Opensource Economics is still new for many people. Here, Law professor Yochai Benkler explains what it is and how it is shaping the human society.
Few people have asked me about a reliable hosted wiki platform. I thought I will put my thoughts in the form of a post in this blog. Before I discuss about hosted wiki platforms, I want to make sure that I convey my bias towards Mediawiki as the Wiki platform. In my opinion, it is the most powerful of all the wiki platforms. However, Mediawiki has a reasonably steep learning curve and I cannot recommend it to newbies. Also, Wikimedia foundation, the home of Mediawiki, doesn’t offer a hosted version of MediaWiki. Many people prefer to have a hosted version instead of going through a geeky installation process. There are many third party MediaWiki hosts but they are not from the original developers and hence people’s (especially business community’s) reluctance to go with them.
In recent times, I was playing around with many hosted Wiki sites like Wikidot, Wik.is, Pbwiki and Wikispaces. All of them have features that will help you get your Wiki running without any problems. Compared to MediaWiki, these hosted Wiki platforms are much more “user friendly”, making it a cake walk even for newbies. In fact, you can do a comparison of various Wiki platforms in the Wikimatrix website. Frequently, I come across questions about the best hosted wiki platform from my company’s clients, my friends and my social networking contacts. I often refer them to sites like Wikidot.com or Wik.is. In fact, I use Wikidot.com for a couple of projects and Wik.is for the third project. Both these Wiki platforms are extremely good and they are very user friendly, with good “mashup support”. Deki Wiki, the wiki that powers Wik.is, is very well integrated with the web services from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live. Both Wikidot.com and Wik.is can solve your Wiki needs without any difficulty for the users. My support for these two Wiki platforms doesn’t mean that Pbwiki and Wikispaces are a bad choice.
I will explain why I selected Wikidot.com and Wik.is over Pbwiki.com and Wikispaces.com here. When I consider the options for a hosted wiki, whether it is for personal purposes or business purposes, I have to take into account the long term stability of the platform. Some of the hosted Wiki sites have very good financial backing and these companies might be there for a long haul. However, this is not the case with every company that offers Wiki as the hosted platform. Sometimes, it is difficult to ascertain the stability of a company on which we are going to trust our personal or business data. There is always the danger of the hosted Wiki company shutting its doors and vanishing in thin air. How can we foolproof our personal wiki or business wiki against such eventualities? There are two ways in which we can achieve this stability. One approach is to ensure that your Wiki company offers you a way to export all your data in open formats. Now a days, many Wiki companies allow this export of data. We can then take the data to another hosted wiki company and get it imported. The second approach is to find a hosted wiki company that also offers the Wiki platform in one of the open source licenses. Suppose if the wiki company goes out of business, you will still have the application available to install in your own servers or in the computing cloud. You are completely safe even if the company that hosted your wiki is out of business. Since the wiki is released under open source license, there will still be developers working on the Wiki development. This offers you continuity with your wiki platform and your investment, both financial and time, is completely protected.
I prefer the second approach over the first and this forms the basis for my recommendation of Wikidot.com and Wik.is. You get a long term stability with your wiki platform irrespective of what happens to the company behind the wiki. I consider this to be very crucial in everyone’s wiki strategy.
Do you have a favorite hosted Wiki platform? Do you have an underlying reason to choose the platform. Feel free to share your experience here.
This is the first post in the Facebook-Scoble Fiasco Series. I want to use this incident to raise the awareness of the users of social networks. This incident brought into focus many claims and counterclaims. Some of them are valid and the rest are plain bullshit. I hope this series helps people make a distinction between what is correct and what is incorrect. This post is not about whether Scoble is right or wrong. It is about things we should be worried before jumping into the social networking bandwagon.
The most important aspect is the data ownership. There are many people who are pounding on this topic ever since the word social networks became part of the tech vocabulary. We upload quite a bit of our data into the social networking services, in the form of personal information, social graph (if thatz the term people want to use), audio, videos, photos, etc. Now the question of ownership of such data comes into picture. I upload my information into facebook. I spend quite a lot of time adding friends into my facebook account and interact with them. They are all fruits of my labor. Facebook just offers me a platform to network with my friends and they make money in the form of advertisement directed towards me and my friends. The more friends I bring to facebook the more value is added to their service (Network Effect). The role of facebook (or any other social networking site for that matter) ends at this stage. The only other role I could visualize for them is to ensure that no law is broken inside their platform. Everything else is at my discretion and responsibility. I decide who becomes my friend and I decide who can see what information about me. Facebook plays no role in this decision except offering granular privacy feature in their platform. Facebook doesn’t tell me that I can only be friends with X or Y. They also don’t tell me what I can show to A or B or C. Every other action of mine inside the facebook platform is done at my discretion, without the influence of facebook. The data generated by my actions are my own data and no one else can claim ownership to this data. Facebook or any other social networking service cannot tell me that I cannot take this data, which was generated by me, to any other service. I can quote a real world analogy here. Suppose if you go to a bar regularly and socialize and let us say you have aggregated a group of people who eventually turn into your friends. Letz say you are bored with the bar you frequent or you had a bad experience with that bar. You now want to move to a new bar. You want to invite your friends to come over to the new bar. Now, if the manager of the old bar says that you cannot take your friends to the new bar and if he argues that you can’t even remember the name or phone number or any other personal information of your friends, outside his bar, would you agree with the manager of the old bar? Don’t you think it is highly ridiculous? Don’t you think your relationship with your friends in the old bar is your personal matter and the old bar is just a place where you socialized with them? If you said no to the first question and yes to the next two questions, you are well aware of what is right and what is wrong. All you have to do is to apply the same kinda thinking to facebook or other social networking systems. Like the old bar, facebook is just a place where you meet with your friends. Like how you have every right to take your friends to a new bar and how you can remember the information about your friends outside of your old bar, you should be able to take your friends to any social networking service you want and you should be able to carry the information about your friends to any social networking sites you want because it is you who own your information and your friend’s information. Facebook or any other social networking service has no right to take ownership of your data. Every social networking user should be able to understand the ownership of the data they generate inside the social networking service and make claims their data when some service tries to hold the data to a ransom. Even though I have used facebook in my discussion above, it applies to all the social networking services. If at all anyone can ever stop you from taking friend’s information, it should be that friend in question and not the social networking service. It is very important that the users of social networking services have a clear understanding about the ownership of data. The users of social networking sites only allow the sites to mine their data and build a business model out of it either using advertising or any other approach. They don’t transfer the ownership of data to the social networking site. It is like renting out your house to someone to live. The tenant cannot take ownership of the house. In the Libertarian speak (disclaimer: I am not a Libertarian and I am just borrowing the term from them), data ownership is similar to property ownership. Understanding this is very crucial to long term security of your identity and data. Imagine if Microsoft told you that every document you create with Microsoft word is theirs, would you accept it? (well, in a way, they tried to tell that but lost it). It is the same case with your data in social networks. Please think carefully about this issue before you jump inside any social network.
In my next article in the series, I am going to talk about another misunderstood topic, your addressbook. The tentative title of the next post is “Do you own your addressbook?”.
I am going to write a series on Facebook-Scoble fiasco. Scoble has an issue with facebook on a personal level (his account got disabled and he was on the verge of losing all his social data) but I have an issue on a more philosophical level. There are so many misconceptions about the issue and I have tried to convince people of their misconceptions on twitter and also on some blogs. I thought I will take each and every point offered in support of facebook and discuss it here. I will try my best to publish my first post by tonite. If not, I assure you that it will be up tomorrow. In a way, I am upset about Robert Scoble losing his account but this is much more than one person getting kicked by some company. It is more about a philosophy and this is an opportunity for me to create an awareness about a fundamental right of each and every user in this world. I will be back soon with my first post.
During Scoble’s early days of facebook evangelism, I voiced my concern about data being locked up inside the walled gardens of facebook (in one of his kyte.tv sessions). At that time, he said he doesn’t care about getting struck inside a walled garden. I wanted to argue with him about the consequences of such a thinking but didn’t do it for some reason. Later, probably due to the influence of people like Marc Canter, he started embracing the notion of open standards. He even signed the Bill of Rights for Social Networks. I wrote about Scoble’s change of heart in a positive direction sometime during Sept. 2007. Today, his facebook account is disabled because he tried to take his own data with him. I am pretty sure he has fully understood why I tried to convince him long back about data portability. I am sure he has understood how dangerous it is to put the data behind a walled garden. Now, I am calling on him to become the champion of data portability in social networks. He has a huge following and he can use his position to create an awareness about the dangers of having your data behind walled gardens and the importance of data portability. If he takes up this call, he can get back at facebook, by forcing them to change their ways because of pressure from the users (remember beacon?) and he will also get a satisfaction that he played a role in creating a civilized world where users are empowered rather than greedy companies. Will you be the champion for openness, Robert?
Today Google announced their new project, Google Knol. Their idea is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. My first take on Google Knol is
If it is done correctly, it might kick the butt of Mahalo and if it is done wrong, it will add splog kinda pages messing up the search results
Before we I explain my reasoning, let us take a look at the two other competing projects, Wikipedia and Mahalo. In the case of Wikipedia, the collective wisdom of crowds are used to develop “authoritative” pages on different topics. Mahalo tries to become a “better” search engine by using a small group of paid employees and tipped “volunteers” to write search result pages which can be considered as “authoritative” collection of information on certain topics. Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, is planning to develop a search engine which will also put the “wisdom of crowds” to good use. I am pretty convinced that Mahalo cannot be a Google beater. Only an algorithmic search engine can solve the world’s search problems. I still stand by it. Mahalo kinda products can only add a layer of filtering to algorithmic engines. They cannot replace them. I am not sure what Jimmy Wales is going to do with his project but I am pretty convinced that it can only succeed if there is an algorithmic engine at the center with the “wisdom of crowds” offering a filtering layer. I have listed down my reasons to justify these arguments already, in the post criticizing punditry about Mahalo overthrowing Google. Also, if Jimmy Wales’ project takes off and gets a following like Wikipedia, then their filtering of algorithmic search results will be far superior than Mahalo’s results because of the sheer number of volunteers lending their “brain’s processing power” for Wales’ project.
Letz get back to the discussion about Google Knol. The knols on different topics are meant to be the first thing someone who searches for a topic for the first time will want to read. Now, Wikipedia plays this role in Google searches. Google is expecting their knols to replace Wikipedia in the search results. This has started a discussion in the blogosphere about the demise of Wikipedia. Any such talk is premature. The big differentiator between Wikipedia articles and Knol is that Wikipedia has one (well, in most cases) article on a single topic which is edited and tweaked by the “wisdom of crowds” whereas Knol gives an option for anyone and everyone to write a separate article on any particular topic. For example, a topic like evolution could have thousands of articles offering two entirely opposing views, thereby confusing the readers. There is no “collective” wisdom to weed out the nonsense from sense. Thus Google’s Knol project lacks the “authoritativeness” of Wikipedia. This requires Google to come up with another algorithm that can rank the Knols on the same topic based on rating, comments, etc. Such a system is also a good breeding ground for another SEO like cottage industry. This is where my statements about “Google doing right or wrong in Knol” assumes significance. We have to wait for this project to become mainstream before we can know if it is going to work or not. Google has a very difficult job of bringing in “authoritativeness” in these Knols, in a totally unbiased manner. It is not an easy task. There are way too many topics where it will be difficult to establish the “authoritativeness”, when there are hundreds or thousands of articles on the same topic. It is easily done in the case of Wikipedia where the wisdom of crowds is applied to a single article. However, if Google manage to get it right, they are going to have a pretty neat system that will augment well for their search results. If Google has “good” search results as a result of Knols, Mahalo loses the meaning of its existence, unless they shift gears to offer something else along with their search results. If Google messes up, Jason Calacanis’ criticism of increased spam in Google search results will get amplified. We have to reserve our judgment on Google Knol till it used in a widespread manner and becomes part of mainstream search experience. But we can be sure that it is definitely not a Wikipedia killer.
For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating “user-generated” content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.
Chris Brogan is an advocate of using social media to build brands. He is planning to write a series of 100 posts to help people understand how they can leverage social media to their advantage. He is a great writer and a good person. If you are interested in social media and wondering what it can do for you, I suggest that you head over to his blog and follow the series of posts.
Starting today, I will dedicate my next 100 posts to a specific mission: helping you grow the value of your social media and social networking efforts. I will post specific strategies, tactics, tips, and resources to help you develop your skills and abilities in these areas, particularly insofar as these might help you develop your personal brand, build business for yourself or your organization, or otherwise perhaps be helpful to what interests you.
There was a call for “The great Twitterout” on facebook. I thought I will take up the challenge and keep myself off from the social media. Well, I am not exactly doing a 100% social media blackout. I am still using blogs (which will show up in my facebook profile and twitter). I am using Google feed reader (and also sharing through the Google Reader, which also shows up in my facebook profile). I cannot avoid the ultimate social networking utility that goes by the name of email on a working day. Essentially, I am using some of the social utilities or apps with social on it. There is no way I can cut myself off 100% from the social media.
In this experiment, I am keeping myself off from Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, Jaiku, Seesmic, Mogulus and Kyte.tv. The idea is to see how efficient I am when I keep myself off from these apps and also to see if it is an addiction. When I work on my computer, I usually take some short breaks every now and then, and the first place I visit on the web happens to be facebook or one of the other social networking sites. Also, my twitter app on the browser status bar always keeps popping up with messages from my “friends” and I tend to click on any interesting link, whenever I am not in the middle of an important work. At times, I log into my social networking sites involuntarily and I hope this experiment will help me understand if it is some sort of an addiction or just practice. It has been two hours since I started the “social media blackout” experiment. So far, I could resist my temptations. I will have to wait and see if I can successfully stay away till midnight. I will update this post after my experiment is over.
PS: I want to state that I had participated in a “Google blackout” experiment several months back, when ReadWriteWeb had put up a challenge. I failed in that experiment as I couldn’t avoid Google from my life even for a single day. I just hope I am able to stay out of social media for a day.
Update: I have successfully managed to stay away from Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, kinda social sites for the whole 24 hours. This experience helped me realize how much time I spend on these sites and I can now optimize the workflow to be more efficient.
