Some blatant promotion - this time by me....

The new Internet watchdog site founded by Wikipedia Reviewers Gregory Kohs, Paul Wehage, Anthony DiPierro and Judd Bagley, called Akahele, is up and running.

http://akahele.org/2009/02/the-more-things-change/

Wehage has written an entertaining piece on a topic which he is obviously well informed. I enjoy discussions of the immediate predecessors of Web 2.0. He may have found a medium that fits his abilities to great advantage over discussion forums.

Also I thought the "Library of Alexandria" bit at the end was especially amusing and reveals much about the prevailing attitudes of Wikipedians. It is obviously POV to the extreme to link mp3.com to "Destruction of the Library at Alexandria" but I hope nobody does anything about it. It is more valuable as an illustration of that POV.

Well done FTA and Akhele.

Thank you. I appreciate that very much.

These two pieces by the same author, which appeared on our blog, are also worth revisiting:

WP:Give US Money and we'll give you FREE Culture, Another fund-raising ploy...

Violating Copyright for the “good of the project”

Cute name, but since most of us don't speak Hawaiian, and the link and site doesn't explain it (at least not the one above), it takes some time (or at least a separate Google search) to realize that akaheli is to wiki-wiki what cuidado is to ¡ ándale, ándale! Still don't get it? Well, they're showing off a bit. At the cost of transparency and memorability. Which may not be the best idea.

Akaheli is Hawaiian for "be careful."

Nice article. I remember the old MP3.com with nostalgic fondness. I discovered Falling You and related artists there ....... then everything went tits-up. Aye.

It's explained in the first blog post, which you can reach from the first link in my sig. It's actually Akahele, by the way. Minor typo in the original post.

It's also entirely my fault that we've got such an obscure name. We were riffing off of each other trying find good names (and we weren't finding any) and I decided to poke around for something Hawaiian to contrast with "Wiki". I happened to find this page of musical terms translated into hawaiian and noticed that wikiwiki akahele meant Allegro Moderato. The rest is history....

I like the name. It's beautifully explained on the site as well.

I like it too, and the word is quite memorable even to a non-speaker. Also, the 'turtle' logo is awesome

A friend of Greg's, Cheryl Levy of LionGraphics. did that and I think that she did a really nice job too!

Anyway, next week is Judd Bagley's turn.

Interesting article ... thanks for posting. I had always wondered whatever happened to mp3.com. I never knew (or just don't remember) that they had forums, but I used to download music from there back in the day. They had a really good supply of Christian music.

I knew nothing about any of this, so it was a very informative read. And there are comparisons to Wikipedia.

Key Quote:

Close, But No Seger —

It's not Communication, not in any proper sense, but Raw Quantitative Connectivity that the BrinPageRank Al-Gore-Rhythm is such a big sucker for.

This all goes back to the days of the Perceptron and the the fact that Connectionism can't do Logic. Web Zero was founded on that philosophy and it's the underlying reason why Web* remains so Artefactually UnIntelligent today.

Jon

I read that first article with interest, and found it informative and thought provoking. If you guys can keep the stuff you do there to the level of the first article or thereabouts, you've got a real winner. Thanks for your efforts so far.

That article by Odlyzko is pretty key to understanding the logic of what's happening in community-driven web 2.0 sites (of which Wikipedia is a shining example): the point being is that since traffic is more profitable than content, that's all they want. Verifiability, not truth is just another way of saying this, in so many words.

Thinking about this, especially in the context of Judd's work on this subject, I'm beginning to think that this aspect of web 2.0 and the current meltdown of financial sectors are just two symptoms of the same phenomenon.

In any rate, think of this first post of mine as laying out some general themes, which will be developed over time.



I don't believe that the web was ever supposed to be "intelligent", except in the way that you could call a telephone "intelligent". It was just a way for a buncha U guys to send letters around quickly. Nobody was ever expecting it to be any more than that.

It's always when somebody sees a way to get exploit it that it gets to be problematic. But I suppose you could say the same thing about a hammer that is used as a murder weapon: nobody blames the hammer...



Thanks Lar! I'm looking forward to what Judd comes up with next week, since his slide presentation was so brilliant!

Exactamundo!

It's called «Not All Singularities Are Positive» (NASAP).

Jon

I just realized that the original link that I gave for that Odlyzko article wasn't working, so I found a .pdf and changed that. I strongly urge that everybody read this, even though it is a bit dry, since it lays out some pretty interesting concepts : http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/histor...unications2.pdf.

I wonder if Moulton knows this guy?

Andrew Odzlyko was in the Mathematics Research Center at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ from 1975 to 1983, which overlaps the period when I was in the Network Planning Center at AT&T Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ.

It's possible we crossed paths; it's possible I may have attended a talk where he spoke. But I have no specific recollection of meeting him during that time of our overlapping careers at Bell Labs, some thirty years ago.

There was a Mathematics Research Colloquium, sponsored by Odlyzko's center. From time to time they would invite distinguished outside speakers, who typically gave talks to audiences at both Murray Hill and Holmdel. It would not surprise me to learn that Odlyzko hosted and introduced one of the speakers at such a talk where I was in the audience. But I have no specific recollection of that.

It was just a hunch, but not that important, Moulton.