[bjc] Friday: The things I want to say
On Friday, the pivotal moment for me was when Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia replied to Jill Abramson of the NY Times. Jill was reminding us how expensive it is to maintain overseas reporters, an expense bloggers can’t bear. There were a number of replies about how bloggers could reduce that expense, but Jimmy took a different tack. The Encyclopedia Britannica is a $350M operation, he said, but Wikipedia is kicking its butt without having a single employee.
Some of the media folks jumped on this, saying that the Jimmy is underestimating the value of their operations. Jimmy replied that of course the existing media couldn’t be replaced except by something that offers more value. Jimmy wasn’t crowing and he certainly wasn’t threatening. He was pointing to the success of the Wikipedia as a cautionary tale.
I don’t blame the media folks who reacted negatively. First, it’s a human reaction. But more important, I think it’s a sign of the cognitive gap between us; we’ve made progress in understanding one another, but we’re now at the point where the misunderstandings are so deep that they’re easier to ignore than to confront.
So, here’s the cognitive gap that I see: The media folks (generalizing) still think that the important effect that blogging is having on them — and they do believe it’s having an effect — comes from bloggers who are sorta kinda journalists. But that’s a tiny percentage of the blogosphere. The truly disruptive effect of bloggers comes from the rest of the blogosphere that doesn’t think of itself as journalistic at all. We’re not the farm team for Big Media. We’re a different ballpark entirely.
In fact, we’re not a ballpark at all, of course. The other big gap between us is easy to state but hard to explain: The media is owned. The blogosphere isn’t. We together are building it. The media have to try to get us interested in what they do, but the blogosphere is constructed out of our interests. It’s ours not (just) in the sense of ownership but in the sense of what we care about and what we are.
Something like that. [Technorati tags: bjc blogs]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I’m not sure how Wikipedia can be kicking the Encyclopedia Britannica’s butt when, according to the site disclaimer “Wikipedia cannot guarantee, in any way whatsoever, the validity of the information found here.”
I once considered editing a Wikipedia entry on a subject that I knew something about, spent some time figuring out how to go about it, then stopped when I realized that the odds were exceedingly high that my work would be edited by somebody who did not know as much as I did about the subject, but thought they did—or worse, changed it for “political” reasons.
The subject of the conference is credibility — and as much as I admire and appreciate the extraordinary efforts of Jimmy Wales on the wikipedia project, I just don’t see how one can claim that Wikipedia is superior in any fashion to Britannica if you can’t trust its content.
As to the gaps between “the media” and “the blogosphere”, the biggest gap is that the media has the means to be “objectively” credible, the blogosphere by its very nature can only be subjectively credible.
I assume Wales meant that they’re kicking the Britannica’s butt in terms of traffic. Also, it has 450,000 entries in English while Britannica has about 60,000, I believe.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head when you mention ownership. Big media is essentially big business (ie corporations) and there is no way they are going to tolerate people who threaten their profit/market share. In some ways calling a conference between bloggers and the media is an attempt by them to co-opt the blogging movement.
Well yes, in principle some know-nothing *could* come along and over-write your expert edits. In practice, this usually doesn’t happen. In practice, the quality of the entries in the Wikipedia increases monotonically. In principle, you *could* get run over by a bus ten seconds after you step outside your front door.
What about looking to Wiki knowing that every bit of information may not be “valid”? I can critically-think my way through a Wiki entry, and find its tone of hospitality and invitation positive and generative. And, what about looking to Wiki for fun? Check out the Heavy Metal Umlaut entry that has made the rounds here at my university. How many Brittanica entries are enjoyed and smiled about?
What about looking to Wiki knowing that every bit of information may not be “valid”? I can critically-think my way through a Wiki entry, and find its tone of hospitality and invitation positive and generative. And, what about looking to Wiki for fun? Check out the Heavy Metal Umlaut entry that has made the rounds here at my university (and oops, on Tim Bray’s site too!). How many Brittanica entries are enjoyed and smiled about?
“The media is owned. The blogosphere isn’t.”
No. The media has one set of gatekeepers. The blogosphere has a different set of gatekeepers. It’s an error to think it’s a difference of structure, rather than specifics.
One is not better than the other. They’re just different reference sources. And that’s the distinction.
The Encyclopedia Britannica is edited by people who get salaries, benefits, etc. They have style guidelines and a host of processes. The weikipedia is edited by everyone. No one gets paid.
Is one more trustworthy than the other? I don’t know. I just think of them as different.
I love the library for I can find reference information from a multitude of sources, including Encyclopedia Britannica.
The problem is I don’t go the library very often these days. So, I live with the Internet and depend on wikipedia as a way to provide references for my readers and as a way to deepen my own knowledge.
But I do know this. It’s expensive to print encyclopedias. It’s expensive to print newspapers. It costs little to publish a blog or a wiki. I just hope the reference sources at the library don’t disappear. I don’t get there as often. But they are important. If not for anything but sustaining the collective knowledge those reference sources provide us all.
Thr gap is Blogsphere is going thru organic growth and MSM is going thru organic decay !! I can’t think any other way to put it !!
The media SHOULD be better than the blogosphere in terms of accuracy and objectivity. It’s the sad fact that it hasn’t been there for us, at least in the US, for some time that’s opened the door for the blogosphere’s growing influence. Many of the accurate stories that break in the blogosphere are picked up from foreign media and they’re things that we, as a nation, have the right to know, but they aren’t reported here until it can no longer be avoided.
MSM in the US is in a difficult position. The left thinks it’s owned by and operated for the benefit of the corporatocracy. The right believes that it’s filled with liberals. Both are essentially true, but at the moment it’s the former, rather than the latter that’s informing so much of what’s put out. I’m getting pretty old. I don’t remember a time in my life when I felt quite so much doubt about what the media reports. Without some of the blogs, it would be even harder to know what’s really going on.
Scoble Notes
Steve Broback introduces Robert Scoble, calling him “an important PR asset” for Microsoft. Robert Scoble begins; explains that his birthday party was collected over the Internet, from the wine to the cook. “It seems like everything in my life…
One thing that the new wave may be missing is that it’s a lot more than the “blogosphere” and that many seeing the potential for the first time don’t understand that there have been lots of experiments and developments.
I include the following link because:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25
because it gives a good discussion of strengths, weaknesses and possible developments within wikopedia…
…and…
…because it shows basics in blog design that most commercial verrsions ignore.
For example it allows comments to be threaded and addressed individually. This is necessary for serious discussion in which the contributions of readers can turn out to be as important as the original post.
Blogs are still based on the old “broadcast” top down method of directing information.
This is in fact one of their strengths, it provides a structure free form discussion groups do not and it is intuitive; but we are in the process of combining forms, synthesizing new ones.
In many respects we have to go back to the concepts of the sixties and seventies. I’ve become increasingly sympathetic to Engelbart’s claim that despite adaption of the mouse and so many other things, his “paradigm” has been missed.
We are not really thinking of “augmentation.”
While I think many of the features of NLS
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
are too elaborate and could muddle things beyond belief in a the complexity of a mass system, basic ways of linking and organization that it proposed remain sound. Ways of creating them should be developed for more controlled domains.
For example I think the scholarly work of the future will have many links back to the steps in it’s creation, including possible branches, changes, criticisms and the like will be attached.
The entire model used for the creation of traditional encyclopedias will alter. While I don’t think wikopedia provides an adequete interface for full expression of this and there are certainly flaws in it’s mechanisms of social review I do believe it further along in pioneering the process than conventional scholarly work.
I will also note that despite the flaws in many of it’s entries, some are excellant, certainly many of those on technology are superior to conventional encyclopedias and it does show us things of potentially revolutionary importance such as “cell phone culture” in Japan. It looks forward more than traditional resources.
Given the few years taken in it’s creation, the relatively limited financial resources and the recognition that this is a protoptype not only in terms of the tools used to express knowledge, but the social process for creating it and some serious change may be on the way.
It does threaten to subvert the entire “intellectual establishment.” There is simply no real interest in using even the tools already existing. Papers are often “protected” in PDF and Engelbarts technique of using anchors to mark paragraphs and other key passages within existing html systems hasn’t been adapted, even though it could automatically structure traditional papers.
For example one can not only go to the top of this discussion,
http://bootstrap.org/colloquium/session_02/session_02.html
but link to a specific paragraph on the original structure of links.
http://bootstrap.org/colloquium/session_02/session_02.html#4B
– David Bennett
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Some years ago, the Encyclopaedia Britannica fell behind in its coverage of geology, to the point that even things like plate tectonics received short shrift. I haven’t checked, but I trust that it has caught up since: I mention the matter only to point out that any ambitious attempt to gather together a large compendium of knowledge is bound to suffer some variation in the quality of its contributions, whatever their source may be.