A branch of the project is devoted to children’s books, WikiJunior, where you’ll find books about things like the solar system, big cats and the Kings and Queens of England. There are also things like A-level and GCSE textbooks, lots of computer science stuff and hundred of others. The community votes on which new books to develop, though looking at the history of many pages, a lot of the books are the creation of one enthusiast with corrections and additions from others. Wikibooks appears to be a considerably more sedate and good-natured bunch than the wikipedia crowd, with little evidence of the edit-wars, vandalism and obsessive nitpicking that characterises some of the more controversial wikipedia items. Perhaps this is because the project is less well-known, with a smaller community. Perhaps it’s because books are typically big things that require a lot of work and so command some respect.

The aims of the project, like wikipedia, are to democratise and spread knowledge and information. Traditional publishers, say the organisers, fail to recognise merit because their business models rely on creating best-sellers and so they’re risk-averse:

Traditional publishing houses make the bulk of their income from re-issues of classic books, new books by authors with long track records, or celebrities who are famous in their own right. The chances of a truly good new work being published solely on the basis of merit skyrocket when you overturn the traditional business model and tap the wellspring of new talent out there using the ‘net.

With this project we have reached a crossroad between the books of yesterday, and the encyclopedia of everything for tomorrow. Simply by reading this book and telling your friends, you have advanced the cause of free access to information and of democratizing the field of publishing.

There are issues, of course. I read through the PDF version of Big Cats, which is deemed complete, available in print-format and on its way to a second edition. The information it contains appears to be accurate, well-researched and carefully written to suit a young audience. Unfortunately, though, it was a bit odd. There’s lots of half-finished edits, changes in tone and register and the layout is pretty basic. Ultimately, I wouldn’t buy it.

So what does that mean? If one of the most highly developed books available is still not good enough, is the project a failure? This is the sort of charge that’s levelled at Wikipedia: it contains incorrect information, so it’s no good.

That’s not really the right way to look at wiki projects, though. The point of wikis, in my view, is that they are always works in progress. That’s their strength and their weakness. Unlike print editions, new information can be added at any time. When Pluto ceased to be classified as a planet, thousands of books were suddenly out-of-date; Wikipedia was immediately up-to-date.

This philosophy intersects strangely with the idea of books, though. The idea of a book has connotations of completeness, correctness and authority. (Correct in the sense that we don’t expect spelling mistakes, etc.) The idea of an unfinished book is paradoxical — if it’s not complete, then in some senses it’s not yet a book.

What you’re looking at when you read pretty much any wiki project is not something analagous to anything produced on a printing press. It is a palimpsest. The Romans wrote on wax tablets that could be re-used. Medieval monks wrote on vellum, a form of calf leather. If they needed new paper or made a mistake, they could peel off the current layer and write on it again. Modern scholars use ultraviolet and multispectral imaging to try to decipher the history of the page. Wikis lay this process bare. The ghosts of previous versions, previous authors, can be seen in the crookedness of the edits; its history page provides an X-Ray of its genesis. Portents of its future are on the discussion pages: some of these prophecies will come to pass while others will be forgotten.

WikiBooks might thus be viewed as the ultimate in post-modern writing. Derrida and Barthes talked about books having a ‘magic tablet’ quality. That there were other meanings and expressions hiding beneath the surface:

The Palimpsest introduces the idea of erasure as part of a layering process. There can be a fluid relationship between these layers. Texts and erasures are superimposed to bring about other texts or erasures. A new erasure creates text; a new text creates erasure.

The “oddness” of Wikibooks is only apparent in the print and PDF versions. To publish them in these formats runs directly against the nature of its progenitor. Wiki pages are liquid; they exist at this moment in time, and they are always moving through time as edits and changes accrete continually. When those moments are frozen, captured into a snapshot, it’s like taking a still from a film. We know that the future and past of that picture already exists, but we can only guess at it.

(found through Derek Wenmoth’s fab education blog)

1) Social Media or, “How I learned to stop worrying and love communication” by Australian PRs Trevor Cook and Lee Hopkins. A good, introductory guide to Web 2.0, blogs and social media with useful tips on getting started with blogging and podcasting. It’s only 30 pages so is ideal for students and the very busy.

2) What is Social Media? by former posh UK PR and now Search Engine Marketing guru Antony Mayfield, is also an introductory guide to the subject. In Antony’s words, “The book is a romp through a definition of social media, why it is important, and some of the main iterations (blogs, wikis, podcasts, content communities and social networks) and a bonus bit on Second Life.” Also nice and short.

3) The Cluetrain Manifesto by Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. First published in 1999, this is the book that started all this engagement and ‘markets as conversations’ palaver. It’s available as a hardback on Amazon, but students and the like will appreciate that the entire text is also available online.

4) The Long Tail by Chris Anderson seemed to be everywhere over the summer. Cheats who missed the opportunity to read it then may prefer to catch up by reading this free, super-condensed, 30-page version. There’s some repetition in the real thing, to be honest, so I’d recommend that you do.

5) From Command & Control To Engage & Encourage by NY PR consultancy Envision Solutions talks about why social media matters to companies and what they can do to take advantage of the opportunities it offers. It’s based around the healthcare industry, but is equally applicable to any other sector. (author: Fard Johnmar)

6) Web 2.0 Mindmap by development guru Ed Yourdon. Not a book, of course, but a Mind Map covering all the key concepts around this phenomenon with a wealth of links to resources across the internet. It’s updated fairly frequently so keep checking back for the latest version. I’m not really a mindmaps person, but I still find it very useful.

7) Blogs and Community by Seattle-based e-facilitation and e-community specialist Nancy White is a slightly more academic look at the phenomenon of blogs and social networks and the different kinds of communication models that they entail. That might sound a little scary, but it isn’t. And there’s a handy podcast of the paper available here.

8) We Media by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis (website here) is, as you might expect, about citizen journalism. In the authors’ words, “Historically, journalists have been charged with informing the democracy. But their future will depend not on only how well they inform but how well they encourage and enable conversations with citizens. That is the challenge.”

9) We-think by Charles Leadbetter is about “what the rise of the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations”. Published online, the idea is that readers’ comments become an integral part of the whole work.

10) New Influencers by Paul Gillin is to be published in dead-tree format next year. In the meantime, the author offers drafts of the whole thing in both HTML and MS Word format. It’s about the rise of blogs and blogging, what it means for businesses and how they can best engage with this new environment.

Any others you are aware of?

11) Thanks, Antony, for a reminder about Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. The introduction says “Production is shifting from physical products like blue jeans, to decentralized information goods, like articles on the Internet. This gives users more power (they can publish instead of just reading), creates more opportunities for democratic participation, lowers costs for developing countries, and democratizes the creation of our culture.” It should keep you busy a while longer once you’ve finished the others…

12) Since I have allowed one academic paper, I shouldn’t miss the collection of Papers and Talks published by Danah Boyd. The talk about G/localisation is especially recommended.

13) Thanks, Ed, for the good word about Knock, Knock by Seth Godin. Not social media or Web 2.0 as such. It’s about creating websites that actually work, so probably all of us want to read this one, whatever your interests. And also Who’s There?, a follow-up I haven’t read yet, but which Ed reckons is more Web 2.0ish. Two more: Everyone’s An Expert (about Squidoo) and Flipping the Funnel.

The result is the fledgling MoSex Index (NSFW), an attempt to combine the best of social content with “taste networking.”

“Our social content engine is similar to Digg or Reddit, where members can post content and others can rate it. Based on content thresholds, who is doing the rating, karma and reputation, links make it to the homepage,” Daniel [Gluck] says.

“But — and I think this is an extremely important aspect of the project — we’ve also incorporated a collaborative filtering element. On other sites, you rate or (don’t) rate; we have a degree of rating based on a 7-point Likert scale that adds weight to your like or dislike. We take that intelligence and form ‘taste profiles,’ which combine to form ‘taste networks.’ When people in your taste network find content they like, that content gets recommended to you.”

The MoSex Index is barely launched, and like any community-based project, its usefulness will depend on the quality and quantity of its membership. So far, the user group has been small, with 70 testers posting links and adding ratings.

“Even with the small group, we’re seeing semi-accurate predictions, on a broad scale, of what users might like,” Daniel says. “Just with our museum staff, we can see who is most similar to whom. That’s one of the aspects that’s been most interesting to the staff, seeing whose tastes match.“

Update: Realised I hadn’t commented on this — which seems a little smug/prudish/unsatisfactory/lazy in retrospect. What happens is, you do the test and finally get through to the filth index. Then you rate the links given on a 1–7 basis. That’s quite sophisticated compared to digg, etc. where it’s a simple thumbs up. Theoretically, given a large number of users and large amounts of content, it could result in a pretty complex and accurate analysis of your tastes.

Two problems though, as I see it. (a) Digg is already getting lots of spam posts from people desperate for traffic and I can’t help but think this problem will be even worse in this field; (b) I’m not so sure people are very good at analysing (or admitting to) what they like. I’ve just read Blink, and while Gladwell doesn’t cover porn, he does discuss speed-dating and our inability to describe the people we really fancy.

The idea is to draw “smart crowds — groups of people configured to share intelligence”into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren’t getting done now. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of volunteer users can find things out that the larger public needs to know. I think that’s most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadlines, and to set a consistent standard. Which is the ‘pro-am’ part.

Rosen has already thought through and answered a lot of the immediate objections that might spring to mind (interest groups manipulating stories, sponsors balking at ‘inconvenient truths’ & local stories, volunteers will be nutjobs with an agenda).

Clever stuff. But … there’s a cute parallel here with the ongoing debate about roles of experts and citizen contributors in the proposed Citizendium projects. In some respect, NewAssignment sounds like a Citizendium for news.

What I think the difficulties experienced at Wikipedia and those at digg.com show us is that collective intelligence and wise crowds sound great. Really, I am a believer. But that they are very difficult to orchestrate. One difficulty with news that doesn’t appear in mainstream papers is that it’s often very contentious. What will motivate the unpaid contributors to NewAssignment, if it isn’t their own nutty agendas? If the editors refuse to follow the promptings of the crowd, because they’re all nuts, what will happen then?

The examples Rosen gives of editor bloggers developing a huge following only partly help explain what will happen:

Part of it is the example now being set by liberal journalist and blogger Josh Marshall. His Talking Points Memo blog is invaluable if you follow national politics; he’s widely read on Capital Hill. During the 2004 campaign he raised money for a trip to New Hampshire to hear and question the candidates. He told readers why he wanted to go, what he thought he could accomplish.

The essential transaction I’m counting on is right there. Users fund an act of journalism because they have confidence — a lot– in who’s doing it and why; the chances of getting something really good back seem pretty good.

So the editor needs to be a maven. S/he develops a cult of personality around what they do, strong enough to win the trust and support of large numbers of readers. NewAssignment editors will also have financial backing from sponsors and so won’t need to pass the cup around their readers.

Instead, the readers suggest topics for investigation, and help provide data. Presumably, the editors then use their discretion to choose the non-nutty options. So this is a news site that might cover the plight of illegal torrent sites one day, dental amalgam the next and Panda Baiting the day after. And at the same time, despite flipping from subject to subject, the editor is developing a cult following.

No. That wouldn’t work. You’d have a number of sites. Each of them would only investigate subjects around one quite narrow area, an area the editor is already passionate and knowledgeable about. Probably with an established audience. S/he would get tips and ideas from readers which would decide the topics within the subject that get written about.… Err sounds quite a lot like a blog network, eh.

NB: there are a huge number of alternative news sites already in operation. If you’re like me, you’ve only ever heard of a handful. Why? Well, I expect you haven’t got time or you don’t find them trustworthy.

We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability–including the use of real names–is expected. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

While Wikipedia has come under continuous fire for its open editing policy, most notably, perhaps in Nick Carrs’s essay The Amorality of Web 2.0, this is quite shocking news. The extent to which it is greeted by existing Wikipedia contributors and editors remains to be seen, of course.

From the FAQ:

Are you attempting to shut Wikipedia down?

No. That makes up no part of our aim. We wish instead to leverage the fantastic resource that is Wikipedia and use it to create something better.

Aha! So you are trying to outdo Wikipedia, aren’t you?

Well, of course. Why else would we be proposing a fork?

If you’re not trying to shut Wikipedia down, then what relationship do you want with Wikipedia?

A mutually complementary one, in which we occupy different social niches, as it were. Those who want to work in a system committed to the maximum empowerment of amateurs should always be able to do so on Wikipedia. Those who, by contrast, want to work shoulder-to-shoulder in a bottom-up system with experts, in which the experts are able to settle content disputes, will soon have the option of doing so on the Citizendium. Furthermore, those who want the option of working anonymously and in a wild-and-woolly atmosphere in which rules are not necessarily enforced should always be able to do so on Wikipedia. Those who, by contrast, want to take personal, real-world responsibility for their efforts, and to work in a dynamic but rule-governed environment, will soon have the option of doing so on the Citizendium.

In 2003, for example, the Pentagon set up a prediction market for world events including terrorist activity, FutureMAP. It was rapidly closed down again when the press discovered this “People Betting on Terrorism Outrage!!!” However, as Time magazine reported last year, this wasn’t a clever move:

…the fact is, betting on terrorism actually makes sense. Consider the investigation just launched in Washington over an apparent leak at the Department of Homeland Security in which insiders seem to have tipped off relatives about an alleged threat to the New York City subway system. Outrageous behavior? Perhaps. But get those “insider traders” into a market, and everyone will have access to that information. Insiders have a motivation — money, at the basest level — to distribute their knowledge.

The Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX.com) uses pretend money to buy and sell the “stocks” of movies and stars. The predictions made by the exchange are so accurate that the company sells its valuations and opening weekend predictions to film production studios. Popex (now defunct) did the same for the fortunes of pop acts. The Iowa Electronic Market’s election predictions have outperformed major national polls, even months ahead of the election. The IEM’s predictions have been out by just 1.37% in presidential elections, 3.43% in other US elections, and 2.12% in foreign elections. This is despite the fact that members of the Exchange have mainly been men (viz. not women) from Iowa, and so not representative of the voting public.

So, interesting to hear about the launch of Inkling on Techcrunch. Basically, it’s a site for betting on future events in a stock-market simulation using pretend money, inkies. More innovatively, the service offers Enterprise and Small Business versions of the service. The idea is that businesses create stock exchanges within their companies to facilitate decision-making. Google, Eli-Lilly and Microsoft already use prediction markets internally for this purpose.

You might set up a market for example, on which of your four products are going to be best-sellers. You open that up to as many people as you like — arguably your whole company, or even your customer base. The market should involve real rewards for correct answers. This would be the best approach because you need people to care about the answers they give. Because you are getting varied, independent, self-interested perspectives, the answer given by the market is likely to reveal the truth.

This is better than a poll, because (a) it blends different answers to set a price for the likelihood of various alternatives and (b) it gives people a reason to use their best intelligence, intuition and insider knowledge because there’s a reward for them at the end for betting on what they really think will happen.

In a technology company for example, the sales people probably know your customers best, but the engineers know the real capabilities and limitations of the product. Marketing, on the other hand, has an idea on what people like and what attracts press coverage. The secretary may have a bit of insider knowledge. The cleaner may not know technology, but he knows what sounds good. Combine all those perspectives in the correct way and you end up with a far more complete picture than other methods are likely to achieve.

From the FAQ:

What is a Prediction Market?

Prediction markets allow a group of people to express an opinion over a period of time about the probability of an event occurring. A question is posed and people buy and sell shares in stocks representing possible answers to that question. The highest priced stock at the end of a period of time is the group’s prediction.

Prediction markets are not only useful at forecasting the future, they also provide invaluable insight in to the perception of a group of people, information that can be just as valuable as input to an upcoming decision or action as an accurate forecast.

Inkling is not the first prediction market, but we believe it sets the standard for ease of use and setup, thus capturing the true ethos of what prediction markets are all about: wide participation of a diverse group of people to collectively state an opinion.

Interesting news for digg:

As usual, the criticism is based on a misunderstanding of what the book actually says. It does not say that big groups of people make the best decisions. It says that they are likely to, under the correct conditions. The crowd needs to consist of people who are:

diverse
qualified
independent
self-interested

The interactions between the crowd needs to be carefully managed to avoid social factors distorting an individual’s best judgement. In addition, some problems — crossword puzzles, guess the weight of a prize bull, sports results, open-source software — are a lot more tractable to the approach than others — the most interesting news or the best pop album.

The old digg — which allowed bloc votes from groups of friends and pressure groups — fell down on more than one of these criteria. The book’s author, James Surowiecki, comments: “The thing that makes the wisdom of crowds work is lots of diverse opinions and independent judgments … Digg acknowledged it wanted more diversity of input.”

Personally, I think that at best digg can produce a front page that’s interesting to its typical user, which is fine. Similarly, the hit charts are only going to show what most people like, not necessarily what’s best for everyone. Problems like these involving qualitative judgements can only be solved when you have a crowd of people with similar tastes to you — which is why last.fm works for music recommendations and why a different news-voting community such as reddit or a CrispyNews group might be better for you.

Wikipedia is an interesting case and whatever problems it has aren’t going to be solved by tweaking an algorithm. I liked Jimmy Wales’ comment in the Wall Street Journal, though, that “…it is a misunderstanding to think of ‘openness’ as antithetical to quality. ‘Openness’ is going to be necessary in order to reach the highest levels of quality.”

Swartz decided to count the evidence in a different way. He counted the words added to articles, as opposed to changes for the sake of grammar, spelling and structure. From his analysis, it appears that, in fact, a large number of very different people contribute articles or major chunks of articles. Then, a much smaller number tinker with the story from then on.

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

This is the way it should be, of course. Experts in a subject are a lot more rare than people with general editorial skills. And this is, in some respects, how traditional encyclopaedias are written. The editorial board recruits experts to write articles which are then edited by the board.

Wikipedia stands this normal process on its head, of course. The original contributions come from anywhere, hopefully an expert, but there are no guarantees. Then the editors continually refine these contributions to meet acceptable standards. If Wikipedia were a more traditional business, and paid its editors, this would be deemed very inefficient. However, when you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people working for free, it works well enough.

Where the contributors vs editors ratio affects things more controversially is in decisions over the running of the site. To qualify to vote on decisions, you need to have racked up a substantial number of edits. But the people who have done this, dedicated and necessary as they are, may not necessarily have contributed many articles at all. They could feasibly have racked up thousands of edits eliminating uses of the oxford comma because they simply don’t like it. A voting caucus based around contributions as opposed to changes and deletions might look very different.

Swartz is running for election to the Wikipedia Foundation Board.

This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.

The digg thread reporting the post has already — after 11 hours — garnered 211 comments. The current top user P9 — submitter of 1344 stories and 1113 comments — has apparently decided to resign:

As a direct result of your blog this evening. I will no longer no supporting Digg going forward. I bequeath my measly number one position to whoever wants to reign.

I’ve written before about digg friendship groups, as have a large number of other people. After a certain point, it seems they did more harm than good. After becoming enormously popular very quickly, growth of the site had petered out. These changes seem designed to bring more people into digg and restore the perception that stories are promoted on their merits, rather than because of who submitted them.

Generally speaking, postmodernists deny the validity of claims to objectivity, the power of reason and what they call grand narratives. Grand Narratives are the stories we use to structure our lives. We also find the idea that the media creates our reality, that there’s no originality left, only copies of what there’s been before.

It’s a little bit flippant, but if that isn’t a description of much of the blogosphere, I don’t know what is. The idea that each of us can become a publisher. That every individual blogger’s thoughts have equal weight and validity. “We, the media”. And some postmodern ideas also seem an apt description of the continual annotation and comment on each other’s ideas — like this post. You might also think about things like digg and RSS — where the reader is also editor.

More seriously, Dr Byers notes that some parts of what we call Web 2.0 are better described as belonging to an alternative and very different ideology, collectivism. Collectivists can potentially believe lots of things, but we’re talking about the idea of an “emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity” (Merriam Webster). This would cover things like social bookmarking, networks and projects that depend on collective intelligence — be that a collection of people, machines or databases.

There’s a handy list:

Harnessing collective intelligence: collectivism
Data is the next Intel inside: collectivism
Meeting the needs of the long tail: postmodernism
Postcasting, narrowcasting: postmodernism
The perpetual beta: (arguably) postmodernism

Why does any of this matter? Who cares if it’s postmodern or not? In many ways it doesn’t matter. People will keep trying things — some will stick and some won’t. It only matters when we try to ask “what would be the web 2.0 approach to X?” Because it’s formed from two competing ideologies, you might end up with two very different, equally valid, answers. But that still doesn’t matter, you might say. Try them both and see which one works. That would be the postmodern answer, I guess. If you were a collectivist, we’d probably have a vote.