Thursday, May 25, 2006

Top Podcasts is a new readout of the most-subscribed-to podcasts among Share Your OPML users. Obviously just getting started, with only 117 subscribers for the top-rated podcast, but numbers are interesting, imho.  

Randy Morin: "The coolest new happening in Web 2.0-land in that last month is Share Your OPML." 

Apparently, Web 2.0 is a trademark. CMP sent a letter to an Irish conference on June 8 using the term in its name, demanding that they cease and desist. 

According to Google, the term "Web 2.0" appears 79,400,000 times on the web. 

NY Times: "Viacom now has an explicit policy. In a section on confidentiality, it states that the employee is 'discouraged from publicly discussing work-related matters, whether constituting confidential information or not, outside of appropriate work channels, including online in chat rooms or blogs.'" 

4/26/06: "Of course what I wanted to talk about is Rather becoming a blogger. He said that [Viacom] discourages it." 

Nick Bradbury: Pick a Format (Any Format). Agree. 

Instructables is a "community for showing what you make and how others can make it." 

Ross Mayfield says that Nick Carr is the new Dave Winer. I imagine he intended this as an insult, but I'm happy to be compared with Carr, if he's going to keep challenging the sloppy thinking so typical of technology hucksters. 

XML-RPC is getting new respect from Microsoft and Linden Labs. It's always been a popular site, lots of implementations, it's rational, easy to use technology that works well. 

Realistic expectations for Wikipedia 

The comment thread that followed Nick Carr's piece about Wikipedia illustrates the mistake of the most zealous Wikipedia advocates, they fail to set expectations accurately, and then, when someone like Carr takes their hype at face value, they attack him for not knowing how Wikipedia really works. It's a Catch-22, they attack because he believed them. Sort of makes people reluctant to discuss Wikipedia.

In this case, Carr said that anyone could edit any piece at any time. That's certainly the core element of the hype around Wikipedia. Now we find out that there are limits. The advocates say this was always true. Carr thought it was a change, and he can be forgiven for that, because the very same zealots told us it was so.

This is the dangerous anti-intellectual side of Wikipedia.

It's valuable, it really is, I point to Wikipedia articles regularly, but always with an implicit caveat. I can't be sure that the article I point to today, that I believe is accurate today, will be accurate tomorrow.

Now if the strongest advocates of Wikipedia would start talking realistically about the weaknesses of the approach in addition to the strengths, the utopian stuff, we might be able to work together to improve it. But there's no evidence of that in the latest round.

Postscript: Carr says it's time to bury the mythology surrounding Wikipedia, and I couldn't agree more strongly.

Sitting by the river 

The Chinese have a saying that if you sit by the river long enough, the dead body of your enemy will come floating by.