Flickr Commons

The Library of Congress Pilot Project

The Library of Congress has a Prints and Photographs Online Catalog comprised of over 1 million images (and growing) that have been available online for over 10 years.

Back in June of 2007, we began our first collaboration with a civic institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly-held photography collection.

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

You’re invited to help describe photographs in the Library of Congress’ collection on Flickr, by adding tags or leaving comments.*

*Any Flickr member is able to add tags or comment on these collections. If you’re a dork about it, shame on you. This is for the good of humanity, dude!!

I’m very excited about this and will be participating. Just look at all that good old-fashioned well-formed library data in each photo’s description…

However, I think there’s a missed opportunity here to leverage some of the extra power in having many people tag.

At Flickr’s sister site, del.icio.us, we’ve seen wonderful growth and understanding around how communities of users tag collectively. They’re not necessarily collaborating, which is why del.icio.us holds some special properties we do not see in the tagging at Flickr. However, I think Flickr should expose the identities/usernames along with the tags associated with a photo. Most photos are only tagged by the owner – it’s a safe assumption that this will continue to occur into the future. However, when the tagger is NOT the owner/uploader of the photo, this information is currently lost and not passed along in the Flickr interface.

Please, Flickr, expose the ‘who’ part of the tagging triumvirate (see last paragraph of Vander Wal’s definition). Especially now that we’ll have such rich data around our collective history.

This is still a strong belief the three tenets of a folksonomy: 1) tag; 2) object being tagged; and 3) identity, are core to disambiguation of tag terms and provide for a rich understanding of the object being tagged.

Another interesting note about this pilot – this is the first time we’ve seen a distinction of ‘no known copyright’:

Can anyone use “no known copyright restrictions?”
For the time being on Flickr this new usage is being contained to the Library of Congress account. If the pilot works – or, when it works! – we’ll look to allow other interested cultural institutions the opportunity to extend the application of “no known restrictions” to their catalogues.

Hooray, Library of Congress + Flickr!

However, this is not stopping the continued declaration of quality-over-quantity.

Some people might be a little puzzled why I am pushing for higher quality in online content, and why I am not content with “good enough.”

I will make the point, again, that “good enough” is strictly subjective and that Larry/Citizendium just has a different definition of what it means to be good enough.

There are tremendous amounts of data online, but the vast quantities make it difficult to find the best: the highest quality data is hidden among mountains of cruft. Most of us specifically want the highest quality data — we want the most authoritative introduction to a topic, the highest quality video, the most recent and accurate statistics, the least biased and best-informed product ratings, etc. And some of us spend huge amounts of time looking for the highest quality data; I often do. Therefore, a website like the Citizendium that aims to aggregate the best information online would — if successful — render that sort of searching unnecessary. Whatever sort of search-for-quality can be aggregated, we’ll aggregate it.

The best? Highest quality? Most authoritative?

These things are completely subjective. Many would say that the highest quality video has nothing to do with what should be made available for distribution. The people largely do not *want* the highest, most, or best – they want good enough. When the spectrum of information is more filled-out, and a variety of qualities are available at their respective price-points in the market – the consumer will seek out the level they are comfortable with and/or the one they can afford. Not unlike cars and houses and everything else in a mature market.

In fact, Dr. Sanger is placing himself squarely outside the mainstream with his definition of what is good enough for his own research purposes. He’s a “premium” consumer of information sources – an academic (I include myself). Most people do not spend huge amounts of time looking for *anything* – they try once or twice, they ask a friend, and if they don’t find the answer that satisfies them, they give up, it was too hard. If the task is somewhat more important to a searcher, then perhaps he’ll spend a little more time/effort/money looking for the answer that is “good enough”. Regardless, it’s the personal threshold that’s important.

I have watched Citizendium for over a year now and was originally going back and forth on how I thought it would fare. I haven’t changed my mind now for quite a few months. I’m fairly certain the project will never gain the type of attention or credibility it needs to remain viable.

Wikipedia changed the game. The Citizendium is trying to build a house atop a foundation made of (purposefully) constantly shifting sands.

I agree with Larry Sanger about expertise mattering when compiling ideas and opinions about a subject. I’ve said as much before – Democracy is for opinion, not for knowledge. But I strongly disagree with Larry Sanger about how those experts shall be identified and whether their expertise itself should be a proxy for facts that should stand on their own. Facts should be sourced and they should be able to hold their ground on their own terms. If it is true that 97% of credentialed experts agree on view A, then the job of an encyclopedia is to publish the statistic directly following the discussion of what view A is. Whether an expert is the one who picked the particular turn of phrase is inconsequential.

Sanger also conveniently ignores the passage of time as contributing factor for Truth. Wikipedia is not a snapshot. It is not a bound book shipped across the country and sold door to door. It does not come with a year proudly stamped on its spine – declaring at first how new and relevant and then, almost immediately, how dated and quaint the information inside truly is.

Wikipedia allows the best knowledge of the time to be condensed and parsed, argued and sourced – in plain sight. As this knowledge changes, as the facts move and shift because of new discoveries and developments, the Wikipedia changes with it. If experts happen to arrive with new information, and source it well, the Wikipedia can be convinced to publish the new information. If the experts cannot source it, cannot convince the skeptics and the masses that the new facts are indeed facts, then they are sent packing – same as everyone else – to keep digging. This is not to say the masses should have all the power, it’s that if an individual truly feels they can move the discussion forward, they have to bring the evidence – whether they be expert or not.

This is the way it should be.

Because someone comes with credentials, they are not necessarily to be believed. Opinion is where we should defer and perhaps listen to experts. They have knowledge and expertise. They have experience and judgement tested through trial and error and the passage of time. Presumably they’ve even been challenged by other experts, both professionally and at lunch, and so they should be listened to and considered. But how much deference we pay to the experts should be a personal decision. The argument remains that there is no objective truth – and we are each making up our minds as to what we believe. We each use experts as proxy. We should not be told who the experts are – we should be allowed to choose ourselves – and that has to be done on a personal level.

Finally, experts are—albeit fallibly—the best-suited to articulate what expert opinion is. It is for the most part experts who create the resources that fact-checkers use to check facts. This makes their direct input in an encyclopedia invaluable.

Yes, exactly. And I think we’d be hard pressed to find anyone to argue with that. What is at issue is Sanger’s assessment of what follows:

To exclude the public is to put readers at the mercy of wrongheaded intellectual fads; and to exclude experts, or to fail to give them a special role in an encyclopedia project, is to risk getting expert opinion wrong.

It does not follow. Why does allowing experts a spot at the table specifically mean the head of the table? And nowhere still is the process for determining the expertise of the expert defined. What’s the term limit for head of the table? How often are the midterm elections held? Is there only one table?

Here’s a little dilemma. Wikipedia pooh-poohs the need for expert guidance; but how, then, does it propose to establish its own reliability? It can do so either by reference to something external to itself or else something internal, such as a poll of its own contributors. If it chooses something external to itself—such as the oft-cited Nature report—then it is conceding the authority of experts. In that case, who is it who says “we know”? Experts, at least partially: their view is still treated as the touchstone of Wikipedia’s reliability. And if it concedes the authority of experts that far, why not bring those experts on board in an official capacity, and do a better job?

This is not a strong argument. Wikipedia stands on citations from other sources, credentialed sources, sources written by experts. This is not under debate. Wikipedia takes great pride in pointing to others and showing broad consistencies where it finds them – and inconsistencies if and when it finds them. Experts are not needed for this job.

The reliability of Wikipedia is in its transparency. A full audit of edit history and personality and language is available at the click of a button. This is the main reason experts should not be given a big chair at the table of Wikipedia. They are not needed – because the knowledge compiled in Wikipedia is not original research. It is simply a compendium of the very world in which it exists. Its job is to document – and that does not require expert opinion.

What was he doing that I found so compelling? It was his Ph.D. research on ContextualAuthorityTagging. The basis of the idea is simple: The best way to identify an authority on a topic is not to ask people to self-identify themselves as such, but to ask others to identify the people they consider to be the authorities. We can leverage this principle to locate expertise by building tagging systems where users tag other users with information about their expertise. (LWT)

Terrell has thought really deeply about this, and several of his ideas are documented at his website and on his blog. PhilWindley and DavidWeinberger have also commented on his work. (LWU)

I heard more original ideas about tagging in that 20 minutes of conversation than I’ve ever heard from anyone else. The one that really struck me was the notion of tag disparities: comparing what people say about you to what you say about yourself as a way of measuring reputation. Sound familiar? It’s a real-life instantiation of the SquirmTest! (LWV)

And then, Aldo Castañeda at The Story of Digital Identity (STODID) contacted me to talk about my work. We spoke last week and he’s posted the podcast this morning.

Episode #55 is live and the direct link is here. It’s just over 36 minutes long.

I also wanted to share that I’ll be in Austin this next week for SXSWi – so please send me a note if you want to talk and/or get a very cool claimID button.

The takeaway numbers show that 28% of online Americans have used tagging before and that 7% are active taggers (tagged something ‘yesterday’). The survey spoke with 2,373 adults (1,623 of those being counted as ‘online’, or 68%). The data was collected via telephone throughout December 2006.

“Taggers look like classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income.”

Q: Why do you think Internet users are drawn to tagging?

Weinberger: It’s really useful. Compare your traditional computer system to organize your digital photos to using a tagging system. Instead of having to stick a photo into a single folder — say, “trips 2006” — you can easily tag it as “Italy,” “anniversary,” “sunset,” “mountains,” and “no kids.” You can assemble instant virtual albums of all your anniversary photos, or all your photos of all
your trips to Italy, etc.

There’s an altruistic appeal to tagging as well. Tagging at public sites can give you a sense that you’re adding to a shared stream of knowledge. At del.icio.us, or other such sites, tag a page “robotics” and you know that it’s automatically added to the list of pages tagged that way, so anyone else interested in that topic can find it.

In addition, as more people get used to the idea of having their information sliceable and resortable on the fly, we’ll see more intuitive interfaces bloom for very, otherwise, ordinary tasks. This phenomenon is still very young. The world only found del.icio.us in early 2004. Not very long ago.

Tagging – anyone?

The happy meeting of folksonomy and authority records? Our first look into how these align “in the wild”? Where are the strengths and weaknesses in each? How can we improve on each – since we now have a fuller picture of how they relate… LibraryThing? Are you listening? Researchers – come and get it.

Simon writes:

This may be of interest to some: last month I created and deployed a custom web agent designed to recover full MarcXML authority records via http://authorities.loc.gov.

There are still some inaccuracies that appear to reflect problems on the original; until these issues can be resolved, I’m only making a limited release (bad authorities are worse than no authorities).

The current results are available in http://www.ibiblio.org/fred2.0

authorities – contains all authority records, broken down by heading tag (1XX). You can either fetch individual batches of records or download a tar file containing all batches.

Be careful when uncompressing these files, as although the compressed data only takes 637 MB, the compression ratio is around 15:1 (XML is not the world’s most compact encoding).

subjects-NFC.tgz – contains only subject headings.

Authority.app – is a little RubyCocoa application for viewing marc xml files.

Please let me know if you spot any problems.

Thanks,

Simon

From http://www.ibiblio.org/fred2.0/readme.pdf

Fred 2.0
Phase 1: Library Of Congress Authorities Files

Open Catalog Liberation Council, Provisional ALA
22nd December 2006
Dedication
Fred 2.0 is dedicated to the memory of
Frederick G. Kilgour (Jan. 6, 1914 – July 31, 2006)
Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus
School Of Information And Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This phase of the project is dedicated to the men and women at the Library of Congress and outside, who have worked for the past 108 years to build these authorities, often in the face of technology seemingly designed to make the task as difficult as possible.

Summary

Using a custom agent, we were able to harvest 6.95 million authority records, using the publicly accessible interface to the Library of Congress authority files located at authorities.loc.gov.

Retrieved records have been converted into MarcXML.
Accented characters have been converted into NFC (Composed Normal Form).

Initial checks against authorities.loc.gov indicate that the retrieved data faithfully reflect that on the original system; however these checks are still only preliminary.

Cross checks against Classification Web have revealed some inconsistencies. For this reason, we are releasing these records for research purposes only. These data are not suitable for production use.

Citizendium seemed to be headed down that path. Within a couple days of an initial announcement, hundreds of people were paying attention to this idea of an expert-led, expert-moderated compendium of the world’s knowledge. It was to be what many have been clamoring for since Wikipedia‘s public “problems” have become more and more a part of our collective understanding (I’m not convinced Wikipedia’s “problems” are not simply “features” that need a better interface). A new wiki that would withstand the fly-by editors, spam and possible subtle fact-shifting that could be present in any article at the old and tired Wikipedia.

Larry Sanger was onto something. The Citizendium project obviously touched a nerve among the masses and fostered a flaring-up of discussion by providing a public square where like minds could share opinions, concerns, and plans for improving the status quo. There really was a rallying of the troops. Hundreds of messages in the first few days.

Description Main discussion list for Citizendium, an expert-friendly fork of the Wikipedia project. Citizendium was founded by Larry Sanger.

And then it died.

Or rather, its momentum was killed – by the very person who started it only a few days before.

What’s interesting here is that one of the reasons for announcing an 8-message/day limit for the mailing list was the crushing weight of too many messages.

I confess that, while I’m truly delighted with the activity on this list, and while I don’t mean to criticize anyone, I’m increasingly frustrated with the way things are going on the list. The process is more to blame than any specific person’s abilities or carelessness. There have been many 100% signal posts, of course, but overall the signal-to-noise ratio here has never been very high.

I think everyone can agree that there has been just too much happening on the list to be of the best possible use to anyone, myself included. It’s like trying to make a civilized assembly out of an enormous roomful of extremely intelligent and opinionated people, who are constantly talking over each other.

However, there were really only about four days after the opening of the list where the message count was truly staggering. After that, it was already tapering off. People had mostly said what they came to say, and the discussion was shaping up nicely both in quality and quantity. The announcement on Sept 26 by Larry Sanger relegated the “Main discussion list for Citizendium” to basically an announcement list for Larry Sanger to share whatever it is that Larry Sanger seems to have decided in the last few hours.

And this is by no means a complaint or a finding of fault.

I am simply surprised by the move – first, because there was a very interesting and lively discussion happening where there was not one before, and second, because someone as visible and connected as Larry is in this world of many-eyes-make-good could so abruptly shut down such a viable branch of conversation.

Now, in fairness, within the same message announcing the 8-message/day limit there was the announcement of an online forum where the discussion could be moved. A quick look at the forum confirms there are currently “76 members, 624 posts” in the 17 days or so since the announcment. So the discussion has continued – just not in my inbox. And out of sight of the hundreds that were part of that initial flurry of a few days.

I dare suggest that forcing people who have other things to do to come to Yet Another Forum just to keep up with the discussion, is not the best idea.

We may look back on this post and laugh at my observations, my base analysis. We may wonder how I could have missed the obvious genius of Sanger’s calculated move. But I’m not convinced that’s going to happen.

I would love for Citizendium to work. I would love to know that there is a vetted place where good information is free and dependable and available to everyone. But I see too many edge cases where the two cultures, free/open/allcomers and topdown/authority/expertiseonly, will collide in Citizendium’s current model.

I still stand with Clay at this point in time. It will collapse under its own administrative weight. Experts are too expensive/hard to vet in the proposed self-identified model and the experts will not play along anyways because there is not an incentive for them to play along.

All that said – a most excellent dissection of what is happening with the bigger picture of Citizendium is posted by Mike Johnson at Modern Dragons. It is highly recommended if you want to know more.

I believe that this last issue, motivation, is one of the larger black clouds over Citizendium. My major concerns are as follows:
1. How many academics can be expected to put large amounts of time and effort into something which doesn’t (at this point) help their chances of getting tenure, nor their academic prestige?
2. Doing original research is one of the most appealing parts of being an academic, and there’s no place for original research in an encyclopedia. Might academics tend to be busy with their own projects, curiosities, and visions?
3. Do enough experts have enough collective drive to build an encyclopedia? Nobody thought amateurs could write an encyclopedia, and that may have been a significant part of why Wikipedia took off. Experts, on the other hand, know they can write an encyclopedia in principle- all encyclopedias were written by experts before Wikipedia- and don’t tend to be as hungry for validation as amateurs.

This is exactly what they should do and what they should have provided at the time of the launch of Mini-Feed and News Feed.

Both Fred and danah have weighed in and for the most part, I think this will be a truly pivotal moment for Facebook. They’ve messed up, said as much, and provided a set of tools to win back the trust of their community. The students will not flee – and the next Friendster has yet to be identified.

Good job Facebook.

And like I said, they do get it and they will change things to make it work. The fact that they knew they were racing the clock is a good indication of how they’ll fare. Don’t count them out yet.

An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we’ve seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Tomorrow at 4pm est, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark

Update: Just found Charlie O’Donnell’s post. Sharing a mind is a tough assignment.

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.George Felix Allen (born March 8, 1952, in Whittier, California) is a Republican United States Senator from Virginia. He is running for re-election in 2006 and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2008 Presidential election. He has recently been involved in a number of controversies, most prominently his use of the word “macaca.”

I love that disclaimer at the top. Don’t you? Self deprecation and honesty, and therefore, authority on the matter (and 63 references at the time of this writing).

Earl Mardle is all over this new media thing. He’s hit it out of the park and deserves a pat on the back. The power continues to move down the food chain and we’re seeing the toddler years ahead of us now. The 2008 race will be something quite instructive indeed.

New Media With Fangs

When Jim Webb’s campaign for a Virginia Senate seat assigned a worker to attend all the public events of the incumbent George Felix Allen, they made an extremely shrewd move.Gathering intel on your opponent is SOP, but doing it with a video camera in public was a new wrinkle, and it plainly annoyed, perhaps unnerved Mr Allen, who eventually unloaded on the cameraman. The cameraman’s family came from India, and Allen was careless enough to lift the corner of his racist rug and let out the French racist epithet, Macaca.

Boy was that bad tactics. Not only was his racism immediately available on the net, and eventually in the corporate media who could no longer ignore the gathering furore, as it eventually caught up with the Trent Lott racism thing, but it sent the liberal blogosphere on a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” search of the net.

And now the whole game is rolling out like an anchor chain. Finding the photo of Allen posing with the leading lights of the Council of Conservative Citizens was only the start, Jeffrey Feldman took it further and produced a full scale research article on Allen’s racist connections, with chapter, and verse. Frameshop: Allen’s Political Klanbition

Within days, Allen’s previously strong campaign was in trouble, Webb was within the margin of error in the polls and Allen was steppin and fetchin all over the state, trying to stay out of the firing line and keep intact his former presidential ambitions.

I’ve always said that the net shifts the locus of power and control, it takes it away from the traditional owners and gives it to the wider community. It remembers and it aggregates, and it is merciless. Or as Feldman says in his piece.

In 1996, when George Allen posed for the picture, it was hard to imagine that only ten years later that the circumstances surrounding the photo, plus similar circumstances, would be so widely accessible to people beyond the semi-clandestine membership of the CCC. But now they are.

But it gets worse, because if one republican insider was working the CCC track, there’s a good chance there are others. So now the citizen journalists are researching the CCC itself, looking for the reverse links to the Republican party.

No doubt someone in the CCC will soon wake up to the risks and start cleaning out the website. However, you can bet that someone already has a full copy of the site contents to sift at their leisure. Which is a nasty lesson that ABC TV in the US is learning.

After finding itself in the middle of a storm about a biased and politically motivated “docudrama” on the path to 911, ABC tried to pull down the blog it was running on the programme; mostly because the promotional value was being shredded by very pointed and aggressive comments from those who found the timing and the content to be unacceptable in a supposedly independent media organisation.

If you go to the ABC site right now you’ll find the blog missing, but as with the stoush over the censoring of the NYTimes Ombudsman’s blog, someone already has the copy.

Is it any wonder that the people who have controlled the message, the medium and the money for so long, want to remake the net in their own, previous, image?

Earl gets five points.

1) You post information online about yourself in various places
2) It gets aggregated by bot or human
3) Bad guy decides you’re worth screwing with
4) Bad guy finds all this information and can act on it accordingly

Pretty straightforward.

(We also realize that #1 and #2 are not necessary for #3 and #4 to happen)

Today, I find a story on Slashdot with all these elements represented:

http://dumblittleman…/how-to-get-robbed-killed-or-stalked-by.html
Death by Google Calendar: How I Identified you to rob you

(Apparently, it too has undergone some reconsideration – note the title vs. the URL)

I am not picking on this woman but I needed to show a real example. There are tons of public calendars far more revealing than this one. In literally 20 minutes, I now know the name, address, phone number and schedule of this woman. If I can do it, you can be damn sure the real bad guys can. Please be smarter about what you share online. If given a choice, choose the private setting. If you are not given a choice, either choose a new calendar or talk in some code that only you understand. I guess I just don’t understand why people set themselves up to become victims.

There’s nothing really interesting in the story except the way it played out.

I mean, we know that “public information” means it’s public. If someone decides to post something online, then it’s online. It can be crawled, saved, searched, found, archived and refound later. It can also be aggregated, resyndicated, blogged or forwarded. There are entire websites devoted to this aggregation of interesting things – it’s how I found the post in the first place.

That said, there’s nothing new in what was posted. What’s interesting here is how he went about doing it and how little foresight he displays by using real information about someone.

The poster himself now has to deal with the emotional trauma (apparently not so much) of having posted the personal information of this young woman and her housemates. Perhaps more importantly, the young woman herself has to deal with the emotional and potentially physical fallout of being made the posterchild of “How to stalk someone 101″. This is not fair to her at all. And the author should have considered this before making her the object of his ‘research’.

While he and his two friends are positioning their site as “Tips for Life”, they’ve crossed the invisible but morally obvious line of someone else’s personal space. This young woman’s sense of identity and safety has been violated by this posting of personal information. Her trust in the world has probably been knocked down a notch or four. This, to me, is an unacceptable use of the power of “making a point” in any public forum, especially one that’s electronic and archived. The author neglected to consider this (we hope) before making her an example. If the consideration was made and somehow deemed insufficient, then it’s even worse.

Additionally, the comments attached to the original post eventually included a message from the girl’s friend who first woke her with this information on a holiday weekend as well as messages from the girl herself and a close friend. You can read the frustration and loss of control in their words.

First of all, being the topic of discussion suddenly, I would have greatly appreciated a heads-up on this whole article before hving [sic] a friend call me at 6am to alert me that I’ve been publicly cyber-stalked.

Secondly, I admit my own stupidity for listing the calendar as public, a problem that has quickly been fixed, but two things: you could have

1. notified me before posting this article so I could have locked my calendar before having the whole world view it, and

2. used a PSEUDONYM?? For somebody not “thinking bad guy thoughts,” you’ve already endangered me and those who live around/with me by posting my name and screen shots of my calendar.

So thank you in advance for all the lovely stalkers and real “bad guys” out there who now have this information thanks you you. I realize you used my calendar to make a point, but you have also seriously upset me by ACTUALLY endangering me now that slashdot and whoever the hell else has read this article.

I’ve been wanting to post examples of how not to post personal information online for a long time. I’ve wanted to share my own Tips for Life but in every case, have come to the conclusion that it’s not fair to single anyone out. I can only sleep at night if I’m not part of the problem.

Teaching a “Paranoia 101″ course might be in my future at some point, but I will definitely not be using previously unaggregated and obscure personal information of young women whom I’ve not contacted ahead of time and asked for consent.

I agree with the original author – be smart, be vigilant, don’t post things you’re not willing to actually let the whole world see.

But I also feel very strongly that the author, in this case, has crossed a very important line and should realize the instructive benefit afforded by his post does not outweigh the personal trauma caused to this young woman. It’s not fair and there are better ways to make a point.

The network brings us closer – but we’re still people and we should consider our actions.

Like she said, he’s really no better at this point than the actual bad guys who might use this information against her.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told CNET in an interview that the Germans are coming—and they have a plan to save Wikipedia. The German-language version of Wikipedia will get an experimental overhaul in the next few weeks designed to cut down on vandalism, edit wars, and misinformation. How will it work? Through the magical power of trust.

In the German system, any user will still be allowed to make edits to any article. Those edits won’t show up in the live version of the site, though, until a registered user with a certain level of time and experience approves the changes. It’s a simple change, but one that could prevent the most juvenile forms of vandalism from ever appearing on the main site, which should do much to remove the appeal of vandalizing articles.

This is interesting on a few levels.

The wiki phenomenon we’ve all experienced in the last few years has definitely reached a tipping point – a point where an educated populace has probably heard of, and might even be able to explain, what a wiki is. We’ve seen NYTimes articles, CNN reports, and BBC broadcasts. We’ve considered what it means to be a ‘real’ resource for our children’s homework assignments – what it means to have a NPOV (neutral point of view).

But we’ve also learned that communities of trusted peers do a very good job of policing themselves (it takes a global village?). While inalienable rights are great, I think this movement away from ‘all users are created equal’ is a good thing. We need to better mirror our real world and give credit and affordances to those who are experienced. We should allow those who are the experts, those who have done this a few times before us, to have more say in how things run. They’ve probably learned something.

This decision by Wikipedia, while in part a reaction to a lengthy court case, is a welcome one. The pantheon should be allowed to speak a little more loudly than the peons. It’s only fair. We’re not all equal when it comes to knowledge. Trust, reputation and expertise are what allow us to divide and conquer. Adam Smith’s Division of Labor is most efficient when we let the experts do what they do.

I welcome this change and can’t wait for it to trickle across the rest of the Wikipedia and the rest of the sites that let allow/encourage user-generated content. The sooner we have more than the lowest common denominator, the sooner we can tap the real power of everyone.

Third, you have to participate in the online conversation. If you don’t, the party will start without you and how many of the millions of people online do you think care about your reputation? That’s what I thought.

Nathan Schock at Fresh Glue:

It all started when someone decided to have fun with a Wikipedia entry. Nothing new, right? It happens all the time. But this entry happened to be about Stephanie Herseth, the lone member of the US House of Representatives from South Dakota.

The wiki-hacker claimed Herseth was pro-life (she’s not), pregnant (she’s not) and engaged to her campaign manager (she’s not). The false information was taken down quickly, but not before it got a little more interesting.

Herseth is in a (very non-competitive) race for re-election this fall and her opponent’s campaign manager couldn’t leave the Wikipedia reference alone. He emailed it to several political bloggers…one of which happened to be the blog of the Rapid City Journal…who posted the full text of the email on the blog…and then defended their decision to do so.

As local political blogger Pat Powers noted, whoever put the false information on Wikipedia didn’t do Republicans any favors. Neither did her opponent’s campaign manager because now the discussion is about his email, rather than what they want to discuss. Not surprisingly the Herseth campaign has sensed the momentum in their favor on this issue and is calling for the campaign manager to be fired.

There are three important new media lessons here for anyone who cares to learn them. First, the Wisdom of Crowds is real and represents a new kind of information and fact exploration process. In the old days (only a few years ago) someone would research a story for days, weeks, months, even years before publishing the definitive account in a newspaper, magazine or book. If you wanted to respond to that account, you had to do the same thing yourself and it was very difficult to correct a story once it was published.

Today, the quest for the facts starts out in the open with a blog post or a Wikipedia entry. Everyone can read that information and respond to it. Eventually, the truth is discovered, as it was in this case, through the participation of a large group of people, like a virtual party. That’s why Wikipedia is always among the most-searched topics on the net. That’s also what makes blogging so difficult for most people to understand. Any one post may not be completely accurate, but is rather part of the process of getting at the accurate account. Sure, there will always be those who abuse the system, as there were in this case, but those people are typically found out and appropriately flogged.

Second, the Internet is not nearly as anonymous as you think. If I were you, I would avoid emailing anything you don’t want the entire world to see. Bad email pitches can find themselves on the Bad Pitch Blog or posted on another blog that (at last count) had 80 comments. And by the way, your computer has a little thing called an “IP address” that leaves a convenient trail for people to follow. As we learned from the Cluetrain Manifesto and Adam Curry, there are no secrets, only information you don’t yet have.

Third, you have to participate in the online conversation. If you don’t, the party will start without you and how many of the millions of people online do you think care about your reputation? That’s what I thought.

Two seemingly unconnected events caught my attention over the last week and it was only this morning that I put them together. The first is the now well covered Photo’chopped photos that Reuters carried and then retracted, and the second was the less known case of Kevin Corazza v. Kris Krug. [on Flickr]

and he concludes…

My prediction is that reputation systems of all kinds will increasingly become a focus for anything in the public view, and they will rely on techniques that capture the power of community to derive trust rather than a brand manufacturing it.

We are moving quickly towards a time and technology where distributed, calculable reputation is available. We’ll be able to query our network about a person or company and see their public reputation score, their public-facing history laid out in contextually relevant and timely, localized, helpful clarity.

We’ll be leaving trails wherever we go and with whomever we interact. Our history will play a role in our future, more so than ever before. The shadow of the future will loom larger than it ever has.

Today, our networks are divided, our personas are separate. We can, as long as we’re obscure and not famous enough to note, morph and change who we are. We can pick up and move to a different state – a different city, and become a new person – to a point. We are tied to our physicality. But this is less true today than even a few decades ago, and it will continue to become less true as we move forward.

None of this analysis is new, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious as the science fiction of just a few years ago is now very much a case of current events.

Wikipedia has added RSS feeds to the 1.25 million entries in the encyclopedia. This means you can now more easily track the revision history for important articles, such as those about people, brands or corporations. Simply click on the history link at the top of any entry page and you will see the RSS link on the left hand side. Here’s the feed for the ever-popular podcasting page.

This is a very interesting and very powerful. Wikipedia is arguably the single point of aggregated knowledge with the most active participants anywhere on the planet. The fact that those participants can now, a little more passively, keep up with the topics that most interest them is truly ripe with potential.

One of the OneTrueWiki’s greatest strengths and points of the most contention is that anyone can edit the content at any time. The resource that so many people are linking to and citing now as vetted fact can be changed by anyone – horror of horrors!

What is left from these discussions oftentimes is that there are a great number of watchers who see every change made to an article and swoop in with great fervor to defend the honor and NPOV of their joint creation.

To help complete the feedback loop of content creation and policing via RSS, I propose Wikipedia publish, Feedburner style, the number of subscribers to each Wikipedia article (bandwidth and CPU cycles notwithstanding). This will perhaps give more pause to those edits of inconsequence, the toes in the water of community edited content.

There is a potential downside to publishing these numbers though. Knowing how many people are watching your actions is a great catalyst – either for subtlely and rational good behavior, or for rash inflated headline-grabbing stupidity. I think the full information loop of disclosed RSS readership outweighs the potential for rashness though – let the masses use their power for good.

And they even render well in my newsreader – bonus!

I’ve been telling everyone who would listen that I’m scared of the Internet because I understand it – because I know how it works and how it never forgets. I’ve seen friends abandon their blogs – abandon their place in life where they spoke out, spoke their minds, spoke their feelings about things – because it caused business to conflict with personal – or worse, it hurt someone close to them. I’ve seen them stop writing because they weren’t sure who their audience was, not sure who was listening and perhaps, just maybe, because they talked to me and I convinced them it was a scary world and they’d be better off keeping their opinions where they could see them.

But I’ve also seen friends flourish. I’ve seen them find new paths, new connections with professional posts and insightful commentary. I’ve seen opportunities present themselves and chance encounters occur because the chance was given. I’ve seen colleagues be able to ask ‘the network’ for answers – the lazy web – and the answers came. I’ve seen all of that, and I’m a convert.

There are a lot of people watching. The Internet is a scary place because of that – but it’s also an incredible place. A place where expertise is granted on merit – where ideas that hold water really shine. It’s a place where if you have a good point and you have some readers, you’re very likely to make more of a difference than if you didn’t have a blog. This is why I’ve changed my mind and I join you all today.

I’ve started this blog to house my ideas – to hold my good points and hope that they hold some water.

Hi, I’m Terrell.