4. Not just the world’s best information resource http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1291/634984110_9fb230962c_o.jpg
5. Wikipedia is a living entity Over 7.4M edits per month (May 2006) http://valuewiki.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/chart.png http://stats.wikimedia.org/
6. Vandals and spammers and bots, oh my! http://seemikedraw.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/wizard-of-oz.jpg
7. The neutral point of view (NPOV) Neutral point of view is a fundamental Wikimedia principle and a cornerstone of Wikipedia. All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view
8.
9. Wikipedia and the link economy Top sites referring traffic to http://endeca.com/ :
21. Are social networks a fad? http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd062307s.gif
22. Fiddle faddle, those are good numbers! http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/facebook_ready_to_pass_myspace_in_worldwide_traffic
23. But are they matters of consequence? http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/images/businessman.jpg
24. Should we keep it professional? LinkedIn’s simple philosophy: Relationships Matter Your professional relationships are key to your professional success.
25.
26. But keep it professional! http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1041.gif
36. Caution: Twitter is a work in progress Scaling issues—both for servers and for user attention.
37.
38.
Notas do Editor
Social media has been making headlines--not just in the technology news, but in more mainstream topics like business and politics. As with most mainstream reporting about technology, the good stuff tends to be buried in confusion and hyperbole. Nonetheless, social media, from the now venerable Wikipedia to more recent developments like Twitter, are making real and significant changes to online publishing and communication. Those of us at the forefront of information technology have a professional responsibility to understand these developments. I promise to keep this presentations hype-free, but I also think you'll walk away with an appreciation of how these new (and not-so-new) technologies affects us as technologists and thought leaders.
An interesting perspective from Aaron Swartz: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content. Source: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Wikipedia defines these concepts as follow: Vandalism: any deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia Wikispam: advertisements masquerading as articles and external link spamming Bots: automated scripts which edit Wikipedia (but not all bots are evil!) Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vandalism
It is impossible to overstate the importance of the dispute resolution process to the success of Wikipedia. Most contributions are uncontroversial, but the controversies get all of the press—and cause all of the headaches. The process outlines above is the main reason that Wikipedia survives such controversies with remarkably few scars.
Self-explanatory, but note that Wikipedia is not only the top-referring site, but that it provides high-quality traffic.
I received this email when I made a change to the Faceted Classification entry. Needless to say, the change stuck. More details: http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/09/30/faceted-classification-on-wikipedia/
The Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) Wikipedia entry is an object lesson in what not to have happen to a corporate Wikipedia entry. It is not entirely clear who were the participants in the reversion war, though it’s been speculate that they represented FAST and Autonomy. In any case, the last thing that FAST wanted was publicity like this: http://searchengineland.com/searcharazzi-salacious-wiki-edits-to-fast-search-transfer-12021.php
This is one of several examples where I’ve worked with the readership of my blog, The Noisy Channel, to improve Wikipedia entries related to search and information retrieval. Despite the obvious connection between these topics and my employer, I did not experience any backlash—precisely because I complied with Wikipedia’s rules in letter and in spirit.
There are lots of good reasons to blog. If you have something to say, blogging is one of the best ways to say it. But not everyone has the gift of online gab.
Lots of statistics here. The main take-away is that these numbers are current and show that blogs are relevant to the mainstream U.S. population.
I’m not suggesting you should *read* all of these blogs. But you should recognize them by name, much as you’d recognize a top-20 newspaper or television network.
There are countless technology blogs, and just keeping up with the ones that are relevant to your work could become a full-time activity. What I suggest instead is that you spend a few minutes a day reading one of the major technology blog / news aggregators, four of which I’ve listed here. I personally recommend Techmeme.
User comments can make a blog post a great discussion / networking venue. But unmoderated blogs can become overrun by spammers and flame wars.
One caveat is that some blogs get so many comments that the comments become “write-only” in practice, since no one will wade through hundreds of comments. Don’t waste your time writing comments that no one is likely to read.
Note that MySpace is still drawing more traffic than Facebook in the United States, though Facebook is gaining on it.
The illustration is from Chapter 13 of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s novella The Little Prince and depicts the “businessman” who is concerned with “matters of consequence”.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site launched in May 2003 that is mainly used for professional networking. As of October 2008, it had more than 30 million registered users, spanning 150 industries. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn
Perhaps the key unstated point is that these CTOs and senior technologists are ignoring all of the other social networks. It’s down to LinkedIn and Facebook.
Even though personal social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace may not be intended for business, your professional colleagues are likely to encounter your content there. So don’t be an idiot.
The scene is from the Disney classic, Bambi .
Of course, exponential growth can’t go on indefinitely. But the rapid adoption of Twitter is notable.
Mostly these companies are using Twitter for branding and customer service, whether proactively or reactively to field customer complaints.
If anyone has any doubt as to the real-world impact of social media, consider the recent battle between Motrin and the "mommy bloggers". Motrin had released an ad that presented an irreverent take on "wearing your baby". Apparently too irreverent: a critical mass of indignant baby-wearing moms used blogs and Twitter to express their outrage, and Johnson & Johnson quickly pulled the ad and apologize prominently on the Motrin home page. More details: http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/11/20/tweet-first-ask-questions-later/
This is a snapshot of my “timeline” using the Twitter web client.
I use a WordPress plug-in on my blog to automatically “tweet” whenever I publish a new blog post.
By sheer coincidence, I was checking out Twitter when I encountered someone at the University of North Carolina struggling with his Endeca installation http://twitter.com/oombrella/status/979847430. Turned out to be a simple operator error. But it’s always nice to get this kind of PR.
While Ron was preparing his questions for a Q&A with Google Enterprise Search product manager Nitin Mangtani, he reached out on Twitter to solicit input. I responded, and Ron graciously offered me the same one-on-one treatment. More details: http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/11/26/endeca-vs-google-round-2/
When Twitter crashes, users see the "fail whale" error message. Beluga whales are known as "canaries of the sea" due to their high-pitched twitter, and the fail whale is a whimsical illustration of red birds using nets to hoist a whale from the ocean. The message reads: "Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again."[45] The fail whale has been featured on NPR. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
If you like the ideas in this talk and would like to learn more, please feel free to email me. Better yet, take a look at my blog, The Noisy Channel, or follow me on Twitter. Thank you!