When the mainstream media addressed the John Seigenthaler Sr. affair — he’s the respected journalist who wrote an op-ed in USAToday complaining that slanderously wrong information about him was in Wikipedia for four months — the subtext couldn’t be clearer: The media were implicitly contrasting Wikipedia’s credibility to their own. Ironically, the media got the story fundamentally wrong.

Most media reports presented the narrative line of the story roughly as follows: A person of indisputable honor was smeared in Wikipedia. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of its failings, the mainstream media shamed Wikipedia into reluctantly becoming more like them. See, Wikipedia was unreliable all along, just like we said! We’re the grownups, and now we’re making Wikipedia grow up…

Are leaves mulch?:
Peter Morville’s criticism of folksonomies, et al.

I’m very fond of Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, a highly readable exploration of what’s going on in the field of information architecture, i.e., how we find stuff, written by a practitioner and thought-leader.

Larry Irons wrote to me recently, however, asking about Peter’s jibe about the idea that I’ve been pushing, that we’re moving from trees of knowledge to big piles of leaves…

Cool Tool :
Power scanning!

What I’m playing: Murderous rivolity rules.