sj's Longest Now [v.1]

The first Boston Wiki Wednesday was a success, though it got started at
11pm rather than 6. Of the 5 people who had RSVP’ed, some had other
plans in the early evening, so we rescheduled…  Ivan and I
grabbed dinner at Nine Tastes
instead.  We were soon joined by Dustin, Erik, and her
Starkness.  They knew the beautiful people sitting next to us,
naturally. We covered speed reading and salsa preferences.

Later that night, we invited the Harvard Free Culture club to come join us at John Harvard’s; and talked about the Penn State wiki, wysiwyg dominance
of the editing world, why all the wiki software companies are on the
wrong coast, rewriting MediaWiki in Python, and the meaning of the
phrase “structured multilingual API”.  A moderate quantity of beer
and coke was consumed, theoretically putting SocialText out twenty-one
bucks.

Next Wednesday will be Wiki as well, when David Weinberger sounds off about trust, anonymity, and wiki editorial practices, at 6pm at Berkman.  Come join us.

Tomorrow I will be hosting the first Boston Wiki Wednesday at the Grafton Street pub & grille at 6pm.  These gatherings will generally take place the first Wednesday of each month; thanks to Socialtext for the idea and for the first round of drinks 🙂 

(Socialtext is also the drive behind the best implementation of WYSIWYG wiki editing I’ve seen to date, free or not; try it out to see what I mean.  Now if only we could get something similar for in-place image editing…)

This is not a replacement for our bimonthly Wikipedia meetings; we’ll talk more about projects and internships and new wiki ventures.  Come out and say hi, or bring ideas to share.  RSVP on-wiki.

The original English Wikipedia turns 1 million this week.  Kudos to KG, who won the millionth-article pool… the two-millionth pool is now closed, but you can still place (gentleman’s) bets on when the eleventy-billionth article will be written.  (Full disclosure: My money’s on 2021.)

New traffic data from Hitwise (.doc)
suggests that by their standards, Wikipedia is also in the top 20 orgs
with popular websites; though some, such as Yahoo, MSN, Google and
Myspace, have more than one site ahead of it.  Thanks to Hitwise  for sharing their results for the millionth article press release.

I hope that some of these leisure sites will start to integrate more
useful content with their portals, and not remain paeans to the id; it
is heartwarming to see useful content providers (such as pure search
engines, and news portals) near the tops of the list. 

Wikipedia fields 11% of education-related traffic, and 0.17%
of all traffic they measured, with Answers.com getting 1/3 of
that.  I asked for details on their methodology and sample size;
they claim 25 million users, but I don’t know their distribution,
geographically or otherwise.  They also show a pretty flat age
distribution from 18 through 44, and an even split along gender lines.

It’s a bit late, but oh so sweet. 

I found an Easter Egg in RL last month, near the Harvard Sq T-zone in Cambridge.  Go all the way down the stairs, stand 5 feet to the left of the last change machine, and look up.  There was a fully-inflated Valentine’s Day balloon stuck to the ceiling next to one of the lights.  It remained there for well over a month…

Kudos to the Simmons grad school of library and information science, who are taking the modern connotations of their full name seriously.  They have started a group blog for the school, and are thinking of a school-wide wiki…

I still find the notion of ‘librarianship’ and of libraries themeslves an unappreciated anachronism in our world culture; even among professional librarians.  People who spend their lives gathering hundreds of thousands of volumes in order to allow those in the target audience who can gain physical access to them to read them for free, rarely fail to look askance at the idea that they might provide searchable databases of public information; even a database of book citation information.  The OCLC still haven’t quite decided to do such a thing, despite their meta-collaborative nature [above and beyond the implicit collaborative nature of all library work].

Kudos to the Simmons grad school of library and information science, who are taking the modern connotations of their full name seriously.  They have started a group blog for the school, and are thinking of a school-wide wiki…

I still find the notion of ‘librarianship’ and of libraries themeslves an unappreciated anachronism in our world culture; even among professional librarians.  People who spend their lives gathering hundreds of thousands of volumes in order to allow those in the target audience who can gain physical access to them to read them for free, often look askance at the idea that they might provide searchable databases of public information; even a database of book citation information.  The OCLC haven’t quite decided to do such a thing yet, despite their meta-collaborative nature [above and beyond the implicit collaborative nature of all library work].

Nevertheless, the persistence of the idea of providing free access to physical materials goes to show the power of custom and professional culture…

So I landed on a random “brushes with celebrity” page while stalking my favorite American actress, and found this charming vignette about our Prez– :

In the fall of 2004, right before his bypass surgery I was sitting around the parking lot of Central Park’s ‘Tavern on the Green’, and out walks this handsome looking guy with white hair and a suit, casually leaving the place like he was Joe Schmo.

I looked at this guy long and hard and realised that it was Bill Clinton.

Apparently, so did dozens of other people. Someone (who was apparently a Republican) heckled him about raising taxes. Now, normally when a former president encounters a loser like this, he smiles waves and gets whisked away in his limousine.

But, Bill Clinton started debating him! The secret service guys were going nuts as an entire crowd of blue-staters formed to watch the former president and this dude with a stroller arguing over economic policies.

Then he took questions from the normal people off the street that gathered around him. NYC parks officials were called down to patrol the scene. He also took pictures with tourists, mostly young and female.

Bob Zmuda, Eat your heart out.

So I landed on a random “brushes with celebrity” page while stalking my favorite American actress, and found this charming vignette about our Prez– :

In the fall of 2004, right before his bypass surgery I was sitting around the parking lot of Central Park’s ‘Tavern on the Green’, and out walks this handsome looking guy with white hair and a suit, casually leaving the place like he was Joe Schmo.

I looked at this guy long and hard and realised that it was Bill Clinton.

Apparently, so did dozens of other people. Someone (who was apparently a Republican) heckled him about raising taxes. Now, normally when a former president encounters a loser like this, he smiles waves and gets whisked away in his limousine.

But, Bill Clinton started debating him! The secret service guys were going nuts as an entire crowd of blue-staters formed to watch the former president and this dude with a stroller arguing over economic policies.

Then he took questions from the normal people off the street that gathered around him. NYC parks officials were called down to patrol the scene. He also took pictures with tourists, mostly young and female.