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conflux

The Standard The New Encyclopedia Salesmen
"In 1978 Douglas Adams wrote a hit radio play for the BBC called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Its title came from a gadget described in the story as "a sort of electronic book" that "tells you everything you need to know about anything." In today's techspeak it would be called a wireless PDA. The handy electronic guide was updated on the fly by a team of spacefaring researchers and had "supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom."

Adams hopes to bring this fantasy to life with his company, H2g2, which is turning WAP phones into real-world "Hitchhiker's" guides. H2g2 is part of a new breed of Internet encyclopedias that are trying to amass a repository of all-encompassing knowledge by using volunteers."

CNN Building the world's biggest encyclopedia
"The philosophy of the open-source movement is spreading within the industry. Now, a maker of a Web-based encyclopedia wants to apply its principles to share knowledge in general."

""Eventually we're going to out-Britannica Britannica," he says. "By that, I mean we'll do all the things that they do, only we'll do them better and in more depth."

Dan Bricklin The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor
"What we see here is that increasing the value of the database by adding more information is a natural by-product of using the tool for your own benefit. No altruistic sharing motives need be present, especially since sharing is the default. It isn't even like the old song about "leaving a cup with water by the pump to let the next person have something to prime it with" (I'll have to use Napster to find that song...) where it just takes a little bit of effort, so why not be nice to the next person like the last one was to you."

"As Kevin Werbach wrote:
"What made Napster a threat to the record labels was its remarkable growth. That growth resulted from two things: Napster's user experience and its focus on music...What makes Napster different is that it's drop-dead simple to use. Its interface isn't pretty, but it achieves that magic resonance with user expectations that marks the most revolutionary software developments."
"I would add that in using that simple, desirable UI, you also are adding to the value of the database without any extra work. I believe that you can help predict the success of a particular UI used to build a shared database based on how much normal, selfish use adds to the database."

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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