Britannica free access... gotcha?

EB building name plate with thistle
Image by Robert Brook via FlickrPreviously, I wrote about Encyclopaedia Britannica's free access offer. I may have more to say later but I thought I'd update you a bit with a couple of things I ran into

First, it seems I can't edit my previous post! I'm very used to just going into already published posts and tweaking them (I always find typos after I publish them! Why is that???, er, don't answer....).

For whatever reason, an attempt to edit that post blanks it out. I'm not sure if this is a glitch at my end or what (further testing is needed) but the only think that is different about that post is the widget I embedded. If in fact I can't edit posts that have those widgets that's a strong disincentive to embed them. Hopefully just a glitch that will be sorted out.

A somewhat more serious matter was blogged about by the author of Pattern Recognition, who sat down and analyzed the Terms and Conditions of use. It seems that the T&C has that dreaded "non commercial use" clause... (I was going to put a link to it about here, but Jason Griffey is a better searcher than I am, I can't find the page that has the Ts and Cs!... silly me...)

Now, on my blog, if you look over to the left, and if you look between every second posting, you're going to find ads... so far I think I've raked in a total of 24 cents or so from them but it's commercial use, technically. So if you come back one day and find that first posting gone and any and all links to Britannica content gone, that's why...

For now, though, I'm going to assume they don't really mean exactly what they seem to say by that, since (thanks again, Jason) their next paragraph says:

If you want to post, publish, or use content from (or contained within) the Services on your Web site or in any other Internet activity, you will need permission from Britannica, even though your Web site or Internet activity is free of charge.

Well hmm... wasn't that what I just signed up for the ability to link to EB articles? Color me confused I guess.

What do you think? Does EB really mean that?

Britannica free access?

A print Encyclopaedia Britannica
Image via Wikimedia CommonsThe Encyclopaedia Britannica recently announced "free" access to some of their content. The basic scheme is that if you are one of the "people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, Webmasters, or writers," you can register for the ability to share access. Their reason?

"Britannica covers a wide range of topics with thousands of articles and multimedia features. They’re relevant and useful, and we’d like more people to be able to take advantage of them." (quoted for review purposes)

Many have said the real reason is more obviously commercial... that Wikipedia is eating into their online market share (and the web in general eating into print encylopedia share, c.f. the recent announcement by a German print encyclopedia that they were publishing their last edition) and that this was an attempt to win market and mind share (as well as Google ranking because there would be more inbound links to their content) TechCrunch observed something somewhat similar.

What's on offer are widgets as well as direct links.

I decided to sign up and see for myself. The sign up process was simple enough, fill out a form, give a link to your blog, and wait. Shortly thereafter I received a mail with another link, I filled that out and now I have access to content. Here's an example widget:



(I haven't sussed out how exactly to specify what I want to display so gosh knows what topic you're seeing.... the help page wants me to watch a video... I'd rather just read directions) and here's an example link (to the Britannia article on Wikipedia).

I think it's instructive to compare that article (go read it, I'll wait) with the Wikipedia article on Britannica... (again, go read it, I'll wait)

While it is true that Britannica has been around longer... and therefore there is more to say, I find it odd how much of the Britannica article seems to focus on Wikipedia's flaws. While I do not fool myself that Wikipedia is perfect, and I have criticised the project for its flaws, it's not quite as dire as EB seems to paint matters. Perhaps they have fallen into the trap of not exactly having a neutral point of view about their competition?

I'll no doubt have more to say about this later but it's an intereesting development. What do you think? Why did EB do this? Will it be useful to folk? Will this experiment work for EB?

Get Satisfaction!

Listen to your customers!
Image from Wikimedia CommonsSo I just started using Zemanta, which I intend to talk about further, as a way to enhance my blog posts. I'm sure you've noticed the logo at the bottom of some posts. No doubt you'll hear more about it elsewhere too, I think a fair few number of people are using it. (the early reactions seem good, but that's not what I am writing about... oh no... this is just a segue to something else entirely! )

I can't actually remember how I found out about Zemanta, but I soon went to their website and discovered how they plan to give support and foster community.

They're using a tool called "Get Satisfaction" ... I'm obviously behind the curve on this and there are shedfuls of people that knew about it already, I suppose, but I'm impressed. Get Satisfaction seems a pretty robust tool for support. Many companies use forums (phpBB based and the like) but this tool seems to take things a bit farther. You can watch the problems and suggestions put in by others and rate comments, help, suggestions and the like as useful. You also can sign up as someone that works for a particular company.

I've reported a few problems I've encountered with Zemanta and so far it's going well. There are a fair few popular companies and products there already (Twitter, Facebook, etc) but oddly, I didn't see IBM there... I was not going to sign up as an IBMer, probably not a good idea from a volume of activity perspective. :)

If you haven't tried Get Satisfaction, you might want to check it out.

What do you use for getting support? Or for giving it?

Blog till you drop?

I've got to get me some of these pencils!
Image by kaurjmeb via FlickrI know that people make money from blogging. (not me, unless you count the 34 cents in AdSense revenue (or whatever it is, I try not to look) I've gotten so far) But I had no idea that there were "blogger sweatshops"...

The New York Times reports that people are burning out, and other outlets are also talking about how some blogges have actually died.

That seems messed up to me. While I've gotten some comments about my update frequency and about the quality of my posts... I'm doing this blogging thing for me, not for pay. As soon as it's not fun any more, I will stop. That's as it should be I would think.

Does this frenzy to work, to make money at blogging have anything to do with WMF projects or with free content in general? Well, I'm not sure. Money? not so much... people shouldn't be creating content for the money... but obsession? I've talked about obsession before and how it ties into doing what we like to do. I am sure I'm not the only Wikipedia editor who has looked at the time in shock, wondering how it got so late! It is easy to lose track during a good work session on an article, a policy page, or what have you, but it's important to keep a sense of perspective. As with anything else, some rotation is good as well... don't JUST hang out at Requests for Adminship, or the Articles for Deletion pages or Featured Article Candidates or whatever... take some breaks.

That's one of the reasons I'm glad I have multiple hats to wear within Wikimedia Foundation projects... when I tired of the hurly burly of the English Wikipedia, there are always pictures to categorise or upload (after all, I've got plenty of old pictures!) over at Commons, or things to do at Meta, or the like. But I also have my other obsessions too. Oh, and a real life and a job and a family and bills to pay. That sharpens the perspective I think.

How about you? How do you keep a sense of perspective?

Planet Wikimedia

So I just put in a request to be added to Planet Wikimedia. This feed aggregation collects blogs from various wikimedians and is designed either for blogs that are primarily about Wikimedia Foundation related projects, or else that use filtered feeds to restrict the topics.

I had been holding off for a few reasons...

1. I wasn't sure I would be able to stick with this for very long, but I've been hitting an average of one post a day for over a month now (with a little fudging, note I said an average!)
   
2. I wasn't sure what I would be doing, I thought I'd be talking more LEGO and less WMF, but that hasn't been the case. (I have a few things I want to say about LEGO and I will )
3. I wasn't sure how to do filtered feeds. But this help explains it. Hopefully I did it right, we'll see. I filtered on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, and Commons. I (ha!) left out Wikipedia Review as a filter tag.
   Ouroboros.
   Image from Commons
   

So what do you think dear (4, is it now?) readers? Worth reading and adding or just vanity on my part?

(By the way, this may be the most self referential post I've done yet!)

(Also by the way, see that "Zemified" logo? That's a nifty little addon for Firefox I found from Zemanta, it will suggest links and pictures for you. The Ouroboros image at right was suggested by it when I put 'self referential' into the text)

Church signs

I can't take credit for finding this. It's not even new. But it's fun to play with. The guy has a fair few other good generators too. You can get some fairly realistic signs and tickets using them.

My favorite church sign I've come up with so far is
http://www.churchsigngenerator.com/makesign1.php?line1=St0p+st3al1ng+th3++&line2=l3tt3rs+%21%21%21+kthxby3&line3=&line4=++++++++++-+g0d
(you'll have to cut and paste it yourself to see it, understandably he doesn't want people embedding his images into their blogs and costing him bandwidth)

Along the same line, but not made up, is this commentary site.

Most of this stuff is funny in small doses but a bit much in larger ones, I suppose.

And no, there is no significance to publishing this on Sunday, we're all atheists in this house. It was just a filler I had lying around so I used it today :)

Anonymity

Wikipedia, "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", allows anonymous editing. It also allows pseudonymous editing. (yes, there's a difference)

Andrew Keen, a reporter for The Independent, makes the case that anonymity is bad for civil discourse, calling it "the last refuge for cowards and scoundrels". I can see some case for anonymity but I myself have never really hid who I was. My online identity is "Lar" wherever I can get it, and it's fairly tightly linked to my real identity, and has been for 25 years. I tend to find myself thinking that a fair few number of the problems that Wikipedia encounters would be reduced if a verifiable connnection to a real person was required.

I made a decision from the get go that this little blog would not allow anonymous posters in replies, only posts from blogger accounts. Some people have remarked on that, complaining a bit, at least in passing. Turns out since Blogger allows you to hide the account details, it's more or less the same thing, really, I still have no idea who some of these people are, even pseudonymously. This isn't the same thing as Wikipedia, to be sure, so perhaps some of Keen's arguments don't apply. Still, it is instructive.

What do you think of anonymity?

Next blog...

I'm still bemused by all the blogs out there...

Just now, I found this one... quite the record of presumably famous people there. Pretty amazing, in an odd way. People use these things for so many different uses it sort of boggles the mind... (another blog by the same party animal is this one, which highlights real estate to rent or buy, and another one is this one, which promotes carpet steamers... apparently if you party a lot in rented real estate, you'll be glad you're in the carpet steamer biz!).

The other day I found this one, which has recipes that look yummy but a lot of work.

So... try hitting "next blog" some time, you never know what you'll find.

What do you use your blog for, besides opining?

More on notability and the BLP

Dave Winer, in his blog piece "Whats Wrong with Wikipedia" opines (after pointing out what is good about the project) that his bio entry on Wikipedia is in bad shape. His thesis is that it doesn't give him enough credit for things he was involved in, and moreover, that articles which should mention him, don't.

This is, of course, kind of the opposite of the beef Don Murphy has, as I described in Notability and the BLP policy... Don wants less said about him, not more.

It is easy to dismiss both of these complaints as meaningless, or to say that they balance each other out. But the WikBack threads (among them "removing marginally notable BLPs" and others), the discussions elsewhere, the activity on new proposals (among them SirFozzie's latest, "BLP-Lock") suggest that while the project may have come a ways from Siegenthaler, it still has farther to go. Consider the biographies of Ashley Alexandra Dupré (of client #9 fame... hopefully that won't mean anything in 3 months), or of Abigail and Brittany Hensel... Does Wikipedia have too much detail in those?

I won't be so full of hubris to say that I know the answer. Heck, I am not sure I even know the right question... But my unease that Wikipedia is not doing right by living persons remains.

What do you think?

Cheating

When I started this blog I had set myself a goal of doing a post every day. Well guess what, I blew that little self imposed deadline... yesterday went by and I didn't do a post. (too much other drama I guess)

What's that, you say: "I can see darn well that there was one yesterday, Wednesday March 19th... just look at the date"... er wait, that's this post isn't it? Yep!

Blogger lets you cheat. On the post options screen, you can set the post date and time to any value you like. So I did. I backdated this post to yesterday. It means I'm still behind for today, but the day is young yet, I may catch up.

So do you hate me for cheating? Hate me for revealing the secret? Think I'm lame that I did a meta post and it still counts against my average? Or not care a whit?

Don't blog... write!

Gee, I hope Robin Hobb is wrong. She makes the case that there is a fixed amount of writing within ones self to be had, and that if one has a blog, that means less actual writing. (1)

But I fear she is correct.

Writing is something I do for a living, in part... most IT consultants have to deliver documentation to a greater or lesser degree, and system architects like me tend to have to deliver quite a lot of it.

I've long noticed that I procrastinate on deliverables by writing articles... I procrastinate on writing the articles I mean to write (see "procrastination") by getting involved in various admin things, reading newsgroups and mailing lists, writing posts, writing stuff on talk pages, posting on AN/I, RFARs, chatting away on IRC, posting to Wikback, to Wikipedia Review, other people's blogs, etc. etc. etc! Namespace shift at its finest!

And now apparently I have yet another way to procrastinate, this blog. Well maybe I should at least try to be brief, and stop now, then...

Do you find one kind of writing saps your will to do another kind?

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1 - Note, I found her writing via a post at the blog of Cydeweys, which was in turn a reference to a post at the blog of John Scalzi, one of my favorite currently active SF authors.