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Number of articles in english language version of Wikipedia: 1,000,000
Total articles in Wikipedia: 3,300,000
Total articles in Encylopedia Britannica: 65,000
Number of articles edited per day on Wikipedia: the same number as the total articles in Britannica.
You don’t get what you pay for.
Press releases/English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article - Wikimedia Foundation
‘Crude or profane language
Little and his dad both use “Oh snap!” as a euphemism. Dad interjects “Jeez.” Name-calling includes “loser.’… and Little’s dad keeps calling him a daft wee feathered c*nt - I don’t think so.
Sony’s latest cockup with DRM in CD’s shows that they haven’t a clue - or rather that the media bods in Sony don’t have a clue.
More than ever, Sony needs to split its hardware and media divisions before one drags the other down.
Such a spectacular failure in DRM attached to physical media sets a huge precedent - Sony will have to change tactic. Their real fight now is with Apple since Apple’s DRM is flowing onto iPods without people really noticing while their own attempt got caught by being stupidly aggressive.
Anyone who has visited a used CD store recently and looked at the prices, can see that the very CDs that the music industry fought so hard to push, with inferior artwork to vinyl, are its worst enemy - they have created the sneakernet Napster. The price of used CD’s is dropping as they change from a product of desire (the inferior artwork is not enough to collect) to one of convenience - serial numberless disk storage media.
One of the things that may happen is that Sony pretend to repent and donate money into the cash strapped EFF to force Apple to open up their own DRM or place warning notices on iTunes downloads that the songs will only ever play on Apple products.
This would be Sony’s true Trojan horse as their ultimate interests would be orthogonal to consumers.
What is happening to all media is that the distribution has changed and that we don’t need the distribution companies. From MySpace to my iPod there is no role for them, just like there is no real role for Blacksmiths when people have cars.
I wonder if this Slate article, Are Subway Searches Legal? - The rules for searching bags. By Daniel Engber was written by someone that :
thought he had a point then realised that his argument was flawed;
added the paragraph at the bottom marked ‘bonus explainer’ which tries and fails to defend against the flawed logic in the main piece;
ran the story anyway.
There are very real civil liberty concerns post 911, they highlight the fact that democracy is built from a peaceful society. But cummon, screening bags for bombs before travelling is not one of them. There is nothing that takes away your liberty more than being blown to pieces.
Summary - piece highlights a claim that searching subway bags is ‘unconstitutional’, realizes that could be argued that is no diff from air travel searches. Tries to say that air travel is different because:
1. You have other travel options when flying vs taking the subway. (In fact it is more likely that you have more travel options when using the subway, as people from Hawaii).
2. Airline searches search everyone and where some people are singled out it is not at discretion of the security personnel (Er - bullshit).
PBS’ Guns Germs and Steel documentary took an hour and several tons of jet fuel to explain, well nothing. The documentary merely stated, but neither explained nor tested the hypothesis.
A great shame, because the book is still a hypothesis worthy of testing. I saw Jared Diamond talk about a year ago, and he had plenty of new evidence to add.
“The information density is appallingly low, and what we got in an hour was the equivalent of reading a handful” of pages from the book.”
I received a boat-load (very small boat) of email about me moaning about political blogs. So just to redress the balance, the mainstream media is crap too. Bah Humbug.
As an example, I always had a feeling that Wall Street Journal opinion pieces were written by cub hacks, or even cub scouts, rather than the editor. Its an otherwise excellent newspaper, ruined by painting by numbers editorial.
As Josh Marshall points out, today’s is a particularly side-splitting classic of obsequious, foppish garbage, worthy of the court of Louis XVI:
“Wall Street Journal headline: “‘Karl Rove, Whistleblower.’”
Translation: Rove told the truth, shower him with medals, everyone else has no integrity and is wrong.
Marshall:
“… can you blame them? Most of the kids there want White House jobs or other GOP-based promotions.”
When 911 happened, most people hadn’t heard of bloggers or Wikipedia, there was no Feedster or Technorati, Google News did not exist*, there was no Flickr and people did not have camera phones.
These products and services are not a result of 911, but this was the event that created one facet of what is now an unshakable trend, real-time, ubiquitous, truly democratic media. The second phase of the web, where people could publish as easily as they could browse, was being born.
The thing that people used to laugh at when we pitched it originally while at Moreover, actually happened.
After the attacks last week in London, I thought that this would be the point where image sharing reached mainstream awareness for news gathering. Camera phones with ability to post via the web are more widespread than in the US and photo sharing has reached an inflection point.
In some ways this did happen, within a couple of hours, amateur pictures posted on the web were picked up by mainstream news services and there have been articles since pointing out the role of digital cameras and camera phones.
When I tried to create a real-time list of aggregated thumbnails of amateur news pictures, using Wists, I realized that things are still nascent.
I looked at over twenty photo sharing sites (some of which have far more users than Flickr) and other than a few images from moblogging sites in the UK the only site with images was Flickr and therefore there was little point in aggregating them.
In addition, the majority of the photos on Flickr were taken from people pointing their camera phone at television news. After the event, the most important images are those taken by CCT surveillance cameras.
None of this is that surprising, however, I’ll bet one thing - that Google develops something more like Flickr and less like Picassa at some point, cos Flickr clearly demonstrates the future of image sharing.
*The fact that other search engines such as Alta Vista had news search (through Moreover), largely prompted Google to develop a news product.
Google News Search: “senior White House official.
Several hundred news items with various ’senior White House officials’ quoted as sources for a bunch of stories.
One good thing that could come out of the Plame case is less of this speculative nonsense or spin.
One of the problems that I have with the current Supreme Court ruling over file sharing is the assumption that this stuff can be legislated absolutely.
As media is reduced to an atomic state of bits, it starts to show quantum-like uncertainty, is it a thing like an LP or a transmission like a song on the radio, a particle or a wave?
Hidden within the Supreme Court ruling is the other side of the coin:
Just as people have created software that allows people to share things they don’t own, with copy protected digital media nobody owns anything. Everything you buy is actually rented.
Why is it legal to develop software which necessarily prevents ownership of something you buy?
At the moment I buy albums in flea markets for 10c a song, read books that I bought in the UK in the US and can read all the books I want by checking them out of the library.
I cannot buy second hand MP3s, watch DVDs I bought in the UK (without hardware that will surely be banned at some point) or check out unlimited electronic books from the library.
The bottom line to all this: stuff should just be a whole lot cheaper and the problem would surely go away.
The role of the media industry has always been to promote and distribute media - when the network replaces these what is that role?
What is acceptable on TV:
a.) A nipple - not actually visible, but it’s shape visible through clothing.
b.) Two people re-enacting creating life in a loving manner - fictionally.
c.) Minor swearwords.
d.) Encouraging violence and hatred. Racism, homophobia, misrepresentation and extortion.
Answer d.)
And for this madness, Max Blumenthal encourages people to complain to the FCC about a specifically odious example.
At the moment 90% of FCC complaints come from one organization on the lunatic fringe. If Max can encourage enough bloggers to write to the FCC, at the very least it will help redress the balance.
It may even help the FCC re-address how they deal with the fact that their complaints currently come from a minority group and therefore their guidelines do not reflect the ‘true moral majority’, the mainstream of America which is largely benign and moderate.
Here is where you file complaints. Complaints can be via email
via Jeff
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