One of the more interesting effects of Wikipedia's 'editable-by-anyone' nature is the occurrence of edit wars- where two or more authors keep editing and counter-editing a page over and over. This page lists the most egregious examples of said battles. It makes for quite a hilarious read.
A few of my favourites:
Devil's Lake (North Dakota) Shockingly, there are multiple locations in the United States with the name "Devil's Lake." A very heated war broke out here regarding which one should be featured, whether a disambig page was needed, even over the usage of the apostrophe- eventually literally degenerating into "my lake is better than yours!"
Wii Is this article about the Wii or the Nintendo Wii? Should it be Nintendo's Wii? Does it rhyme with "We" or "Wee"? Should "Wee" link to urine? Is "Wee" slang or a euphemism for urine? Is it a British or International word for urine? Should urine be mentioned in the article at all? Just some of the hard hitting issues that provoked in excess of 1500 edits in the space of two weeks. In addition to all of that, a massive war breaks out over "non-official external links" that leads to a huge strawpoll to end the issue.
Death Star Is it 120km or 160km in diameter? Who cares?
Colour me shocked. Stunned, even. A fledgling online music company by the name of SpiralFrog has announced that they're going to make Universal Music's entire North American music catalogue available for free downloading on their website. A test of the service is supposed to start in North America (USA + Canada) by the end of the year, with Britain and other European countries following next year.
Of course, all this free music isn't really free. Instead of spending money, you'll have to spend time to download these songs, and I don't just mean the download time. See, you'll have to watch or listen to ads on their website in order to download the songs and if you want to keep the songs, you'll just have to keep watching ads on the site regularly. As long as the service offers fast download speeds and little to no server downtime, I think people won't mind that too much.
A bigger problem is that SpiralFrog's music offerings will be encoded in Microsoft's WMA format, which isn't compatible with the iPod. Oho. That's a large segment of the digital-music market they're shutting out right there. Is SpiralFrog insane? With a name like that, you'd be tempted to think so, but it looks like they didn't have much of a choice. I'm sure they'd like to support iPod compatibility, but the iPod isn't compatible with any DRM systems but Apple's own FairPlay technology- which isn't and probably can't be used by anyone but Apple.
This leads to an interesting possibility: services like this (I'm sure more- including a yet-to-be-announced service from Kazaa- will be along the way soon) might just erode Apple's dominant position in the digital music market- but only if other hardware manufacturers can get their acts together and start offering compelling alternatives to the iPod. Microsoft's upcoming Zune doesn't count because apparently its only going to support it's own proprietary DRM encoding instead of Microsoft's existing technologies (unless they do an about-face following this news, or try to one-up SpiralFrog with their own free music service). Maybe it's time for Creative to shine?
Still, the big question for me now is simply this: When will we get services like this down here in Asia?
According to this Reuters report, online video site Youtube's viewers are now watching 100 million videos daily. Wow. That's a whole lot of videos. They've definitely captured the market in online videos. Blog TechCrunch raises an interesting question- given their high bandwidth costs (over $1,000,000 a month in April this year- bound to be higher now), how is the service going to make money? Increased advertising would be the obvious solution- question is where will Youtube put the extra ads? Before or after videos? More banners? Well, I'm sure the company's savvy enough to figure something out. Today, they'll be toasting themselves on their fine achievement- beating out large industry players like Google (with their competing Google Video) service to create the household name in online video.
On a sidenote, it's very amusing to read some of the comments on TechCrunch where people try and pinpoint single magic factors that led to Youtube's popularity. Of course, there isn't one. Their success, like any sucess, is due to many factors, but the most important is one that TechCrunch nails with this statement:
"It just might be that YouTube is simple, easy, works well enough and people like it - there may be no more mystery than that."
Well said indeed. Others who want to succeed in the world of "Web 2.0" should make note of that.
UPDATE2: MICROSOFT- DON'T RELEASE BUGGY SOFTWARE AS AN OFFICIAL RELEASE! This stupid program crashes on me with near-clockwork regularity. Now I'm just plain irritated. This isn't a Beta version and I didn't expect it to perform like one. Even better, the damn thing installed itself over my old MSN Messenger installation (which I really wasn't expecting given it's Brand-New name) and I can't go back to using that... Whoopee. Oh and the offline chat feature that I was so in love with is totally broken! Half the messages I send my friends while I'm in offline mode don't get to them- and vice versa.
I can't un-recommend this program enough. Argh!!!
UPDATE: OOH FINALLY MESSENGER LET'S ME CHAT WITH PEOPLE WHILE I'M IN OFFLINE MODE!!! Yeah, ICQ had this feature like a decade or so ago so Microsoft is busy playing catchup, but I still really appreciate the feature. OK I'm a convert- if for that feature alone.
So I've been using the recently-released Windows Live Messenger client for the past few days and well, it's basically MSN Messenger with a new coat of paint. OK, it's got VoIP but... oh wait, MSN Messenger did voice chat too. OK OK, so Windows Messenger Live also lets you call normal telephones from your PC! Whoa! But oh wait, Skype already provides an excellent VoIP solution- and it runs on Mac OS X and Linux too! So there's that. Well, colour me totally unimpressed.
Also, what's the deal with this "Windows Live" branding thing? Who is Microsoft trying to fool? Windows is an operating system. Sticking it's brand-name on everything from the new version of Hotmail (speaking of which, dropping Hotmail- one of the Web's most recognizable brand names- for 'Windows Live Mail' is just plain stupid) to the new version of MSN Messenger is just going to dilute the Windows brand.
Stupefyingly enough, the VP in charge of marketing Windows Live mysteriously left Microsoft just after the release of the new Messenger client. Very bizarre, considering he was scheduled to give interviews about the program's release on the day he left! Just what is going on at Redmond these days? I hope these guys have a plan. I'm quite ambivalent towards MS these days, but the company has done so much to push computing into the mainstream over the past decade and a half that it's just downright sad to see them floundering like this now.
"Vista. The term stirs the imagination to conceive of beautiful possibilities just around the corner. And “just around the corner” is what Windows Vista has been, and has remained, for the past two years. In this time, Vista has suffered a series of high-profile delays, including most recently the announcement that it would be delayed until 2007. The largest software project in mankind’s history now threatens to also be the longest."
Quoted from this blog entry by a Microsoft manager who formerly worked on Windows. The operating system has (in)famously been delayed multiple times, losing features in the process. It's finally nearing release but the system requirements, which are formidable indeed, indicate that the system is very bloated. Everything I hear about Vista just makes me more and more apprehensive.
I wouldn't care if I could just stick to XP for the forseeable future, but I'm a gamer and some 'killer app' game will no doubt force me to make the switch to Vista. Ugh... the insanity. This, along with the recent news of Bill Gates leaving Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic activities (good on you, Bill!), makes me wonder about the future of the company. Well, as the saying goes, time will tell. Meanwhile, I'm thinking seriously about switching to Linux for day-to-day use.
More than a year after he wrote a blog post titled Math Every Day- the same one I found 2 weeks ago- Steve Yegge's written a follow-up post on a new blog he's started (check it out- it's interesting!). He's got a few cool ideas, based on his experiences. For one thing, he thinks maths is taught all wrong in schools. He thinks schools spend too much time teaching students the details of a few branches of maths- because of that, we never figure out how it all fits together. The Bigger Picture, so to speak. His says that acquiring a broader knowledge about math is far more useful (and why? In Yegge's words: Because the first step to applying mathematics is problem identification.) and suggests Wikipedia as a tool to this end. I think he's onto something here!
Lifehacker's put up a post on how to become a Gmail master. If you're a Gmail user (and who isn't, these days?), check it out. There's lots of great tips and tricks there.
Drawball is a large online virtual canvas for anyone and everyone to draw on as they please. Once you enter the space (by disagreeing with the tongue-in-cheek license agreement at the start), zoom in on on an area that looks suitable and start drawing away. Just don't be surprised if someone else draws over your stuff in a day, or even sooner! The Hall of Fame's got some really cool drawings- including this two-part Dragon. Best part is, by clicking on any of the drawings, you get to see the process of their creation, stroke-by-stroke. Wikipedia has an informative about Drawball. It's rather interesting to note that there have been several community efforts to create large-scale drawings- like the Korean Flag at the center of this Drawball:
Oh and the area available for any individual user to draw on is roughly the size of the 0 on the "zoom 0%" you see at the left of the Drawball. So you can imagine how many people it took to draw a huge flag like that!
At the time of this writing, there's a really cool drawing of Mario wearing a cape and riding Yoshi at the bottom of the Drawball. I say at this time because drawings tend to get vandalized pretty often on Drawball- which is pretty much inevitable since it allows any and all users to draw anywhere on the Drawball at all times. Which does lead to the sad destruction of many a fine drawing (which is why the Hall of Fame exists- to immortalize such work) but it also makes the Drawball a very dynamic space.
Last week I stumbled upon a blog entry written by Steve Yegge, a former software developer at Amazon.com who now works for Google, titled Math Every Day. In it, he discusses how reading a book called John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing made him realise how important Maths is, especially to programmers, and how a lack of practical Maths knowledge hindered his expertise as one. So he embarked on a program to learn (or rather, re-learn) a bit of Maths everyday for one year.
In his lengthy post, he also details some of John von Neumann's spectacular achievements. Originally a mathematician, von Neumann co-created Game Theory, was a key member of the Manhattan Project that created the first atom bomb, contributed to the field of quantum mechanics, created the field of cellular automata and oh yes, invented the modern computer (in fact, most computers in use today are designed according to an architecture that bears his name). With a resume like that, it's no wonder that John von Neumann is considered one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century.
Fascinated by the story of this man, I did a bit of googling and found the online text of Tools for Thought, a history of modern computing that focuses on some of the key figures in the field. The book's written by Howard Reingold- who also wrote the critically-acclaimed book Smart Mobs, about the impact that pervasive computing will have on society. The blog associated with the book is one of the best on the Internet.
I read the first chapter of Tools for Thought, which tells the story of Charles Babbage, who invented the world's first working digital computer- the steam-driven Difference Engine, and Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the infamous Romantic poet Lord Byron (author of, amongst other works, Don Juan) and one of the world's first programmers.
Having read that much, I wanted to read more about all these visionaries who stood at the brink of the Age of Information in which we now live. So the next day at the NUS Library, I searched for books on the history of computing and found two rather interesting ones. The first, The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron's Daughter, was a biography of Ada Lovelace, which I'm currently reading.
Far from a dry text, the book starts off by detailing the tumultuous romance between Ada's mother- the supremely logical, rational and scientifically-minded Annabella Milbanke- and George Byron- poet, lover, celebrity, a man who would come to symbolize the Romantic movement evermore and become the model for the now-stereotypical Romantic hero.
The book presents Ada as thus being borne of a union between the increasingly-incompatible philosophies of Scientific Rationalism and Romanticism. She would inherit both the wild passions and cold logic of her father and mother, respectively. Set in the backdrop of the emerging industrial Victorian age, her story is one that would quite possibly be considered too outlandish for a work of fiction, and so is yet more remarkable for being true.
The other book I borrowed is Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone. The book is partly a biography of John von Neumann and partly a history of game theory, that branch of mathematics that he helped create. I haven't read it yet, but it comes highly recommended and looks pretty cool.
I personally find that learning about the history of a field- Computing, in this case- and the personalities who helped shape it is far more interesting than simply learning theory without being able to ground it in any kind of context. Pretty much the same goes for Physics, which can seem awfully abstruse to the casual observer but has always been one of the most exciting branches of science, populated as it is by a set of individuals as eccentric as they are brilliant.
On March 1st, 2006, the 1,000,000th article on Wikipedia was created. It's a short article about Jordanhill railway station in Scotland. Brilliant. The article provides some really specific information that's not be important to everyone but will be of benefit to a certain set of people (I'm guessing locals, travellers and people who are moving into the area)- the sort of thing that Wikipedia is really good at.
I've been using Wikipedia regularly since I first came across it a few years ago and it's grown into an absolutely fantastic resource for looking up just about anything. I think the growth of the website has far surpassed the expectations of it's original creators by now. How many years til the 2,000,000th article, I wonder?
I just found out that Google's expanded their ever-growing set of webservices with a beta version of Google Page Creator, which combines a web-based website creation program and a website hosting service. Neat. According to Google Blogoscoped, Google Page Creator uses a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor much like Frontpage, so it's clearly not aimed at professional site designers. But I think it can find its niche as a Geocities-style service for hosting simple webpages. Wow, looks like the service was really popular- this PC World report states that Google stopped accepting new accounts for the service only a day after it launched on February 23rd. Looks like Google's plans for taking over the web are shaping up nicely. ;-)
Oh the self-reflexivity of it all! Oh and by the way: this is my fourth post today! How unusually productive of me. Anyway, the February issue of New York Magazine's got a cool article called Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom, written by Clive Thompson- who runs the excellent science and technology blog collision detection. The article tries to answer the question of why some blogs become really popular and others languish in obscurity, despite the quality of their content.
Well it seems that Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University who specializes in network theory- which the article describes as "a mathematical model of how information travels inside groups of loosely connected people, such as users of the Web"- studied this phenomenon by analysing 433 blogs and found that a very small number of blogs received hundreds of inbound links (links being the equivalent of popularity votes for blogs) whereas the vast majority of the rest barely had any at all. So we have a very small A-list who get loads of links, a slightly larger B-list (less links than the A-list, but still substantial) and a huge C-list (all us folk who hardly get any links at all *sniff sniff*).
OK so I guess this isn't news to a lot of bloggers out there. What is interesting, though, is that the curve that Shirky obtained by sorting the 433 blogs in order of most linked to least is a power-law distribution- a distribution that is common to many social systems. Shirky thinks that this result can be explained by a simple quirk of human nature- that when we try to choose amongst many given choices (in the case of blogs, a dizzying number of choices), we'll gravitate towards the most popular ones. Which, of course, means that popular things just become more and more popular, and vice versa.
That certainly does seem to describe the "blogosphere," at least to an extent. It also explains why small blogs often try to catch the attention of larger A-list blogs to try and get linked on their front page, which guarantees a surge of attention. There's lots more interesting stuff in the article, but I'm going to cut this post short and send a link to BoingBoing. :P
EDIT: Oh yeah, Clay Shirky's got his own website where you can go if you wanna read more about his research into power laws and blogs.
One of the coolest things about living on the 44th floor of a building in the middle of Singapore's business district is being able to observe the flow of human traffic on the streets down below. When I was 6 years old, I'd sit by my window after waking up in the morning and count the cars that drove along Robinson Road. Yeah, everything was exciting back then. On a weekday I'd count upwards of a 100 cars in 10 minutes, easy. On a weekend I'd be lucky to hit 50 on in half an hour.
Today's a public holiday (Happy Chinese New Year, one and all! It's the year of the dawg!) so there's even less traffic in this area than usual. Chinese New Year is one of the few public holidays in Singapore when most (not all, but most) shops are gonna be closed so it's more or less a sit-at-home-and-relax kinda day for me. Well, actually, I'd go out and watch a movie with my sister normally, but she flew off to the UK early this morning- she's gonna be there for the next two and a half months for a training thing- so I took the opportunity to go through all the RSS feeds I subscribe to on my Rojo account.
I'm currently listening to Gackt's new single Redemption- it's the theme song for the FFVII spin-off game Dirge of Cerberus (both the song and the game came recommended by the mildly-infamous-on-the-Internet gonzo journalist Tim Rogers). The song's pretty damn good! I'm surprised. I really enjoyed his songs with his old band, Malice Mizer, but nothing the man's done in his solo career seemed very interesting. Gackt's last album Diabolos, in particular, was pretty awful. It's cool to see him finally on-form. I wonder if he can keep this momentum? Well, seeing as how the man is a 400+ year old vampire (I kid you not, go read his Wikipedia entry :p), time is on his side ey?
Speaking of music, I've been meaning to integrate my Last.fm account with my blog and it looks like there's finally a way to do that! Must be a new feature. Coolness. So I've added a Last.fm chart of my most-played artists of the week to my sidebar. As you can see, I've been listening to The Strokes a lot lately. I bought their new album First Impressions Of Earth last week. It's got some great tracks, like opener "You Only Live Once," "Heart in a Cage," "On The Other Side," "Killing Lies," and "Ize Of The World." Though I think their last album, "Room on Fire," was more consistent overall, I really like that the band experiments with their signature sound a bit here instead of just doing the same thing over and over (randomize songs from "Room on Fire" and their first album "Is This It" and you wouldn't be able to tell which song came from which album. They're that similar.).
Back to my Last.fm chart- if you click on it, you can go to my Last.fm page and see what songs I listen to the most every week and also what artists and songs I've played the most overall. Last.fm's nifty, but the charts aren't perfect- the site's software plugin only checks what I've been listening to on my iTunes, but not my iPod. And apparently it doesn't count repeated plays of the same song. Oh well.
I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds. So many, in fact, that it can take me more than an hour to go through them all once every 2 days. Well I haven't checked my Rojo for a week so I've ended up with a mountain of unread entries. But I read em all anyway because I never know what gems I'll find in there.
Like these really cool pictures of upcoming Batman Lego figures and sets. The 8 year old me, who was equally obsessed with both Batman and Lego, would have fainted on the spot upon seeing this Batcave playset. Isn't it awesome? I may actually have to buy some of these when they come out (apparently in April).
Another thing I've noticed while reading all my feeds is that everybody's talking about Chuck Norris these days. I hadn't heard anything about the guy since Walker, Texas Ranger (reruns of which are actually showing on TV these days!) which I never really watched anyway. The only thing I knew about the man was that he fought with Bruce Lee, which is actually really cool. But late last year he exploded onto the Internet as a sort of thought-virus. As far as I know, it all started with this page of "facts" about the man, compiled from a thread on the Something Awful forums. Well, the guys who hang out on those forums are nothing if not bizarrely creative, which is why we get gems like "Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting infers the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing." Or "If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death." Or "The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain."
OK I'll stop now. After this one! "The original theme song to the Transformers was actually "Chuck Norris--more than meets the eye, Chuck Norris--robot in disguise," and starred Chuck Norris as a Texas Ranger who defended the earth from drug-dealing Decepticons and could turn into a pick-up. This was far too much awesome for a single show, however, so it was divided." Yep. I'm done with the quotes. But that's not all the Chuck Norris stuff I've seen online lately.
It seems Conan O'Brien's gone Chuck-crazy- he's been playing random clips of Walker: Texas Ranger on his show. But the culmination of all this Chuck-related madness (which includes people digging up old Chuck toys, comics , a cartoon series... What? Even Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't have a cartoon show and he was the toughest dude alive in the 80s! Not to mention the 2nd toughest robot, after Optimus Prime, of course.) has got to be this SNL skit about the young Chuck Norris:
It's actually pretty funny, though far inferior to the SNL Narnia rap skit which made the rounds on the Net last year. Both these skits, by the way, were made by these guys. Wow. Saturday Night Live's actually funny again. Anything's possible in TV Land I guess.
There's just one last marginally-related-to-Chuck thing I've got to write about: this video, titled The Ultimate Showdown, on the Flash portal Newgrounds.com. It's a surreal flash animation where Godzilla, Batman, a zombie Abraham Lincoln, Optimus Prime and several other characters/celebrities (including everybody's favourite Chuck Norris) fight to prove... err.. who's the baddest. Or something like that. Yeah, it makes no sense at all. But it's decently-animated (in a South Park sorta way) and all the carnage is set to a really catchy-song! Ok now I've gotta go away from my PC before my brain leaks out my head because of all this rampant weirdness.
Infinite Matrix is, or rather, was, one of the most exciting science fiction webzines around. Published periodically from August 2001 to January 2006, it featured short stories by authors including Cory Doctorow, Robert Sheckley (now sadly deceased) and Michael Swanwick. David Langford, who runs the most excellent science-fiction newsletter Ansible , wrote a weekly column for the site, cunningly named the Runcible Ansible (if you don't know what a runcible is, go here to find out!). And before Bruce Sterling started blogging over at Wired, he ran a blog called Schism Matrix on Infinite Matrix for two years.
Yep, there's a lot of good stuff on Infinite Matrix, so it's sad to see the site go. But it's final, January 2006 issue's chock-full of great content. Highlights for me included an essay by William Gibson on how he discovered history and science fiction in his youth (and how the two may be the same thing!) and a new novella (or novelette, as the site describes it) by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross calledAppeals Court. The site's going out with a bang, that's for sure.
Wikipedia turned 5 two days ago on January 15th. I don't remember exactly when I started using the online encyclopedia myself, but it's become an invaluable resource to me over the past few years. Given that all the articles are peer-written, I do take them with a grain of salt but Wikipedia is an excellent starting point in looking up information about various topics. Furthermore, well-written articles often provide links to academic sources about the topic at hand.
Defying the expectations of it's naysayers, Wikipedia has become one of the most reliable sources of information on the Internet. In fact, it has been favourably compared to the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica itself by the scientific journal Nature. That's pretty impressive. Perhaps the greatest proof of the site's rising importance is that the Chinese government has blocked access to it since October 2005- much to the chagrin of Chinese scientists and students!
Apparently I'm JFK! Oho!! What an interesting result. I don't do these personality things normally but I was directed to this one by my friend hui (who also got the same result, oddly enough).
