1. Edit your privacy settings and friendships.

This one is easy for me. I practice radical transparency. If I don’t want the world to know about it, I don’t put it anywhere. So, yes, I’ve tracked on some of the Facebook concerns, but since my “friends” know little more about me than other publics do, I frankly am not concerned. If someone decides not to hire me because they’ve seen me being a bit nuts in a classroom, or a bit tipsy at a party, then I don’t want to work there.

(I won’t get into the larger argument. I think there are worthy reasons to pursue certain sorts of privacy, but I think a common understanding of the idea of “privacy” is part of the residue of mass society and now it’s, well… it’s complicated.)

Status: COMPLETE

2. Change your passwords.

This one is long in coming. I’ve had a poor password regimen, and someone has put in a malicious backdoor on my Dreamhost account somewhere that leads to access to this blog among other things. I don’t think that’s a password issue (more likely a poorly protected application), but the damage is done.

I don’t like password managers, but I do have a set of relatively default passwords that I reuse at various levels of security. I’ve started replacing those–even for the very basic ones–with a unique password arrived at algorithmically. Replacing all those passwords is going to take a while–and probably won’t be done by 2010. But I’ve gotten a good start on it.

Status: STARTED

3. Own your name.

I don’t think there’s much more I need to do with this. Nobody is likely to confuse this Alex Halavais with all the others out there.

Status: ONGOING

4. Prune your feeds.

Truth is, my feed reader has grown so out of control that I stopped using it this year. In large part, Twitter and popurls have taken its place.

Nonetheless, I want to be a little more ahead of the curve. I’ll go back to the system I had before, of organizing reads into first, second, and third tiers. I’ll update here as I decide what those waves are.

Status: STARTING SOON

5. Find a better mobile.

All the chatter about the new Google phone and iSlate isn’t compelling to me. I found the Droid I was looking for. I’m glad I waited. Though I hate being tied to the Verizon contract, and I’m a bit uncomfortable with how closely it clings to Google services, it’s very convenient, and it lets me run my own home-made apps. Even if I never have time to write them, I like the idea of having that option. Looking forward to more locative blogging.

Status: COMPLETE

6. Update copyright notices on your website.

RWW is mostly concerned with copyright year, which isn’t really a big deal, at least for me. But (see below), I will be updating the footer to more clearly indicate the Creative Commons License.

7. Revisit your blog.

This one is a big one. I’ve set up an action plan for this blog, which has mainly gone fallow, and will be starting a second site for a new project.

Over the coming weeks, I will:

1. Blog the creation of my new class, of the work I’m doing on a paper, and of my work with the DML Hub and a research network here in New York.

2. Create a research page outlining my scholarship and providing links to as many of my articles (in draft form) as I can.

3. Create a teaching page that does the same, and links to some of the class sites I’ve created.

4, Work through the categories and a tagging structure, as well as effective search.

5. Rethink the layout, and bring in better archives, searching, and my twitter feed.

8. Back up your data.

This has also been a long-time issue for me. I had a box that I was going to turn into a NAS using OpenFiler or FreeNAS, but because of a number of issues, I gave up on that plan, and realized that the (eminently hackable) DLink DNS-321 was on sale for < $100 after rebate. That’s been loaded with a pair of 2TB drives in RAID1. This is a backup system in addition to another server that’s simply set up with a bunch of old drives. Now that the hardware is sorted, need to get the actual backups going (including an offsite backup for the most vital chunks).

Status: UNDER WAY

As you can see: serious New Years Eve partying this year :). Hoping that “ten” is your best year so far.

I am of two minds on this issue, and the reason for this is in part personal. When I heard about the Nupedia project (the edited, open source forerunner to Wikipedia), I was thrilled. This seemed to me to be the most obvious way of making the internet live up to it’s potential, a potential hinted at by the World Brain and the memex. And so, I emailed and said “sign me up.”

There was a problem, though: I didn’t have a Ph.D. That meant that I could not be an editor in the communication section. After a little back and forth, I was installed as a peer reviewer, though. Which would have been fine, except for the fact that for many months there was no communication editor, and when he did show up (I don’t recall who it was), it didn’t have any impact. In the end, as far as I know, there were never any communication articles in the pipe for Nupedia.

Wikipedia was successful precisely because it adhered to the open source development ethos. The approach was something along the lines of “ask for forgiveness rather than permission.” For me, it seemed like the perfect way to develop articles that could then be peer reviewed. Of course, that isn’t how things turned out. Those who are regular readers of this blog know that I think Wikipedia is spectacular. I think it is the best thing to ever happen to the web. As I tell my classes, I think our grandkids, a century from now, are going to ask what we contributed to the early days of the Wikipedia. That said, I think that Sanger correctly identifies a flaw, and that is the lack of a stable, credible “freeze” that might be effectively cited and integrated with more academic work.

One of the reasons for this is that the claims of validity and salience fall back on Raymond’s open source dictum that “many eyes make all bugs shallow.” This is a great idea in practice, and is largely correct, though there are certainly counterexamples. Wikipedia, likewise, mostly validly identifies what I will call “interested general knowledge.” That is, while it is true that most Americans think that Sadam Husein is responsible for the events of 9/11, most of them do not have an interest in proclaiming this from the rooftops, or even in everyday conversation. That is, when forced to give an opinion, they may express this attitude, but I doubt that it is something that they would be prepared to argue.

Not all public misinformation is of this type. Tom Cruise considers himself an expert on psychiatry, and especially of psychopharmacology. (Note that his claim to authority on this matter is not some sort of gnosis, delivered by deity or faith, but because he has “read the literature”.) Though I doubt Mr. Cruise is a Wikipedia contributor, the place of scientology on the site is contentious, precisely because the standards of science are only held in as high regard on the Wikipedia as they are in the general public.

Even in practice, however, Wikipedia entries for Scientology or Intelligent Design seem to maintain a degree of balance. I have little doubt that there are errors in Wikipedia, of omission and of commission, but I also have little doubt that most of the entries are trustworthy. The problem is why we trust them. Do we believe in knowledge as a democratic process?

Sanger’s push is for an accreditation of an encyclopedia by “acknowledged experts.” Those experts are established primarily through institutions of acceptance. One of those processes of marking someone an expert has traditionally been publication. The web is already undermining this. I think one of the reasons publication has been a way of demonstrating expertise is that there has been financial risk associated with it. Someone would not be published unless there was some guarantee that their book or article would sell, and one of those guarantees is expertise. (Another is simply an ability to be compelling — non-fiction is not the only sort of publishing.)

The other kind of imprimatur that Sanger originally used is the Ph.D. You would think, having spent a goodly number of my bestest years pursuing just such a degree, I would be be happy with this hurdle. But having been up close and personal with the process of “earning” a Ph.D., I am convinced of two things. First, that some absolute fools manage to get the doctorate. Some of these fools graduate from the best schools out there, and some of the less able programs graduate more fools than scholars. So, the Ph.D. is certainly not a measure of insight. Indeed, how many business cards have you received with the “, Ph.D.” after the name and thought that this was a replacement for any obvious signs of intelligence.

Moreover, there are plenty of brilliant people who will never get a Ph.D. The degree has a lot to do with a conforming to a particular set of social and economic conditions, and it is not the best learning fit for very many people. It was good for me, I think (still working that one out), but it’s not for everybody. And I have flunked some truly brilliant people out of our own program because I knew that while they were smart and able, they were not going to be able to complete a degree.

I do think that the average Ph.D., and perhaps the average faculty member, is an expert in their field and able to teach about it. But just as with the Wikipedia, that expertise is only most of the time on most of their specialized topics. The difference is that there is social acceptance of this form of authority. And the question is how to lend that authority to Wikipedia.

Sanger sees this need:

Nevertheless, everyone familiar with Wikipedia can now see the power of the basic Wikipedia idea and the crying need to get more experts on board and a publicly credible review process in place (so that there is a subset of “approved” articles–not a heavy-handed, complicated process, of course). The only way Wikipedia can achieve these things is to jettison its anti-elitism and to moderate its openness to trolls and fools; but it will almost certainly not do these things. Consequently, as Wikipedia increases in popularity and strength, I do not see how there can not be a more academic fork of the project in the future.

I hope that a university, academic consortium, or thinktank can be found to pursue a project to release vetted versions of Wikipedia articles, and I hope that the new project’s managers will understand very well what has made Wikipedia work as well as it has, before they adopt any policies.

Likewise, others who are directly involved in Wikipedia are looking for a process for vetting and testing the truth claims found on the site. So far, I think these approaches have been stymied by the enormity of the project involved. At least two viable approaches have been suggested in various fora:

1. Estimate the degree to which wikipedia reflects knowledge as expressed in the scientific literature. By taking a sample of pages and “fact-checking” them using human coders, some indication of the reliability (in the colloquial sense) of the resource could be established. Then, someone citing Wikipedia could be confident that 99.44% of the content, for example, was reliable.

2. Use Wikipedia as a free source of pre-written material to peer review and publish as a reliable subsection. This need not be an entire encyclopedia, as such an undertaking would be tremendously difficult, but might work quite well as a way of seeding a peer-reviewed reference work within a narrower field.

In each case, we have to discount material that is simply not reflected in the scholarly literature. As an aside, I think that this material is particularly interesting, but there really isn’t much to check it against.

It may be that this is a turning point for the resource, a kind of coming-of-age that requires that a meta-conversation happens. Given its successes so far, I would not want this to impede its further progress. My thought is that for a reliability check of any sort to have a good chance of success, it needs to remain in some way distributed. In particular, I’m thinking about one of a number of approaches to developing trust that will allow for interesting extrusions of the wikipedia.

One way of doing this would be by using something like Outfoxed, a trust-based plug-in for Firefox. There is real value in egocentric trust networks, but here, I am looking for the imprimatur of a set of experts. So, instead:

1. Create a transparent set of criteria, perhaps field-specific, that allows for the creation of a set of people that have wide acceptance as experts. This might have something to do with educational credentials, academic appointments, and publications, though this really does differ from field to field. What is an acceptable set of criteria for an scholar of physics is unlikely to be the same as what is acceptable for a scholar of music.

2. Present frozen articles to the peer group and allow them to rate the articles as “acceptable” or “needs more work.” Naturally, given the open nature of Wikipedia, they would be encouraged to contribute to that work, within Wikipedia.

3. Identify gaps in Wikipedia and create stubs, perhaps recruiting authors for the item.

4. Present a frozen subset of Wikipedia as authoritative, maintaining all of the licensing requirements. Revisit the version periodically, on a cycle of years rather than minutes.

This has a further advantage in that, as long as experts were picked in a fairly demanding way, association with the project would be something akin to association with the editorial board of a journal or “real” encyclopedia. In other words, it would provide the sort of reputational currency that many scholars require in order to devote time to a project.

This isn’t to say that some of the other projects to check Wikipedia are not good. I am involved in two such projects, both in a very cursory way, and I am in favor of letting a thousand flowers bloom. And perhaps the best place to start is within the (relatively empty) field of communication. The above could be accomplished relatively easily, I think, for such a small slice.

[Update: I accidentally posted an earlier draft.]

Bah, I say.

1: Set up a submission site to add your podcast.

2: Set up a community filtering system. I’m thinking something along the lines of kuro5hin. Those podcasts that are popular (as rated by listeners) gain a slot and maintain it. Yes, there would be first mover advantage, but you would guarantee turnover somehow (e.g., chopping the lowest rated 25% or 50% from the schedule every month).

3: Get people to hook up their computers all across the campus to tiny FM transmitters on the same frequency. These can now be picked up at any local electronics store pretty cheap, or in kit form even cheaper.

4: Enough people add on to the mesh, especially in a relatively small space, and you have a campus-wide (or nation-wide) radio station.

So, who wants to work on it?

(Anyone have links to similar projects. Lazy request, but 30 seconds of Googling didn’t turn anything up.)

One of the reasons I like my setup is that I can tweak the plugins relatively effortlessly, and students get a more featureful blog as a result. We talked a little bit about the core plug-ins we want to have in the default blogs, and Kevin blogged some options. I think that a basic set of requirements for student blogs includes: spell check, easy format tools (ideally WYSIWYG), and easy image upload.

Why not a Wikipedia of rafts, a mob riverboat? Designate somewhere on the Mississippi, maybe Minneapolis. Fix a date and a place, and take all comers. They can bring any salvaged material that is enough to float themselves and another person (and that they don’t mind never seeing again), and necessary provisions. Then make your way down the old Miss, picking up people along the way. End it with a huge party when we hit the Gulf of Mexico.

Has this already been done? It would only require a skeleton crew, some scrap lumber, and a cheap motor to get rolling, I’d think, and could accommodate as many people as were willing to give it a whirl. Maybe next June? The USS Snowcrash?

there are always pretty girls when i crawl forward.

Visualize a glowing golden button alongside of each image.

What colour is he – if you can find out and get back to me I’ll see if I can’t find out something about it on the net.

Last nights episode was no different.

You can’t run and hide your head in the sand like Spain recently did

I never pushed the publish button.

I’d live for your smile, and die for your kiss.

I mean seriously stupid stuff – even more stupid than the shit above.

Little things like being spanked every day by a middle-aged woman: Stuff you pay good money for in later life.

Whew, I am so relieved that someone told me this.

The Bible speaks for itself.

Well yesterday my sister forwarded me a picture of my dad – and his cronies!

I mean, despite the fact that he humps his toys, he’s a pretty personable bird.

Is it related to an ork?

Somehow, we entered into semantic confusion.

As I was filling out the answers, I felt my brain hurting.

she kept saying she’d be waiting for me when I came.

Actually, as Anne noted, they can be read as cut-ups, making up a sort of story on their own. It’s pretty fun to read through all of them. Still some small bugs, as you will see, but kind of neat nonetheless. I may set it up to run periodically at some point.

I’ve also put up the (super simple) script I use for this. You’re welcome to make use of it, if you like. It’s basically a way to put up various kinds of sign-up lists.

Normal fair warning: I am a novice programmer for life. I’m sure there is a better way to do all of this. I also might have taken code from elsewhere (though I don’t think so in this case). You may recall that I used this to take a swing at update frequency of the average blog a few weeks back. This is the script I used for that. You can get it here either as source or binaries for Windows.

Also, hats off to Pilgrim’s Dive Into Python, which devotes a chapter to dealing with XML.

Then, I found out he was doing these checks by hand–or rather one of his grad students was. Argh! So I wrote a short script to do this for him. You just provide a plain text file with a list of the domains you want to search on linkages for (one domain each line), and it returns a comma-separated file with a matrix indicating in each cell the number of links from one domain to another. George is using this for country-to-country measurements, but there is no reason it couldn’t be used at at other levels, to see how Buffy the Vampire Slayer sites were internetworked, for instance. (I was planning on linking BuffySearch.com, but it seems it has been defaced by muslim Bush-haters, who apparently think they will reach the Republican elite by hacking a Buffy site…)

If you have python installed on your system, the source is here: interalta.py. If you are on a Windows system without python, download and unzip interalta.zip.

Unlike the Buffalo weather information over there on the left, which can be updated dynamically by just clicking the “Updated” link, this update is included each time Moveable Type regenerates the index page. It was a fun way to avoid all of the things I need to do this weekend. Click on more, below, if you want to install it on your Moveable Type powered page, and be a part of generating irrational fear.

This is a simple plugin and it is easy to set up.

1. Download the plugin(dhs.pl). FTP it to your site and place it in the directory called “plugins” wherever your Moveable Type is installed. If you find no “plugins” directory in the directory where you find mt.cgi, make it (and chmod both it and the dhs.pl script to 777).

2. Download the images. Easiest is probably to right-click these and use them, or make your own, using the same titles. (Update: like these!)

Place these wherever your index page for MT is.

3. Somewhere in the main template, include something like this:
<img height="40" width="125" border="0" src="<$MTdhsLevel$>">

And you are good to go!

On the down-side, it turns out Slashdot has changed the way they display personal histories, making a couple of projects I’ve been working on a lot harder to complete :(. Ah, well; just means more crawling of the site.

I promised Julia that I would think about her sampling problem. She wants to use MSN’s web directory. Despite all of its problems, they do claim (with Media Metrix’s backing) to be the most popular search service–though I am curious as to how much of this traffic is driven by those who do not change the default home page. A better bet would be to just take random pages from Google, but since she needs a sample from several countries, we’d have to find the hosting location for each page as well, and would end up rejecting the vast majority of pages identified. Anyway, hopefully I can take a starting crack at that tomorrow, as well as review some of the Zapatista data.