech geekery and pop culture. Just try to find better articles about the creation of Star Trek, the authoritative list of Family Guy characters or a history of South Park memes.

But we’re starting to see this unquestionable dominance, well, questioned.

I’ve pointed out how many dot-com and tech topics (like Pownce and DisplayLink) seem to have lost their studious caretakers in the “encyclopedia that Slashdot built”. These pages have gotten dumped by deletionists, dominated by POV pushers or been missing altogether. This has become fairly regular of late on my blog, in my Twitter feed and the Wikipedia Weekly podcast.

Now, I believe we’re seeing startling holes in Wikipedia’s pop culture dominance.

It began when a friend told me about a new show called “How’s Your News.”

It was on Bittorrent networks as a download, and debuted on February 8 as a new series on MTV with a rather tasteless premise — gather a diverse bunch of mentally challenged reporters (from Down to Williams syndrome) to be roving street reporters, while also rubbing shoulders with celebrities and ambushing them on the Grammy Awards’ red carpet. This is the “brainchild” of South Park creator Matt Stone. Given MTV’s ability to sensationalize Jackasses, Pimping and Sweet Sixteens, it should probably be no surprise putting stumpy, disfigured and badly groomed “special needs” journalists on camera is the next big idea for the cable TV channel that depends on unpredictibility.

How's Your News "mentally challenged" reporters

But this post isn’t about whether the show is a tasteful exercise or not.

The fact that this was a new MTV show with a controversial premise, and caught the attention of not one but two BoingBoing posts, a review by the venerable Tom Shales of The Washington Post, and a NY Daily News TV review meant this was not an obscure show under the radar.

Far from it.

In fact “How’s Your News” is a TV serialization based on a documentary of the same name, that was profiled by NPR’s This American Life, a show with a massive following, in October 2007.

Given how controversial this potential freak show of a TV program could be, it seemed ripe for a solid NPOV treatment ala Wikipedia’s smart crowd of editors.

There was one problem: there is no article.

Not even a single deleted version, which means no one even tried to start it.

To me, this was a real shocker.

At least in the Pownce case, there was a debate among people who wanted the content, and those who questioned its notability. In this case, no one even cared to start it.

For something that landed right in the “sweet spot” of Wikipedia’s core  — pop culture, television show, US market, controversial content, troll-worthy characters — there was nothing at all in Wikipedia. It almost makes you wish the trolls had at least initiated the article’s creation, tasteless jokes and all.

Wikipedia still has the policy that users who aren’t logged in cannot start a new article. So while there are red links from other Wikipedia articles (ie. [[List_of_programs_broadcast_by_MTV]] and [[Arthur Bradford]]) it didn’t lead to [[How's Your News]] being created.

I’m not sure what more to say, other than to ask other Wikipedians what they think this means.

I consider another discovery in December 2008 to be relevant: the article [[Chewbacca Defense]], one of my favorite examples how NPOV can usefully document pop culture memes, was ingloriously merged into [[Chef Aid]]. This was on September 20 2008, without much fanfare, discussion or clear rationale. Just a solo comment in the edit history: “Merged – No opposition on talk page.”

And perhaps that’s Wikipedia’s long term fate as a product of a decimated crowd: a slow march towards being stale and conventional, not out of commission but omission.

WikiAnswers is not Wikianswers. There is wiki.answers.com, and then there is answers.wikia.com. And confusingly, Wikianswers.com points to one of them.

Did you get that? Well you’re not the only one who didn’t.

Seth Finkelstein has a good rundown on this latest confusion among the companies spun off from the Wikipedia Revolution.

His blog and his Guardian article are pretty unequivocal:

In my opinion, Wikia’s relaunch of its site using the name Wikianswers is sleazy and unethical in the face of the far more well-known and successful Answers.com [site].

For those who don’t know, Answers.com has been a major donor and supporter of the Wikimania conference over the years, as has Wikia, which makes this showdown all the more intriguing.

I’ll try to post later if I have more time about the fire here in Beijing, but we were right in the heart of it.

We can see the TVCC building’s all-metal west facade from our living room window, so imagine our shock when at 930pm, we see it lit up like a vertical kebab grill, glowing orange. It was 40-stories of flames and smoke. After grabbing video camera, SLR, tripod, Blackberry and cell phones, we ran out of the apartment to report the story (all in less than two minutes).

You can see some of the Flickr photos I’ve taken, of the fire and morning after. The images have been featured in a number of places, thanks to Twittering: Shanghaiist, Gizmodo, Curbed to name a few. This has driven about 15,000 image views in just under 36 hours. [Flickr]

Here’s the video story I worked on with the Wall Street Journal that evening with reporter/wife Mei Fong. (Flash needed)

UPDATE: The Dezeen architecture and design blog also carried the photos, which has pushed image views to over 24,000.

UPDATE 2: Actually the number of image views is north of 65,000, since it seems the 24,000 number is only for photos visited through the main set.