a thaumaturgical compendium

This will look familiar to regular readers of the blog, but the final version of the blog geocoding paper wound up in Webology. So even if you have read it before, you can now get on the NSA’s watch list by visiting an Iranian website. (Kidding. I hope?) Here’s the abstract:

Blogging has diffused rapidly over the last several years in the United States, but that diffusion has not occurred evenly. In examining the distribution of 191,294 weblogs sampled in November 2003, we find that while blogging enjoys popularity throughout the U.S., bloggers appear more frequently within particular cities. This project indexes American bloggers by three-digit zip codes corresponding to their location, and identifies the demographic factors that appear to encourage blogging. We find that cities with populations that are young, urban, and more tolerant of difference are likely to host more bloggers.

It’s not really a blog without images of your pet. In order to comply with standards:

“I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman,” a mock self-tribute begins. “My mother was a backup singer for Abba. They were good folks.” In Chicago, “I discovered I was black, and I have remained so ever since.”

– Obama’s send-up of Obama, while he was editor of the Harvard Law Review (via the NYT).

Microsoft is in trouble for paying for changes in Wikipedia that appeared to place the company’s stance on open standards in a bad light. While I recognize the danger in allowing paid partisans to contribute to Wikipedia, it does raise some questions.

Wikipedia is built on the idea that good material will rise to the top. It specifically does not ban idiots, ideologues, or conspiracy theorists. Why is it that money should make things that much worse? I think this highlights a larger problem. We don’t care who you are, as long as you are not paid, seems to me to be a fuzzy and difficult line to draw.

I’ve updated Quinnipiac’s Wikipedia page to indicate the development of a new campus. I’m paid by Quinnipiac. That I do not happen to be in the PR department shouldn’t matter that much.

When I was at Buffalo, an email went around suggesting that the School of Informatics should take a significant role in rewriting the social informatics page on Wikipedia. I made my position clear: that it was entirely appropriate for the faculty, staff, and students to edit that page. After all, we were experts in the area, and who better? But I also noted that we needed to be careful to observe the principles of neutrality, and not promote the School directly. In the end, I don’t know that anyone actually made changes. I did, inserting a link to the department at the end of the article, but I don’t believe I made any major changes.

The idea that Wikipedians are disinterested is ridiculous. If they were not interested in the topics they write about, they wouldn’t write about them. Money changing hands should not make a difference. Heck, I would love to see the day when someone offered bounties for Wikipedia articles, providing payment for people to fill in lacking areas. When I provide students with better grades for contributing, is that suspect?

Wikipedia is built on the idea that the community is large enough to root out misinformation or bias and fix it. Why not trust that?

“The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old costumes dig up a black, shiny-buttoned conductor’s uniform. Then he will go home and compile a description of Berlin streets in bygone days. Everything, every trifle, will be valuable and meaningful: the conductor’s purse, the advertisement over the window, that peculiar jolting motion which our great-grandchildren will perhaps imagine—everything will be ennobled and justified by its age.

“I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

– Vladimir Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin,” 1925

You may have noticed since my blogging haitus that I’ve added the Snap Preview Anywhere plugin. Lots of other people have as well, including wordpress.com. If you hover over any of the links on my site, you see a little thumbnail preview of where the link will take you.

I’m not a big fan of random blog cruft, but I really like this one. It allows me to be a bit more elliptical with my linking, and provides a nice aid in reading. I predict that this will quickly be added to a really large number of blogs. I only hope that the service can keep up its performance, and remain free.