WebProNews » Brittanica

Web 2.0 Puts Reason To Sleep

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 16:42:17 +0000

Several noteworthy thinkers consider the whole Web 2.0 meme as part of their series of discussions appearing on the Britannica Blog. We’re still waiting for them to talk about Web 2.0.

It’s been suggested in places that defining Web 2.0 is akin to Morpheus’ description of the Matrix in the movie. “No one can be told what the Matrix is,” Laurence Fishburne intoned. “You have to see it for yourself.”

I’m looking today, my first day back from vacation, at the Brittanica Blog and its Web 2.0 Forum. There are a few names there, like Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky, whose work I always like.

Shirky’s book, The Internet by Email, proved very useful back in the day when I had email at work just as the Net was taking off, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and the Mosaic crowd. Don’t get me started about dialup modems.

It was very much Web 1.0, even though no one called it that. Web 2.0 is more an invention by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle for their conference series. It means something as a term. The meaning just happens to be somewhat nebulous.

A Britannica series of well-spoken bloggers discussing Web 2.0 should be educational. I’m catching up on a week of their posts. I’ve learned about Goya and George Dyson and Wordsworth, but not much about Web 2.0.

The common theme of the discussion holds that it may or may not be a good thing that anyone with access to the Internet can post pretty much anything they like. “Old revolutions good, new revolutions bad,” Shirky called it in summary.

Wisdom of the crowds is an oxymoron, to be invested with little trust. People should learn to think more critically. Reasonable statements, but I’m no closer to understanding why this is a Web 2.0 discussion than when I started.

As the series of discussions continue on the Britannica Blog, I’m going to request that the highly educated minds participating on it do something they haven’t accomplished yet. Build a foundation for Web 2.0, for discussing it, and create on top of that.

“We get the God we deserve,” Carr said of the spread of computer technology as a harbinger of change. I’d like to understand what Web 2.0 is first before getting anything I might deserve.

Problems Sprout For Nature Over Wikipedia

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 21:56:42 +0000

The Encyclopedia Brittanica has expressed its extreme displeasure with the Nature science journal over its comparison of Britannica to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is just as good as Brittanica, so the story goes. At minimum, Nature had described Wikipedia content as “no more unreliable” than that in the venerable Brittanica. Now it has been suggested in The Register by Brittanica that Nature’s research leaves much to be desired:

“Almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading,” says Britannica.

“Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of the articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The study was so poorly carried out and its findings so error-laden that it was completely without merit.”

Nature reported that of the 50 articles it sent to independent experts, Brittanica’s had 123 errors to Wikipedia’s 162. Some of the errors were differences of opinion instead of mistakes, Brittanica also claimed:

“Dozens of the so-called inaccuracies they attributed to us were nothing of the kind; they were the result of reviewers expressing opinions that differed from ours about what should be included in an encyclopedia article. In these cases Britannica’s coverage was actually sound.”

Nature’s choice to run the article without noting how it differed in preparation from the academic work it usually presents probably has caused the most problems. RoughType blogger Nicholas Carr posted in February about discovering that detail:

I found that it was something less than I had expected. It is not one of the peer-reviewed, expert-written research articles for which the journal is renowned. (UPDATE: I confirmed this with the article’s author, Jim Giles. In an e-mail to me, he wrote, “The article appeared in the news section and is a piece of journalism, so it did not go through the normal peer review process that we use when considering academic papers.”) Rather, it’s a fairly short, staff-written piece based on an informal survey carried out by a group of Nature reporters.

Ultimately, Carr observed just how Wikipedia could be a much better source of information, if it followed the open source model more rigorously:

The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work. Community without hierarchy means mediocrity.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Wikipedia Close to Brittanica, Sets Donations Goals

Andy Beal — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 19:04:30 +0000

As Wikipedia becomes larger and more widely accepted, now with an Alexa rank in the range of the top 30 websites on the Internet, it’s beginning to have an impact on people’s perception, accuracy, and donations strategies. All of which have been, for the most part, positive.

A recent study by Nature Magazine, shows that Wikipedia is actually fairly close in accuracy to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

A ZDNet blog post states that “The study found both had an equal number of what were called “serious errors,” while Wikipedia had somewhat more modest errors.”

Additionally, it seems that Wikipedia has recently begun a donations effort in order to continue operations as a free resource, and aims to be the PBS of the Web.

There have been arguments that all they would need to do would be to insert some contextual advertising (AdSense, YPN), but I think that defeats the purpose of being a more purist non-profit organization, steering away from helping another company profit from its business.

Might not be a bad opportunity for a significant donation from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. Or what if Google/Yahoo! allowed them to display their ads, and gave them 100% of the earnings?

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.