Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Yes, the time of year I remember…

that I forgot my bloggiversary.

January 22. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

So here, in honor of this (fourth birthday?!!) season, are my favorites of the photos I’ve posted here in 2006:

And here are a few past strolls down memory lane–I’ll collect some of the best posts from 2006 later on, and post you the linkage.

Thanks for helping me make so much trouble for so long– as the blogmotto says, it’s all “for a better tomorrow.”

• Blog backstory
• My favorite blogposts from 2003 (my first year of blogging).
• My favorite blogposts from 2004.
• My favorite blogposts from 2005.

I am Spider-Man

Spider-Man 90% Wonder Woman 88% Green Lantern 85% Superman 80% Iron Man 80% Supergirl 73% Robin 60% Catwoman 60% The Flash 50% Hulk 45% Batman 40%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero are you?” quiz…

Five things you don’t know about me, since Elaine of Kalilily tagged me ….

1. I wanted to be a car hop when I grew up. The short-skirted, majorette-booted teen waitresses in 1950s drive-up restaurants were my ideal of beauty, competence, and freedom.
2. I fell in love when I was 12 with an 18 year-old boy who (I hope!) never noticed. In an agony of love, one night in my bedroom, trying to think of something that I could do to make myself so beautiful that he’d notice me, I poured three different kinds of perfume into a teacup and dipped the ends of all my ten fingers in the mixture. At that point, my sense of humor must have kicked in, because I don’t remember ever thinking about that boy again. Well, I still remember his name–but I won’t tell Google.
3. You might think I bounce around a lot–next month I’ll be blog-posting from Chile and Japan. But I’m one of the least exotic members of my NH diaspora. One of my dearest NH friends is visiting us right now from Vienna. Another just moved from London to Hong Kong. And a bunch of my favorite NH-ites now gather each Christmas for what is (among them) a convenient, central location…Cairo, Egypt.
4. So I shouldn’t be blogging right now, I should be entertaining Diane! OK, my desk is so messy it would make Steve Rubel faint.
5. I asked Frank if I could instead tell you five things you don’t know about Frank Wilczek–he said, “I haven’t been tagged, and you have.”

So now I tag Frank–he can post his five answers here, if he’s willing. And Dave Winer, if he’ll play. And Julie and Lisa and Dervala, because I miss them!

Oops, Dave was tagged last week–of course!

Thanksgiving is too big a holiday for just one blogpost–here are some of my other favorites today….

• Close encounter with a “fresh” but frozen turkey from the always poetic ZenOfMotorcycling…
• Great “crabby old lady” thankfulness from Ronni Bennett…
• “Thanksgiving 1.0” from Dave Winer…
• “Thanksgeeking in SF from AllAboutGeorge…
• Lisa Williams, ahead of the curve is planning for Christmas…

Whoa–let’s stop the season right here–I’m not ready for that!

My fellow “citizen journalists,” blush with me. After reading 700+ placeblogs, Lisa Williams has our number! “You know, a lot of citizen journalists are a bit shy. They don’t like to do cold calling and interviews. So what they do instead is dig into public documents, maybe put stuff that’s out there into a spreadsheet. Maybe in a way this is a kind of journalistic research that substitutes for stuff they don’t like to do. Or maybe it’s the kind of journalism you can do at 3 a.m.” That’s a quote, not from Lisa’s blog, but from her talk about her new project Placeblogger, last night at Harvard’s Berkman Thursday group. A few more favorite quotes, from my TextEdit jottings….

The (shy?) citizen journalists at GothamGazette.com are doing something Lisa says is great.

“They pick a public document of the week each week and actually read it and talk about what it means.”

How Lisa found the 700+ placeblogs she’s studied so far

“It was very low tech. I kept typing placenames from the atlas into my browser–and every time I threw that net into the water, I came back with more fish!”

Lisa’s good news for old-line newspapers about the zillion web-versions they’re creating:

“I don’t understand why newspapers aren’t trying to make money from technology transfer programs like the ones that universities have. Newspapers around the country are building out tomorrow’s legacy technology today–and they’re not making any money on it because every newspaper is building its own one-off.”

We know how a “real” reporter would cover a fire, a car crash, a meeting in Yourtown, NH. But how does somebody local tell the story? Lisa Williams says:

Placeblogs reveal a fiercely non-generic America that’s not about national big-box retailers, and they don’t feature the kind of broad, blunt coverage that results from driving by communities at highway speed, or flying overhead.

There’s little Red vs. Blue America or fad coverage here. They show America at the level of detail you get at a walking pace. Many of them are also delightful — they give a snarky insider’s view of a community that’s the closest you can get to teleportation — it’s like being there and listening to conversations on the street.

Tomorrow at Harvard, Lisa will launch Placeblogger, her project to aggregate headlines from 700+ placeblogs around the US, plus one in Antarctica!

Citizen journalists, my fellow snarky insiders, we have been notified!

Everyone’s favorite Irish person Dervala joins a whitewater caravan down the American River.

A California friend just sent me email lamenting that the BlueCoat WebFilter has declared my blog off-limits for “Adult/Mature Content.”

Their website helpfully explains this category:

“Sites that contain material of adult nature that does not necessarily contain excessive violence, sexual
content, or nudity. These sites include very profane or vulgar content and sites that are not appropriate for children.

Very profane and vulgar content? Good grief.

I’m curious to know if rightwing blogs are also banned by these mysterious people.

Summarizing my talk at Wikimania…

0) In quantum mechanics, looking at something changes its nature. Media attention creates just such effects on Wikipedia pages, and elsewhere all over the two-way web. Call it the “Paris Hilton” quantum effect. 0.5) Wikipedia has good tools to deal with individual vandals, mostly based on searching for “bad” strings in text/username and then blocking IPs that create such edits. We also need tools for vandal waves and spin waves, problems we’ll face increasingly in the future as Wikipedia gets more media attention. 1) An vandal wave* occurs when a controversial topic gets hit by a lot of different editors, time-synchronized because they arrive from a media event. For example, the leftwing blogs deploring the “swiftboating” article on Nov. 29, 2005 the Adam Curry/podcasting news on Dec. 2, 2005, or Stephen Colbert’s recently urging people to edit “elephant” Such waves yield mostly bad edits because of the way the editing software fails when they occur.

2) You can detect a vandal wave by two simple metrics. 1) The average time between edits by *different* users gets very short. 2) The ratio of edits by IP to edits by registed Wikipedians goes way up. (This isn’t because most IPs are vandals–it’s because a heavy influx of IPs to one page gives you warning that a lot of new users are suddenly seeing that page.) Putting numbers on that–depends on what kind of traffic your page gets normally. (Here I made some arm-waving mention of “derivatives” and even “second derivatives.”)

3) It’s important to respond fast–first because the media event is giving lots of people their first impression of Wikipedia, so you want that impression to be an accurate picture of Wikipedia at its best. Second, because editing software fails in a bad way under such heavy use–“edit conflicts” block people’s thoughtful contributions, while permitting less desirable but faster edits, such as blanking the page, adding an obscenity, or even just correcting one word without realizing a larger problem exists.

4) Wikipedia’s vprotect response should be re-thought as a way to welcome potential new editors at the same time as blocking quick bad edits. For example, the vprotect could include a link to recent page history to show why the vprotect has been added. Also, “failed edits” shouldn’t be dumped and lost–chances are people put thought and effort into creating them. There should be a backup page or two for each controversial article where such “lost” edits get archived so that they can become part of the discussion once the pace of bad edits slows down.

5) A “vandal wave” occurs in response to media attention. “Spin waves” occur in anticipation of media attention, as motivated and paid professional writers try to spin the content of pages. These writers will become increasingly good at hiding their motivation and their identities–we need better techniques to deal with them than outing the few inept ones who get caught.

6) Wikipedia is a resource not only of facts but also of coding solutions that other big interactive websites will be needing in the future. Wikipedia is full not only of words but also of numbers–for example, the timestamp on each edit makes it easy to compute time between edits. These matters will become very important with the growth of “two-way web.” Here at Wikipedia, we saw them first!

* People at the talk correctly pointed out that “vandal wave” was too narrow a description. So with a tip of my hat to Doc Searls, who talks about an “intention economy”, maybe we should call them intention waves. A wave of people arrives at your page–motivated not just to take a look, but to try to play with your software to make the page look more like what they want to see.

There you have the meat of it–my first PowerPoint assisted talk ever–sad that my summary has to leave out the funny parts and fine pictures….

That’s the question Seth Anthony asked Wikipedia’s data. From my notes of his Wikimania talk…Seth first looked at a sample of 250 recent edits:

• Outside article namespace 28% (various administrative frou fra?)
• Article talk namespace 10%
• Vandalism 5%
• 45% tweaking minor small changes, stylistic.
• Substantive changes, additions 10%
• Creating new articles 2%

Looking just at “high-content” edits, that last 12%:

• Not one by a Wkipedia admin. (They’re too busy elsewhere, Seth guesses.)
• Not one by someone with a barnstar.
• 69% by someone with a username–so, almost a third were made by an anon!
• Only 53% by someone with a userpage.
• Median date of first edit (for a registered user), April 2006 (only 3-4 months ago)

My research also (my talk’s at 2 today, aaaaaargggh!) showed that even in a “vandal wave” almost all the anonymous editors were, in fact, trying to add value to the project. It’s pretty inspiring when you think about it.

And so are the people at this conference–though I’m amazed to be one of so few women. The proportion of women speaking here is much higher than the proportion of women in the audience.

Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia wikimania