I’ve received a lot of feedback to my position on Wikipedia brought about by a recent Wall Street Journal article. The feedback has been productive. Its helped elucidate some of the key differences between Wikipedia and Britannica.
The foremost of these differences seems to be audience expectations.
There is one world, online, where people want to be part of the process of growing knowledge, of being heard and sharing. Knowledge in a particular area, for them, is something malleable and something they use to identify themselves with a community.
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The Wall Street Journal has a tense interview between the founder of Wikipedia and the editor the Encyclopedia Britannica. Raises tons of interesting questions. The biggest one is whether the Wikipedia approach offers readers a source of knowledge? Or is it, in Stephen Colbert’s term, a source of truthiness? Feels true, we’d like it to be true. But it isn’t.
For those who don’t know how Wikipedia works, it goes like this. Someone decides that there should be an entry on a particular topic, say project management software. Or, they decide there should be an entry on a particular piece of software. The author searches around and sees that other vendors of project management software have entries on their products, so why not this particular software.
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All work and no play makes a dull boy, so I need to let everyone know about this cool toy/tool to hit the market. The tool to look at is the I-Tech Virtual Laser Keyboard which can be found on my favorite toy site:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/8193/
This virtual keyboard uses a laser to paint a full size QWERTY keyboard on any surface. You can then use the virtual keyboard like any regular keyboard. No more pulling around a small foldable or tiny keyboard.
This is Star Wars level cool. Enjoy!
Search engines may be stifling the success of software companies. How? By assuming all searchers are the same.
In general, a software company writes for a target audience, its intended customer base. That audience may or may not be people who spend a lot of time on the internet or in the blogosphere. (For brevity, let’s call those who do spend a lot of time on the internet and blogosphere netizens.)
However, it seems that search engine rankings are determined, in large part, by the amount of presence a specific url has on the general internet and blogosphere. The more a particular software is talked about by netizens, on net-based outlets like blogs, websites and forums, the higher the likely ranking of that particular software on a search engine.
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Note: This is not a political entry, despite the subject of the article referenced below.
Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal makes an interesting comparison between the general blogosphere and public demonstrations in the 1960’s. He likens similar-minded, link-sharing, bloggers, in his phrase, blogospheric daisy chain’s, to events or happenings in the 1960’s. They are part protest, part public display and as he says “part rock concert, part street theater, the rush of being part of a morally unblemished belief system.”
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Scott Berkun has an interesting survey on his blog. He is researching innovation for a new book. I found his survery thought provoking . Hope he doesn’t mind me springboarding off it (for those interested in the original, check it out here.
To me, innovation is about solving a problem when existing solutions don’t cut it anymore. Underpinning this definition is a belief that there are very few “new” problems (if any), just obsolete solutions. Technical accomplishments and new research are like getting pieces of a puzzle to fit together how we want them to. We didn’t build the puzzle (nobody asked us how the laws of nature should work) but are trying to get new shapes or designs from it.
What drives innovation? Or, in other words, why wouldn’t an existing solution cut it anymore? I think dissatisfaction is at the core of innovation. Somebody or a group of people, isn’t happy with the ways things work. So they try to figure out another way to make things work. The exact way they solve the problem itself isn’t necessarily the innovation. The solution could be made up of existing methods, processes or technologies. But the innovation is in the application of those methods, the fact that it solves a problem and takes away the dissatisfaction.
