Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 66 of 147)

100 Million Websites

Just took a call from John Hill of WCHL 1360-AM for comments on the CNN story “Web Reaches New Milestone: 100 Million Sites.”

It’s not clear to me immediately what constitutes a site, perhaps a unique URL?, but a serious looking guy from Netcraft (Rich Miller) assures us on the CNN bit (and at the Netcraft site) that we are there in numbers. If each MySpace and Facebook entry were considered a web site, where would we be? Note: I see from the Netcraft site linked just above that he means hosts not sites.

With the Google acquisitions of JotSpot, Writerly, and YouTube, we can see that the web site per se is less important than web services that allow for collaboration, cooperative work and contribution of and comment on content. Even at this the content is less important than the social acts of embedded in the collaboration, etc.

My first web page, perhaps web site?, was created on a NeXT with Tim Berners-Lee looking on back in 1992. It was ahead of its time. Not because I made it or anything that I did, but because TBL’s web browser wasn’t a browser. It was a collaborative communications tool from its conception.

I opened two windows. One in which I surfed the web — all 5 or so sites. One in which I created my web page. I took TBL’s own page and added my changes making it my own. I then added new links by highlighting and dragging to the composing window. It as completely collaborative.

We are only nearing that ease of collaboration and creation now with what Dale Dougherty named Web 2.0.

I also got off on how all of this ongoing storm of creativity is fed and nourished by Net Neutrality. Write your senator and support Net Neutrality today!

Exporting MediaWiki pages

I did my talk to the folks at the News and Observer using a version MediaWiki running on a restricted area of ibiblio. Why? Well, they had questions they developed on their internal blog and wanted the talk to refer to them etc so I honored their request to keep those private. Now they’d like copies of the wiki pages. There are several ways to get this done but none all that immediately obvious.

There aren’t that many pages so I could just grab the html from each page, clean them up a bit, put them in a folder and send that on.

Or I could do a limited database dump and send that to them to import into their version of MediaWiki.

There should be an even easier way, but a quick look at MediaWiki help hasn’t shown it to me.

If you have ideas, please let me know.

Open Source Hardware today at Duke

In about an hour in fact, Chuck (who recently posted here) will be speaking about Open Source Hardware. Here’s the dope:

*Wednesday, November 1st, 2006** :: 12:00 PM – 01:00 PM
John Hope Franklin Center, Room 240, Duke University
Wednesdays at the Center*

Free Design and The Open-Source Hardware Movement
Chuck Messer, Tackle Design
Sponsored by John Hope Franklin Center and the ISIS (Information Science + Information Studies) Program
For more information, contact Grant Samuelsen by phone at 919-684-6469 or by email at grant.samuelsenATduke.edu

Two Good Essays on Social Networks by Fred

Fred Stutzman has two new essays up on his blog. One on Friendship In Youth Social Networking in which he looks at Harris and other poll data as well as surveys regarding cell phone call lists, IM buddy lists and SNS. In the other, he attacks various misreadings of SNS use. Is SNS use declining? Is SNS use aging rapidly so that 45 year olds on kids’ sites is now the norm? Nope, says Fred.

Both essays and their links are well worth your time.

Social Networking Protection?

Slashdot and others are all excited about the Federal Trade Commission’s moral panic game, Buddy Builder [link to popup Flash on this page]. Nevermind the funky name, the OnGuardOnline hosted site, pits you against a panel of fake characters as you answer some obvious questions about what to reveal in an IM or email.

Then you get to Round Two where you are asked:

One of the risks of some social networking sites is that there’s no way to control who will be viewing your page — including criminals or identity thieves. True or False.

Social networking pages provide a safe way to share your information with the world, including your school, favorite music group or sports team, where you hang out and more. True or False

More insecurity-building quizzes here. You can learn to fear P2P, Wireless, Spyware, ID Theft and more.

Upcoming speakings etc.

October 31 – Paul Jones speaks to news room at News and Observer (internal only sorry) about news as conversation and citizen involvement in political and investigative reporting.

November 9 – As part of the Office of Technology Development’s Carolina Innovations Seminars, Paul Jones be speaking on “Open Source Licensing: The Basics, The Benefits, The Buzz” on November 9 from 5:15 to 6:15 in 014 Sitterson Hall.

In the spirit of Openness, please dear readers and potential attendees, use the comments here to let me know any specific questions or areas that you’d like to see covered. I don’t want to talk endlessly on the differences between GPL 2 and 3, for example, unless someone cares, but then if someone does I want to be sure to be prepared and to do a good job.

Readings and postings here.

November 13Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media and director of the Center for Citizen Media will speak at 4 in the Pleasants Family Room of Wilson Library

December 8ibiblio at NCREN Community Day

January 20North Carolina Science Blogging Conference

Google’s Craig Silverstein visit reviewed (in Korean)

Visiting Korean journalist Yeri Shin blogged about Craig’s visit on her Korean language blog. Yeri assures me that it’s all complimentary.

I haven’t Babblefished the article yet, but the Google Beta Korean to English translator takes this:

(오른쪽에 티셔츠 차림의 소탈한 인상의 아저씨가 바로 실버스틴입니다. 왼쪽은 제가 듣고 있는 블로그 관련 강의를 맡고 있는 폴 존스(Paul Jones) 교수예요. 이 날 사회자였죠.)

and gives this:

(The uncle of the increase which the t-shirt outfit is informal in right side is rightly the thread bus [thin]. The left side the blow which I am listening pawl Jones which keeps the relation strong will (Paul Jones) professor example bedspreads. This day master of ceremony [yess] [cyo].)

I can see why the Google tool is still Beta ;->

Google visit in News and Observer

John Murawski used the Health Sciences Library sponsored visit by Google’s Craig Silverstein as an occassion to interview Craig about Google and technology futures in today’s Business section.

A couple of suggestions:

NandO should be sure to print the occasion of a speaker’s visit to UNC in the credits. Health Sciences Library did a great job of getting the word out about Craig’s visit — over 600 people were at the talk — but they could and should get specific credit in articles about the visit.

John did a much longer and much deeper interview with Craig. I was standing there for part of it. The NandO site would have been the perfect place to publish the extended interview. Why not take advantage of that endless space to show off the less general questions that John asked (for example)?

At WCOM

Inside the LPFM sausage factory, where about 10 middle schoolers are putting on the Teen Spirit show on 103.5 WCOM. Not only are the music choices amusing, but the process by which they are chosen by 13 year olds selforganizing their various music choices (and requests) is instructive. Not unlike Free Software projects ;-> Only a little dead air in honor of Halloween so far.

Later, I’ll be back in a different capacity on Melva’s Musings on Jazz as part of a tribute to DizzyGillespie with children’s book author/reviewer/reader Susie Wilde and composer TJ Anderson all of us coordinated by Melva Okun. 7 – 9 tonight.

Fred-mania in Financial Times

Also danahboydmania. In the service of explaining how important understanding online social networks are to kids. Yes, there is the standard Moral Panic! material, but the profile/observations by danah and Fred are palpable. Oddly in the Arts and Weekend section.

“One of the things students do at college is they test out identities. Maybe that is one new thing we are seeing now – more rapid changes of identity. Online you get feedback and you can change at a moment’s notice” Fred Stutzman, University of North Carolina

You can be serious without a suit

So goes point 9 in the official Google 10 Point Philosophy, but can you be serious without a haircut? That’s what I want to know.

Yeri Shin sends these action shots of Craig Silverstein and me from yesterday’s talk. [jpg] [jpg]

On a more interesting note, Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped posted an analysis of Google internal documents entitled “Big Goals and Directions – 2006” and “Objectives and Key Results – Q3 2006 Company OKRs”. Would have been nice to have read these before meeting Craig.

Apropos of or perhaps contrary to my previous post, one goal is “Google wants to be the best in search – no surprise here. To reach that goal, Google wants to have the world’s top AI research laboratory.”

Artificial Intelligence vs Social Intelligence

As Craig Silverstein was talking yesterday, I thought of Marvin Minsky the father and grand promoter of Artificial Intelligence at MIT. Not because Google uses very smart AI, but because they don’t do much of it at all.

Folks on the East Coast (overgeneralizing for effect) grabbed the Minsky challenge to create a machine intelligence that mimics and surpasses human intelligence. Afterall, machines can operate, doing certain functions, much more quickly and accurately than humans. Minsky-ites were also influenced by MIT linguists like Chomsky who pushed that concepts of deep structure that could be handled, if properly understood, by machines.

Salton‘s great work and insights at Cornell while not tied to AI seemed to promise that machine understanding of keyword might make for successful searches. But the real magic in SMART (Salton’s Magical Retriever of Text) was and is relevance feedback in which human evaluation of results, whether explicit or implicit, increased both the precision and recall of a search.

The more intelligently that the system could learn from the results noted as relevant, the better the subsequent result sets. Aggregating group results gave even better “Good” results and seemed magic (at the time) compared to simple keyword searches.

Larry Page’s insight in constructing PageRank was to see that goodness could also be indicated by the number of links related to a certain document. Again capturing the human intelligence embedded in the act of linking. Not just human intelligence but social intelligence. What we call knowledge capital or in a larger sense social capital.

Successful searches moved from less modeling of the brain, less artificial intelligence, and more and more social intelligence and what we now see in Web 2.0 as social networking. Not that computing and engineering didn’t matter, but that the machine component is most effective as a magnifier and enhancer and connector of the social intelligence supplied by humans.

Will AI ever be successful? Silverstein says “My guess is (it will be) about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in doing search.”

NOTE: I have not yet read John Battelle‘s The Search

SilversteinRank = Excellent Karma

If Craig Silverstein had invented the method by which Google decides how to return results, would the top secret Google juice be called SilversteinRank instead of being named after Larry Page as it is as PageRank? I was assured by Craig that the secret (licensed from Stanford til 2011) would have lost the wonderful pun and definitely be called SilversteinRank.

Most of the questions asked and answered at today’s talk were meatier and more relevant than that one. Craig talked about Google Book Project, Google Scholar, Mobile futures, Google Health and Google Coop.

On the digitzation front, Craig noted that only 20% of the world’s printed material is in print. 5% is in the Public Domain and 75% is neither in print nor copyright free — these are the infamous orphan works that are not interesting enough to be kept available for profit but cannot be made available legally for free. 75% of our recorded knowledge made unavailable by bad policy.

Craig lived in Chapel Hill years back. About 30 years back as it turns out. For a few years when he was around 4 or 5 years old while his parents completed their medical training at Duke. While here, he had a run in with a Duke athlete. A basketball player came to visit Craig’s school (in Durham). He asked each child what their favorite college team might be. Craig answered the Tar Heels. He was marked for life.

He did, as Fred pointed out, wear a shirt of the appropriate blue shade for his talk here.

We had a great panel. Moderating for folks like these — Jose-marie Griffiths (Dean of SILS), Barbara Rimer (Dean of Public Health), Carol Jenkins (Health Sciences Library Director) and Fred Stutzman (claimid.com and Social Networking researcher exceptionalle) — was easy and fun. (err I was the moderator).

Great crowd of about 600+ people and good questions. Good evening.

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