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Above: Boutique book publisher and geek James Bridle has printed the 12,000 edits made to the controversial Wikipedia entry for Iraq War between December 2004 to November 2009 as a 7,000 page, 12 volume set of books.
"This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification."And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future." -James Bridle
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Bridle spoke about the project in his talk "The Value of Ruins" at the dConstruct conference last week in Brighton, England. Audio of his talk is posted below.
Of the printed collection, Bridle says: "It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes 'Saddam Hussein was a dickhead'."
Of Wikipedia, Bridle says: "It's not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot."
I think that's pretty awesome.
Below: Bridle's talk at dConstruct, The Value of Ruins. Audio thanks to the wonderful podcast curation tool HuffDuffer. (Which, incidentally, was built by James Keith, author of HTML5 for Web Designers, who recently shook hands with James Bridle himself.)
AP - A magnitude-5.1 aftershock hammered New Zealand's earthquake-hit city of Christchurch on Wednesday morning, freshly damaging buildings, sparking evacuations and prompting the extension of a state of emergency for another week.
AP - ABC's search for someone to preside over its news division comes as the Internet and cable television have made the job much different and more complex than what outgoing chief David Westin took over nearly 14 years ago.
AP - Their control of the House in peril, Democrats are scratching to survive in races all across the country. Disgruntled voters, a sluggish economy and vanishing enthusiasm for President Barack Obama have put 75 seats or more — the vast majority held by Democrats — at risk of changing hands.
AP - The Monte Carlo casino-resort has replaced longtime Las Vegas Strip headline magician Lance Burton with a hip-hop dance crew that shot to fame through a reality television competition, hotel officials announced Tuesday.
Anyone who writes on a specific topic will have a set of resources he or she refers to in order to keep on top of what's happening. Those of us who keep an eye out on how free speech issues affect the online world tend to use resources that are, of course, online. Practicing the transparency we preach, I thought it might be useful to share my top sources.
The criteria I used to come up with this list of 10 online free speech sources are that they need to be accessible to anyone, provide original news or original analysis of that news and be frequently updated. In this list I have focused on institutional resources.
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Reporters Without Borders - Internet RSF (as its known in French) was the first press freedom group to pay attention to the non-journalist, non-activist bloggers who were increasingly getting into legal trouble for speaking online. They're probably currently the best source on online threats internationally, with a lot of in-country intel.
Global Voices - Advocacy GVO leverages an international group of native respondents to cover issues of importance to the non-English speaking blogosphere (are we still using that term?). The leverage that group in turn to keep track of bloggers, and other users of social media, who have fallen afoul of the law.
Electronic Frontier Foundation This U.S. group is focused on the legal element of electronic speech. They are not just reporters and analysts. Their active cadre of lawyers are frequently actors in lawsuits to keep in the Internet open.
OpenNetInitiative Famous for their studies of filtering mechanisms and technology use in countries around the world, the ONI blog keeps intelligent track of news and trends in free speech.
MLRC: Legal Actions Against Bloggers Focusing on the U.S. legal landscape, the Media Law Resource Center's blog details "legal cases . . . in which bloggers have been sued for libel, privacy and related claims, or been subject to criminal investigations or prosecutions."
Net Effect Foreign Policy magazine's online speech blog, Net Effect is written by Evgeny Morozov, as wrong and dumb as he is right and smart (and he's right and smart a lot). Morozov has a distinctive point of view on events and trends online, one powered by more of a geopolitical context than most resources. Whether your agree with him (you won't) or disagree (you won't), there's usually something to think about, and sometimes news. He doesn't post as often as he should.
Wired - Online Rights Wired.com's listing of stories on electronic communications freedoms and threats to them come from across the magazine's contents. Some stories have exceptional analysis by thinkers in the middle of the stories.
Committee to Protect Journalists - Alerts The Committee to Protect Journalists was very late to the table in covering online issues, but their long experience dealing with threatened journalists and the contacts they have partially make up for it. A particularly good resource for overall free speech context in a region.
Freedom House - Newsroom Also good for overall context, Freedom House also produces intelligent reports on issues including online free speech trends.
These are the institutional resources I find myself using the most. In the future I may list the personal blogs I use the most, as well as the Twitter accounts from which I get the most useful information. In the meantime, how do you stay informed on free speech issues that affect you online?
Discuss"It's going to come true like you knew it, but it's not going to feel like you think."
Google has unveiled the latest addition to Google Labs, its text autocompletion tool Google Scribe. Scribe takes a look at the text you've already entered and tries to predict the next word or phrase, offering a drop down list of suggestions for you to chose from.
The most obvious application for Google Scribe is as a keystroke saver for Google's mobile platform, Android, and as an Internet-wide form of Google Suggest, the tool that suggests search terms as you type. In the meantime, it will likely offer up some entertainment and a bit of procrastination.
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The first thing we tried, after seeing if Scribe could tell us exactly how many sheets to the wind a drunk person might be, was to see what the tool suggested if we let it get behind the wheel. We started hitting "space" and then "enter" and wound up with this:
Another user noted in the reviews on Google Labs that they had found a similar phenomenon, wherein "If you let it autocomplete everything but the first word it ends up looping on itself, but not before running into 'Ima let you finish but Beyonce had one of the best...'".
Google-centric blog Google Operating System noted similar instances, which it explains comes from Google using "data extracted from web pages". It offers the example of "choose IngentaConnect" as a suggestion for after typing the word "why", which is offered because that phrase is used repeatedly on IngentaConnect's site.
For now, the tool is only available in English, though the presence of a language drop-down box strongly suggests others will soon be available. Users can also chose between constant word and phrase suggestions or having suggestions appear only when they hit the "tab" key.
A bookmarklet is also available, which shows which text fields on any page will allow Scribe to provide suggestions, meaning suggestions similar to those you would get in Google Search can now be offered up across the Web. In terms of functionality off the mobile platform, this might be the biggest - the power of Google Suggest anywhere you like. Perhaps this will be a feature we soon see added to Google Chrome? We'll see.
The real advantage, we think, will be to Google's mobile users, who don't have access to a full keyboard, but rather a touch screen. It could also be a big hit on Google TV, which will allow users to use their Android phones as controls.
Macworld.com - On Tuesday Apple issued minor updates to its Safari Web browser with “improvements to compatibility and security”: Safari 5.0.2 for Leopard and Snow Leopard (OS X 10.5.8 or later) or Windows (XP, Vista, and 7) and Safari 4.1.2 for Tiger (OS X 10.4.11).
Apple has released several maintenance updates for Safari and iWeb. Safari 5.0.2 brings improvements to security and compatibility. The latest version fixes an bug that had prevented users from submitting web forms in certain circumstances, while a Google Images issue with Flash 10.1 has also been resolved....
Facebook has taken a dramatic step, to cut down on spam (as far as we can tell): they’ve turned off the automatic linking of URLs within feed story comments. It’s a significant step as the company has spent the past month vigorously battling a large attack from spammers and hackers who have been attempting to prey unsuspecting users. While we’d assume that this is a temporary change as Facebook looks to cut down on the current rise in spam, it’s clearly underlies how big of a problem spam has become for Facebook.
We’ve reached out to Facebook for a comment on the issue, however we think it’s pretty obvious why Facebook would take such a step. After yesterday’s massive breach which resulted in the widespread distribution of a survey worm, Facebook is taking all precautions to stop spammers from attacking the site.
While there’s no doubt that the battle between Facebook and spammers will continue to rage on for some period of time, Facebook knows how critical blocking spam is for ensuring that the company doesn’t damage its reputation. It watched MySpace essentially collapse from an onslaught of spam, and while it’s now many times larger than MySpace, they want to do everything possible to prevent a similar experience from taking place again.
We’re still waiting on a confirmation from Facebook that spam was the reason for turning off comment links. Have you noticed this happening on your profile as well?
AP - Mayor Richard M. Daley, who wielded more control over Chicago than anyone but his father decades before, said Tuesday he will not seek re-election, a surprising end — at least for now — of a dynasty whose surname became synonymous with the city's legendary political machine.
We’ve seen a lot of TVs announced before and during IFA this year. That makes sense — it’s a consumer electronics show, after all. And I guarantee that most if not all of those sets will have their 3D capability touted. It’s a dangerous move, since so many consumers are wary of 3D — not enough content, bulky glasses, headaches, and so on. So there’s been some grumbling: why are they including 3D on TVs when nobody wants it?
It’s really pretty simple: adding 3D capability to a TV is trivial. It’s a freebie feature they get to charge for.
