That 80-20 Rule

Looks like Wikipedia has its own 1%. I knew that, but this application to surveys is novel and interesting.

Inspired by Wikipedia, Social Scientists Create a Revolution in Online Surveys

Most of the information on Wikipedia comes from a tiny proportion of users. Now social scientists are collecting data in a similar way, allowing participants to design surveys as they contribute. ..... “Just as Wikipedia evolves over time based on contributions from participants, we envision an evolving survey driven by contributions from respondents” ..... a wiki survey. This starts with a set of seed questions but allows respondents to add their own questions as the survey involves. ..... this format allows participants to respond to as many choices as they wish. They call this property greediness. ...... These included ideas that would have been unlikely to emerge through other data gathering methods, such as “Keep NYC’s drinking water clean by banning fracking in NYC’s watershed” and “Plug ships into electricity grid so they don’t idle in port—reducing emissions equivalent to 12,000 cars per ship.” ...... “If Wikipedia were to allow 10 and only 10 edits per editor—akin to a survey that requires respondents to complete one and only one form—it would exclude about 95% of the edits contributed”

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I Like To Read, I Like To Take Pictures

Nexus 4: My First Smartphone
Nexus 4 Is Way Too Cool

I have been playing with my Nexus 4 for days now. It is such a joy.

I have downloaded and organized a whole bunch of apps. I have discovered that I really like to read. Some of my favorite apps help me read. I also seem to like to take pictures. I have discovered. These are not revelations to me. More like confirmations. But confirmations I am happy about.

I really like to read. Pocket is a good one. It beats Flipboard in my book. I like the idea of saving in Pocket on my laptop to read later on the phone. My private homepage on my laptop already has an excellent curation of read destinations.

Amazon Kindle is awesome and easily my favorite app on my seven inch tablet. I am glad to have the Wikipedia app on the phone. Wikipedia is an awesome aspect of the Internet.

I have tried and loved several game apps. I played for hours, one of them overnight, it seemed like. But I did not find myself going back to them the following day. Chess I have gone back to. That is a good classic game in which to want to climb levels.

Path pictures are good, as Instagram pictures. The smartphone is such a poor camera that it has to make up for through filters and effects.

It is a treat to be able to download apps for your phone while sitting in front of a laptop.

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Wikipedia Bots

Image via CrunchBase

Did you think it was only humans?

Meet the 'bots' that edit Wikipedia

"Wikipedia would be a shambles without bots" ..... English Wikipedia alone surpassed four million articles this month. It contains an estimated 2.5 billion words, equivalent to millions of pages, and it is 50 times larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. ..... The bots perform a wide range of editorial and administrative tasks that are tedious, repetitive and time-consuming but vital. .... The site was founded in 2001, and the next year, one called rambot created about 30,000 articles - at a rate of thousands per day - on individual towns in the US..... In 2008, another bot created thousands of tiny articles about asteroids, pulling a few items of data for each one from an online Nasa database.

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• Meet the 'bots' that edit Wikipedia

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• Meet the 'bots' that edit Wikipedia

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• The Bots That Run Wikipedia

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• The Bots That Run Wikipedia [Wikipedia]

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• Bots edit Wikipedia, clean up your nonsense

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The Solution Is Tech Heavy, Data Heavy

Hollywood Might Not Get Killed, Any More Than Silicon Valley Might
What Price A Movie?
MegaUpload, SOPA, PIPA
SOPA Went Down
SOPA Has Egg In The Face
SOPA Is So Going Down



TV ads are not as effective as Google ads. On TV you could be showing me beer ads and I don't even drink beer. But you are hoping many of the million people who got bombarded do.

When I search for beer on Google and you show me beer ads, that is way more effective. You already know I am interested in beer. TV ads not as effective. Search ads more effective. Social ads even more effective. You are more likely to buy something a friend bought and recommends. The engagement on Twitter for ads is more than on the Google platform.

Big Data ads should be 10 or more times more effective than even social ads. And at that point the freemium model really takes off. All you want as content people is people's attention. You don't want their money, at least not directly. I think that is the real solution to the piracy problem.

Fred Wilson: A Post PIPA Post
Clay Shirky: Pick up the pitchforks: David Pogue underestimates Hollywood
O'Reilly Radar: The week the web changed Washington

SOPA Has Egg In The Face

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeSOPA Is So Going Down

Google: Don't Censor The Web
Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet Is The Most Powerful Tool
Search Engine Land: Google Slows Web Crawlers To Help Blackouts Sites
TechCrunch: In Face Of Protests, Congressmen Begin To Abandon SOPA Ship
TechCrunch: Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian On SOPA: “The Fight Isn’t Over”
GigaOm: Taking SOPA/PIPA to the streets: Protests on for SF, NYC

My favorite has to be this one:

TechCrunch: In Face Of Protests, Congressmen Begin To Abandon SOPA Ship

The tide began to turn this weekend when a hearing scheduled for today was canceled and the White House pushed back on some of the more controversial portions ..... Already, a couple of co-sponsors of the bill are pulling their support. Representative Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) is no longer a co-sponsor, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.) is also planning to remove his name from the co-sponsor list, according to Politico. One Congressman, Representative Justin Amash (R-Mich.) is even joining the protest movement.

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• Microsoft opposes SOPA 'as currently drafted' (zdnet.com)
• Yes, Google Will Protest SOPA on its Homepage (techcrunch.com)
• Say NO to SOPA & PIPA! (jeenus.wordpress.com)
• Wikipedia Is Doing a Blackout to Protest Against SOPA/PIPA (dailyblogtips.com)
• This Is the Internet After SOPA [PICS] (mashable.com)
• The Wikipedia Blackout Begins in SOPA Protest (mobilemarketingwatch.com)
• The SOPA blackout (nevillehobson.com)

Monday, October 31: Village Halloween Parade

Image via WikipediaMonday, October 31
7:00pm - 10:30pm Village Halloween Parade
On 6th Avenue from Spring Street to 16th Street
F to West 4th St



The 38th Annual Village Halloween Parade Extravaganza from Kadshah Nagibe on Vimeo.

Reuters: Anti-Wall St protesters to join NY Halloween parade
Wikipedia: Village Halloween Parade

When Wikipedia Beats Social Media

Great early computer scientists and engineers? Alan Turing...who else?less than a minute ago via Twitterrific Favorite Retweet ReplyJennifer 8. Lee
jenny8lee

@jenny8lee This is where Wikipedia beats social media. :-) Or, long live Google.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyParamendra Bhagat
paramendra

Joi Ito Goes To MIT Media Lab

My friend in Kathmandu Ashutosh Tiwari, Harvard graduate, CEO of the Nepali Times in Kathmandu, founder of Entrepreneurs For Nepal, among other hats, had a Facebook update this morning that caught my attention.

Joi Ito had just been appointed Director of the MIT Media Lab, and that was considered unusual, because the guy apparently had dropped out of not one but two colleges, Tufts, and the University of Chicago.

I left a comment. Joi Ito? The name sounds vaguely familiar. Then I went over to the Wikipedia article on him.

Adaptive Text: The Book Deserves To Come Alive

Image via Wikipedia

The Technium: What Books Will Become: a screen that we watch can watch us. The tiny eyes built into your tablet, the camera that faces you, can read your face. Prototype face tracking software can already recognize your mood, and whether you are paying attention, and more importantly where on the screen you are paying attention. It can map whether you are confused by a passage, or delighted, or bored. That means that the text could adapt to how it is perceived. Perhaps it expands into more detail, or shrinks during speed reading, or changes vocabulary when you struggle, or reacts in a hundred possible ways. There are numerous experiments playing with adaptive text. One will give you different summaries of characters and plot depending on how far you've read. ..... books with moving images. We don't have a word for these yet .... Text inside of moving images as well as images inside of text. .... This hybrid of movies and books will require a whole set of tools we don't have right now. Presently it is difficult to browse moving images, or to parse a movie, or to annotate a frame in a movie. Ideally we'd like to manipulate kinetic images with the same facility, ease and power that we manipulate text -- indexing it, referencing, cut and pasting, summarizing, quoting, linking, and paraphrasing the content. As we gain these tools (and skills) we'll make a class of highly visual books, ideal for training and education, which we can study, rewind, and study again. They will be books we can watch or TV we can read. ......... The current custodians of ebooks -- Amazon, Google and the publishers -- have agreed to cripple the liquidity of ebooks by preventing readers from cut-and-pasting text easily, or to copy large sections of a book, or to otherwise seriously manipulate the text. But eventually the text of ebooks will be liberated, and the true nature of books will blossom. ...... We can even filter the most popular highlights of all readers, and in this manner begin to read a book in a new way. I can also read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar or critic. ....... Reading becomes more social. We can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them. Today, we can highlight a passage. Tomorrow we will be able to link passages. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we are reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we've read; from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary, from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie. ........ Even a minor good work could accumulate a wiki-like set of critical comments tightly bound to the actual text. ....... dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event ....... Wikipedia is the first networked book. ...... This deep rich hyperlinking will weave all networked books into one large meta-book, the universal library. Over the next century, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. ....... no work, no idea, stands alone, but that all good, true and beautiful things are networks, ecosystems of intertwingled parts, related entities and similar works ........ The complete universal library, all books in all languages, will soon be available on any screen. There will be many ways to access a book, but for most people most of the time, any particular book will essentially be free. (You'll pay a monthly fee for "all you can read.") Access is easy, but finding a book, or getting it attention will be hard, so the importance of the book's network will grow, because the network is what brings in readers. ...... A book is an attention unit. A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten. As Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." ...... In the long run (next 10-20 years) we won't pay for individual books any more than we'll pay for individual songs or movies.

Reducing price and enhancing quality is what businesses strive for. But the music and movie industries have been bummed out for years now because modern technology has managed to drive the price point to zero. That is like the price point attaining nirvana, no?

When Zuck's Facebook Account Got Hacked

BBC: January 26: Facebook blames bug for Zuckerberg 'hacking': Facebook has said "a bug" was to blame for an odd posting purporting to come from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. ..... Overnight, the cryptic message was posted to the Facebook fan page in the name of the 26-year old billionaire founder. .... It called for the site to become a "social business" with investment from its users. .... The message, left in the name of Mr Zuckerberg, read: "Let the hacking begin: If Facebook needs money, instead of going
Image via Wikipediato the banks, why doesn't Facebook let its users invest in Facebook in a social way? ..... "Why not transform Facebook into a 'social business' the way Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus described it?" ..... Muhammad Yunus is a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the founder of the Grameen Bank, which offers small loans to people who have no collateral to get started in business...... The message also linked to a recently edited Wikipedia article about social business and asked readers: "what do you think?"

Brazil: Economy: Not South Korea

Brazil has come a long way, but Brazil still has a long way to go. $10,000 per capita income is not $20,000, it is not $30,000.

Brazil: Economy: Paving The Way

Brazil's story shows a poor country lifting itself up is great news for the global economy, it is great news for the rich countries. They don't steal your jobs. They create jobs that never existed before and they get rich and then they buy from you.

Brazil: The Landscape

The Amazon rainforest is the most well known geographical feature of Brazil's landscape. But the country is geographically diverse like most large countries tend to be. I don't know if it has a desert though. Looks like it maybe does.

Brazil: Historically Speaking

Brazil is not a Spanish speaking country. The leading country in South America is not a Spanish speaking country. The British left, but the English language in India just grew and grew and grew. Brazil used to be a colony of Portugal. Just like India basically took over the English language - there are way many more English speakers in India than in England, way, way more - Brazil has taken over the Portuguese language.

Brazil: The Largeness Of A Country

Some countries are huge geographically but minuscule in population: Canada, Russia, Australia. Brazil is not one of those. Its large presence on the map is matched by the people who populate that map.

Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis’ Top Tech Products (And A Political Rant)  As of the start of 2010, I’ve set a five year goal for myself: be the most sought-after, and value-added, angel investor in the world. http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/7598157351

The Jason Calacanis Weblog

•  The Case Against Apple–in Five Parts « The Jason Calacanis Weblog if the iPhone was available on more carriers, Apple would sell many, many more units, which would inevitably lead to people switching from Windows desktops to Macs
•  Yahoo committed seppuku today « The Jason Calacanis Weblog Search is the most important business of the 21st century and owning a  commanding lead in second place is not insignificant. At one time Yahoo was the number one search engine and portal..... Microsoft’s deep dive into a graphical user interface on an operating  system, Windows, was a clear sign to Steve Jobs that his bet was correct. Steve doubled and tripled down and that is why Apple is  Apple. Microsoft’s deep dive into word processors and spreadsheets was the clear sign to WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 that this was a space worth fighting for..... Aggression and innovation wins. Period.......startups–and BDC’s (big dumb companies)
•  How to kill Google (or take 10 points of search search share in ...
•  Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky? « The Jason Calacanis ...
•  (The) Startup Depression « The Jason Calacanis Weblog Google started as a search engine but bought Applied Semantics in order to create their real business: text-based advertising......... Microsoft started by building programming software (Altair Basic), but went on to make it’s business in operating systems, Microsoft Office and servers.
  

Jason Calacanis
Mahalo.com: Human-Powered Search
Jason Calacanis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia the Silicon Alley Reporter. Originally a 16-page photocopied newsletter, as its popularity grew it expanded into a 300-page magazine .... Calacanis's tireless socializing ..... He then hired some of the top users of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and Flickr to go to Netscape as Netscape Navigators ....... in August 2007, Calacanis got into a public confrontation with Dave Winer that led to Winer's resignation from the panel of experts for the TechCrunch20 conference organized by Calacanis ... Winer interrupted Calacanis' speech during the event, calling it "conference spam" and igniting a war of words on their blogs. .... October of 2009 Mahalo reached 12 million unique visitors and became the 155th largest site in the United States
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Jason Calacanis (Jason) on Twitter
Jason Calacanis Profile Weblogs, Inc., a network of widely read blogs including Engadget – ranked # 1 by Technorati, Joystiq, Autoblog, and Blogging Baby. Founded in January 2004, Weblogs, Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL in November of 2005.....a 5th Degree in Tae Kwon Do and has run in eleven consecutive New York City Marathons .... serves on the board of directors of Bay Ridge Preparatory School.
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