a thaumaturgical compendium

I had the idea that it would be worthwhile to assemble a panel to peer review sections of Wikipedia, within particular academic disciplines, and “freeze” a chunk of the site and certify it through peer review. That would have a duel purpose. First, it would provide an opportunity to measure the wiki, and second, it would provide some form of external validation — using traditional criteria — for the site.

At least the first part of this seems to have been accomplished. A project undertaken by Nature. Basically, they picked 50 representative articles (this does not appear to be a sample, and I wonder how they arrived at these), and put articles from Wikipedia and Britannica out for review. Britannica won, a fact that is not stressed in the Nature write-up. Instead, they show that Wikipedia is flawed, but so is Britannica. The average Wikipedia article has four innaccuracies, to Britannica’s three.

Of course, such a measurement is fuzzy. After all, if you extrapolate this to the total number of articles in Wikipedia, that’s a whole lot of inaccuracies.

I’ve started working with a doctoral student, Derek Lackaff, to take another approach to identifying the validity of Wikipedia, hopefully one I’ll be able to talk about more in the spring.

Alexa is opening their engine to API access. This should provide a great opportunity to web researchers who otherwise have to deal with crawling. Of course Alexa & the Internet Archive are linked in some ways, and the IA have been nice about providing research access to their data, so it may be that the pricing can be avoided. However, for small slices of the data, it seems as if the pricing is not too bad. Worth considering as another resource, I suppose.

A bit of a late notice, but: Jia Lin will be defending her doctoral dissertation “Blogs and the City: Weblogs as Indicators of Urban Culture in America” tomorrow, Tuesday, December 13, at 2 pm in Baldy 553 on the north campus of the University at Buffalo. I am her committee chair, and other members include George Barnett and Pauline Cheong. Ms Lin will be defending via web chat, using Skype and Festoon, which may be a first for the department. We tried it with a Masters defense last week, but over a wireless connection that dropped quite a few packets. Hopefully, things will go a bit more smoothly this time around!

The defense is open to the public. If you are in Buffalo and interested in blogging research, stop by.

Great commercial overall, but love the ending. Who hasn’t dreamed of doing this at Niagara Falls? The Impossible Dream. Also check out this Microsoft gem.

This is the season for looking for an academic position (actually, a little late in the season) so I am spending a little time talking to local or commutable universities. I am being a bit picky about where I am applying, and will be a bit picky about who I accept a position with, if anyone offers. It is not that I can really afford to be choosy — I am not an academic superstar by any means — but I do not want to end up at a place that is a bad fit, because I hope this will be somewhere I stay for some time. So, no applications to “safety schools.” Everywhere I have or will apply is a pretty reasoned application.

As a side note, I have been telling people that I plan on riding the 1 train giving lectures and holding out my hat. Folks have had two reactions to this. Either they think it is an excellent idea and well worth executing, or they are horrified. If you have leads on good jobs in Manhattan or surrounds (need not be academic), do let me know. I am planning on doing some consulting as well — whether I find a suitable academic post will indicate the degree to which I will also need or want to consult.

For the sake of the process, and because I would not want to publicize matters the schools prefer to keep quiet, I will report only in generalities. I was going to assign cute pseudonyms but given few schools there are, that would make it way to obvious which was which. I will just give them some numbers. Over the last couple weeks, I sent out four application letters to four different schools:

School 1: Got back to me right away and I talked to the chair of the hiring committee on the phone. They had me in for an informal campus interview pretty quickly (I was their first), and I got to meet a number of their faculty members and chat a bit over lunch. I’m now on hold until they do first interviews with some of their other candidates, and then they will get back to me to see whether I come back for another talk or if I have been voted off the island.

Not a perfect match for what I do in terms of research, but who is, really? More importantly, they need someone with the set of skills I have. The university and the program is a bit funky and a bit arty, both in ways I like. The program (graduate only) is large and has some great folks teaching in it and some interesting graduates. It would provide a nice space between theory and production, and a lot of places fall heavily on one side or the other. The university as a whole is a good place for me, and I could make strong ties with other campus units. It’s not entirely clear whether this is something the chair likes or not, though it was suggested it is a pretty common sort of thing to happen. I’m excited about this school, but it may just be because I met and like the people there, and so I know more about it at this stage.

School 2: Also got back to me right away and I chatted with the hiring committee chair. This one is a “vaporjob”; it has yet to have a funded line backing it. The conversation/interview was interesting, and I think I would make a good fit here. It is a program with a clear emphasis, and although that has not been my emphasis in the past, it is not foreign to me either. Great school, with a well-known faculty. I don’t know enough about the job yet — including whether it exists — to know what is happening here. Waiting for a call back, eventually.

School 3: Had a brief conversation with the chair of the hiring committee the day after I sent in materials, and they are bringing me out for a campus interview, but not until late January. This one is the farthest commute, which would probably mean relocating a bit outside of the city, but it is an interesting and growing program. It is not nearly as well known as the other three schools in this batch, and different in character in many ways, but it is an interesting possibility.

School 4: Nothing yet. Normally, this would be expected, but given how quickly the others got back, I am already thinking this may be a “no.” It is also the position that everyone in the world (at least everyone I have talked to) seems to have applied for, so I am guessing (a) there may be a mountain of CVs to work through and (b) I may not be a particularly big fish among them.

A three-out-of-four initial hit is far better than I had expected. Of course, those of you who know me in person know that my charming, witty, self-effacing blog-self is a stark contrast to my severe, taciturn, mean-spirited in-person-self, so these face-to-face interviews could very well signal the end of my search. I’ll update in a month or two; sooner if there are rapid developments.

Kevin links to yet another guide to Battling Bloggers Block. But I have the perfect one-step solution: don’t blog. Frankly, if you don’t have something worth saying, or don’t have the time to say it, why bother. Go do something else. Heck, watch TV. Your blog will still be there later.

Now, of course, there are exceptions. If you are a “full-time blogger” or have some aspiration to be (”I’m not a waiter, I’m a blogger!”), then maybe this makes some sense. Or if you are a student who has been forced to blog regularly by some ogre of a teacher, then maybe you need some help. I will be distributing this great 10 killer post ideas listing to my students who are blogging next semester to inspire them.

But if you are an everyday, run-of-the mill blogger type, take the day off. I do. And consider whether the world really needs to know about your cat’s quirks or your least favorite color.

Is this about addictive bloggers? No, it’s about what people seem to value in blogging. There is clearly a relationship between frequency of blogging and traffic to a site. If you are after numbers, sure, blog incessantly. If you care more about the quality of your readership, stop for a moment and think about what they want. And maybe they are willing to wait until you have something not good, but great to tell them about.

Then again, maybe blogging is the medium of the “good, but not great.”

I’ve been neglecting my blog lately, so I figured it was time for another post on colors. Went to the MoMA this weekend to see the excellent exhibition on “safe” design. Be sure to check out the online version, which has some cool things like a tree-mountable tent, a trans-dermal RFID tag, and other fun stuff. I’ve uploaded some other photos as well.

Anyway, the contrast was obvious on the trip. Regular readers will recall that I am a fan of cerulean blue. At the museum, we walked by the Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome, which is, um, kinda abstract. But it’s a good blue. On the other hand, they have just repainted the doors in the building where we live. They used to be a deep green; not exactly radical, but acceptable. They are now roughly the color pictured here, or about #8D8D77, though a photograph cannot do the color justice. One of the other inmates referred to it as “somewhere between pea green and bilious.”

So now you know my most and least favorite colors. Aren’t blogs great?