Marketing, damnit!

The ideas behind the open source movement are very powerful.

How powerful?

So powerful that if a competent marketing team -- people who ordinarily churn out boring beer commercials -- are asked instead to create a commercial for Linux or Wikipedia, they can make something mindblowingly inspiring without breaking stride.

That doesn't happen very often because open source projects are broke. But when it does happen, you get stuff like this 2003 ad:



link, if you can't see the embed

After watching that, I want to marry the open source movement and have its children. This is the kind of power your typical corporation has to shape public perception; usually it's spent trying to get you to increase your detergent consumption.

Now some Texas design students have created a mock ad campaign for Wikipedia, complete with magazine ads, a T-shirt, posters, etc. It so utterly fucking rocks.



The artistic vision:

"Many people tend to view Wikipedia as an unreliable source of information because anyone can edit entries on the website.

Our concept was to present an everyday person as an "expert" on a specific subject in order to show that whether the information comes from a university professor or from an avid gamer, it is still reliable.

Each piece shows a straight view of each persona and a mind map of their thought process. We felt this approach humanizes the experience of Wikipedia."

via

Ohio Country

Hypergraphia, Pyromania, Pyrophilia, Trichotillomania. (Chorus! ♬We didn't start the fire... ♫)

Via this category, via whoever reached this blog by searching for "Pyrophilia wiki". They probably just wanted to find the wikipedia article, but I'd really prefer to believe they were looking for a pyrophilia-themed wiki.

Best name for a logical fallacy ever.

Concharto is a geographic wiki for documenting historical events -- think wikimapia times ten.

It also has a pretty noble goal:

When Leo Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace” in the 1860’s, he sprinkled it with whole chapters of rants against the historians of the day. His complaint was that they viewed history solely as a progression of major events precipitated by “great men”. Instead, he argued, history is a much more complicated progression of cause and effect driven by small events. In one of his more philosophical moments, he proposed applying the scientific method to history, asserting that a complete understanding of an event could be obtained by slicing that event into smaller and smaller pieces, in exactly the same way that a math student performs integral calculus.

While not actually creating a calculus of history, Concharto does attempt to slice history into smaller pieces.

But the interface is confusing and cumbersome in the extreme. It's built on top of google maps, and inherits its interface elements in all of their general-purpose bulk. No, no, no, no, no. You want something that looks like this.

As things stand, the interface imposes so much cognitive drag that the application (which should be awesome, and has plenty of functionality) isn't very fun at all. Here's hoping it improves over time.

(hat tip for the russia map)

Erik Moeller is the Wikimedia Foundation's deputy director and possibly its most powerful member (alongside Sue Gardner, the grownup in residence).

Wikipedia Weekly talked to him last week, but Erik is a fastidiously thorough politician, which makes him a rather boring interview subject. I sat through the whole 40 minutes so you don't have to.

The takeaway: the Foundation seems to be finding its legs. It's paying cheap-ish rent in San Fran, reaching out to the general public (insofar as that exists in silicon valley), and hoping eventually to be known as the Red Cross of information. I'm actually impressed with the way things seem to be going, organizationally. Now get us a stats machine.

Origin of water on Earth

I was wondering why Clay Shirky's talk about Wikipedia -- among other things -- has been blowing up the blogosphere. (Because it's fucking brilliant, that's why. Though I don't buy all of it.)

Not wikipedia-related:

If you're curious about the controversies surrounding China -- if you're chinese and think the western public is gullible and uninformed, or vice versa, here's a good article.

Wikipedia takes manhattan: a photographic scavenger hunt for places around our city needing photos for their Wikipedia articles. Looks like it went pretty well.

Autocompletion

Is anyone else seeing predictive autocompletion in the Wikipedia search field?



Update: head techie Brion Vibber has the scoop. This is pretty big news -- most people have no idea how vast wikipedia is, and now the dropdown is a little window into that.

So, what are we going to do tonight, Brain?

Warning: not Wikipedia-related.

My band, the Afternoon Round, at one of our first shows.

The recording levels are way off, but I think it rocks pretty hard. We're playing at the Heidelburg in Ann Arbor on thursday. There's some more melodic stuff on the myspace.

WikiXMLDB provides a way of querying Wikipedia with XQuery.

With all the benefits that Wikipedia promises, it is not easy to use it off-the-shelf in applications. While Wikipedia is available for download in an XML format, individual articles are formatted in a proprietary wiki format. So the most interesting uses of Wikipedia in applications are still locked behind the access troubles.

Here is where WikiXMLDB comes to the rescue. We have parsed the entire English Wikipedia content into XML representation (its total size is about 21GB), loaded it into Sedna and provided a query interface to it. Now you can dissect individual articles, rip out abstracts, sections, links, infoboxes and other components. Or you can combine pieces of existing documents into new XML documents and convert them to web pages with XSLT for example. And you can do it all using the standard W3C XQuery Language. So finally you can start enriching your content with data from Wikipedia and unlock its power for your applications.

Cool.

Was Tolkien's wizard Gandalf based on Gundulf of Rochester? "In 1078 King William used Gundulf's skill in the construction of the White Tower: the keep of the Tower of London."

Tea culture is defined by the way tea is made and consumed, by the way the people interact with tea, and by the aesthetics surrounding tea drinking.

List of ethnic groups in China. (Don't miss the map.)

English America* has "John Doe". What are informal names for unknown or unspecified persons in other countries/regions?

* You pedants

Lieutenant-General Sir Manley Power (1773 – July 7, 1826)

Wiki FM Lets You Listen to Bands on Last.fm While Reading their Bios on Wikipedia