August 2014
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Copying a Whole Site Is Remarkably Easy In Smallest Federated Wiki
Operations in Smallest Federated Wiki tend to be page-level — dashboard style site managers have been avoided for the moment. Still, the speed at which operations can be executed makes site-wide stuff pretty easy. This video shows how to copy a small fifteen page site in about a minute. If you think about how long Continue reading
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Plagiarism Derp Reaches Epic Levels
First there was Buzzfeed, which admittedly plagiarized material: Take that “Faith in Humanity” write-up. Last September, NedHardy.com—“the self-anointed curator of the Internet,” a kind of poor man’s BuzzFeed—posted an item called, “7 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity.” Then, last month, NedHardy posted another piece, “13 Pictures To Help You Restore Your Faith Continue reading
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Open Licences and SFW
David Wiley with a great comment on yesterday’s post: The answer, more or less, is yes. And initially that seems like a dealbreaker. But here’s the history of the web, from me, condensed. A long time ago very smart people decided that web pages had to all look different, that your stuff would only exist Continue reading
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The Web is Broken and We Should Fix It
Via @roundtrip, this conversation from July: There’s actually a pretty simple alternative to the current web. In federated wiki, when you find a page you like, you curate it to your own server (which may even be running on your laptop). That forms part of a named-content system, and if later that page disappears at Continue reading
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The Part of Wiki Culture the Classroom Forgot
If you look at most treatments of wiki in the classroom, people talk about collaboration, group projects, easy publishing, revision control. All of these are important. But one important element of what makes a wiki a wiki has been underutilized. Wikis not only introduced the editable page to users, but the idea of page-creating links. (In Continue reading
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Blue Hampshire’s Death Spiral
Blue Hampshire, a political community I gave years of my life to, is in a death spiral. The front page is a ghost town. It’s so depressing, I won’t even link to it. It’s so depressing, that I haven’t been able to talk about it until now. It actually hurts that much. This is a Continue reading
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The OS-Based Lifestream Will Kill the Mega-Site, Continued
Back in January, one of my predictions was that the “Revenge of the OS” would accelerate. The idea was that Google and Apple didn’t need to compete with Facebook, because Google and Apple actually owned the one lifestream that mattered — the notifications panel of your smartphone. Facebook’s monopoly was in fact broken and the age Continue reading
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All the Versions of the Amelia Bedelia Wikipedia Entry
I should probably stop talking about the federated aspects of Smallest Federated Wiki — as I mentioned before, whether federation works or not for any given use case is speculative. There is no way to come to real agreement about it since it relies on us making predictions about how people will act in a Continue reading
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Amelia Bedelia’s Hats Are Not the Problem
So there’s been an Ameila Bedelia Wikipedia hoax. We learn that Amelia was not inspired by a maid from Cameroon who wore sensational hats, a “fact” cited in a vandalism which survived on the site since 2009. Yawn. First, let me say in a world where Elsevier was recently discovered to have published half a dozen Continue reading
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