December, 2007

Web/Tech — 2 Comments
4
Dec 07

i love wikipedia

I needed to look up something about EU membership today, and went to the Wikipedia artile on it. — and I’m reminded yet again what a wondrous thing it is. I could spend hours looking at pages like this — learning things I’d forgotten, and many I’d never known. Even the disclaimers at the top of the page are wonderful — indicating contested parts of the content, that there could be/is bias in the article, etc. Just a magnificent evolution of shared knowledge, I think, for all its faults. For me, it’s ground zero for human beings to learn again how to really read. How to read in an age of ubiquitous and cheap creation tools — how to read in an age where understanding point of view of authors is paramount.

But this article is just a beautiful example of what’s possible. In the middle of a busy work day for me, I am undone.

Books — 2 Comments
4
Dec 07

I am American (and So Can You!), by Stephen Colbert

Eh, okay. Funny in spots. Not in others. Don’t think I’d recommend purchasing it. I’m also finding that I don’t really miss the Colbert Report on TV, with the writers’ strike going on. I like his character, I’m glad he exists, but I think it’s off my nightly list of television to watch.

Books — 1 Comment
3
Dec 07

Kindle: my analysis of title availability and pricing

I was curious to see how having a Kindle might make a real difference in my life, so spent an hour this weekend looking at my 2007 Amazon purchase history, checking out which titles were available on the Kindle and which weren’t, pricing differences, etc. Doesn’t count the books I bought in airports or, you know, in real life instead of on the web.

Anyway, here’s what I found: of the 58 books I bought from Amazon, 39 (67%) are available in Kindle while 19 (33%) aren’t. For fiction, it’s 16/23 (70%), and for non-fiction it’s 23/35 (65%).

Overall, I spent $837.34 on books from Amazon in 2007 — of the books that were available on Kindle, I spent $578.14, compared to Kindle-pricing of $380.01, for a savings of $198.13. (When you include the price of the hardware at $400, means it’ll take 2 years to pay for itself.)

But here’s the kicker: of the 23,034 pages of books I purchased last year, 14,871 (64%) could have come to me as electrons instead of dead trees. Now, I’m not being naive — I don’t have the tools to do some sort of eco-analysis on the total energy footprint of the Kindle and servers compared to the relatively-more-efficient-and-developed printing industry. But I do know that there are several 500+ page books that I’m just not reading because they’re too big to drag around. Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, for example, or Winik’s The Great Upheaval, or Follett’s World Without End. And I think with a Kindle, I would start reading them all.

[disclaimer: there’s some pricing and page count funkiness because of the timing of the analysis, availability of paperbacks now versus hardbacks then, etc. also, i should note that the real-paper catalog on amazon doesn’t seem to be the same as the kindle catalog — they’ve got lots of sync work to do there. titles were different, searching was different, etc.]

And I’ll note also that of the 58, I’ve loaned out probably a dozen this year to friends — something that’s impossible at the moment with the Kindle.

Anyway was an interesting exercise for me — I think that for someone who reads as much or more as I do, this’ll make a ton of sense. For others, I think waiting will make more sense.

Here’s an image of the spreadsheet if you’re interested…fiction at the top, non-fiction at the bottom; available titles in green, unavailable in red.

kindle analysis

Mozilla — 2 Comments
3
Dec 07

Hybrid organizations: Wikipedia paying for illustrations

Noam Cohen has an article in today’s New York Times about a new Wikipedia initiative to pay $40 per illustration for some number of needed images for the online encyclopedia. (I haven’t checked into the story enough to confirm with the Wikipedia principals though. In the meantime, they’ve got an interesting blog about what they’re up to, fundraising-wise in particular.)

This marks the first time that Wikipedia is paying people for their contributions (although I believe they have a small paid staff working on things full-time).

I, for one, am really happy that they’re experimenting here. I don’t know (and don’t think that anyone does) what will happen, how the broader community of contributors and content consumers will feel about the change, and whether it’ll be significant for them or not.

But I am ecstatic that they’re experimenting with ways to make an already great Wikipedia even better, even when they knew there would be articles with negative overtones that would start to appear.

And I’m hopeful that there will be more of these hybrid experiments, and in particular more of them attempted at the global scale of a project like Wikipedia or Mozilla. We’re in the middle of a bunch of them here, including staffing up around the world, working with commercial partners for distribution, and generating revenue from partnerships. Not your traditional non-profit endeavor, but I think yielding results that are quite positive.

There’s a growing number of these hybrid companies operating on the Web today — we’re trying to smudge some of the distinctions between non-profit and for-profit, between project and company. They’re organizations/companies like Wikipedia, Creative Commons, the Participatory Culture Foundation, kiva.org, and Mozilla. I know there are more out there, and I’m incredibly excited that it’s happening.

One other point: while it can be uncomfortable to show up in the Times, I’m very glad that Noam and others are starting to write about efforts like Wikipedia’s and Mozilla’s. They’re not easy to categorize, really — and we’re just starting to learn how to talk about, let alone measure, the techniques, strategies and  efficacy of public benefit mission-oriented organizations who’re using Internet market mechanisms (both for revenue and for the spend side).

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