Editing Wikipedia

Thanks to for TechDirt for pointing to the new Wikipedia scanner service by Virgil Griffith. It lists anonymous Wikipedia edits from interesting organizations.

Wired is maintaining a running tally of the most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs. One might have expected such efforts from Scientology, and both national political parties, but ... employees of the New York Times? Disney? MySpace? Diebold? Microsoft AND its PR firm, Waggener Edstrom? the National Security Agency?

Another Inconvenient Truth

The following online discussion and debate is an example of the power of the web to bring both wide public participation and deep expertise to bear on the detailed mathematics involved in research and simulation, the public policy debates that rest on that work, and collaborative contributions by widely dispersed individuals.

According to Wikipedia, Stephen McIntyre found an error in the surface temperature record kept by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). GISS has acknowledged the error and incorporated a correction in their data set. The error affects the surface temperature record from 2000 through 2007. The US Annual Mean Temperature Chart from GISS, last modified on 2007-08-07, is below.



McIntyre is the primary author at the blog, CimateAudit, which is said to be under a denial of service attack at this writing. His most recent comments, as a guest blogger, are available here.

Thanks to Daily Tech for a pointer to this online discussion, and to Anthony Watt's Watt's Up with That? blog for a historical summary and annual charts from the revised data. The mission of Watt's newest online endeavor, SurfaceStations, is the creation of a publicly available photographic database of weather stations and weather station metadata through collaboration.

Startup Reviews

Sponsored by Sierra Ventures, Startup Review profiles interesting new tech companies. The Startup Review index includes 30 of the most important new companies. Their Reddit review from April is a good example.

Launched early this year, Killer Startups provides quite different startup reviews, daily coverage of unusual new companies like the free publishing site Lulu, and the search engine for obscure sites, TagTooga. Their nomination form requires registration, but makes it easy to propose a startup for review.
We [Killer Startups] deeply believe in the power of crowds, and we want to put it to good use by detecting in an early stage what’s going to be big.

Converging on Amateurs

Some interesting crosscurrents in journalism and publishing, displayed neatly in two recent articles. One from Demo highlights Blurb.com, which does on-demand print publishing, and has a nice little bookstore from which to sell these print books to other customers on the web. Their newest feature makes it easy to move Flickr content into print. Mark Bowden writes on Publishing2 about newspapers struggling to move beyond "filming a play" to collaborative work with citizen journalists and online multimedia presentations while their businesses can still support a staff to learn it.

This is a good time to revisit William Buckeley's 2006 WSJ article, "The Internet Allows Customers to Trim Wasteful Purchases"

When customers find a way to avoid buying the excess baggage, they change quickly.

UPDATE: The recent Tools of Change for Publishing conference is summarized here.

Threadless Interview

Guy Kawasaki's interview with Jeffrey Kalmikoff, who describes Threadlless as "an ongoing, online tee shirt design competition."

On asked whether the Threadless participation in forums and podcasting increase sales or are they just fun/cool things to do, Kalmikoff said

Participating in the forums, definitely helps to people understand that the owners and employees of the company really are part of the community and don’t sit up on high looking down onto our business. Most everyone who works for us was part of the Threadless community before they were employed, so it’s a pretty natural thing. The podcast—who knows—but it’s really fun!

BGN reviewed Threadless last November, as an early example of successful crowd-sourced manufacturing.

reCaptcha Barnraising

Word puzzles known as CAPTCHAs (completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart) will become part of the effort to digitize texts. The project, named reCAPTCHA, is one of many projects that enlist the wisdom of the crowd to organize and evaluate information.

Luis von Ahn, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, helped develop the CAPTCHAs about seven years ago. He says that optical character recognition doesn't always work on text that is older, faded or distorted. The only way to digitize those is to type them into a computer manually. Von Ahn is working with the Internet Archive, which runs several book-scanning projects, to use CAPTCHAs for this instead.

It's definitely a barn-raising to try to build the great library," said Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive. Snippets from CNN Tech News and Tech Shout.