Here are some notes from my talk at Outsell’s Go! conference yesterday.

What are some types of Web 2.0 projects?

• Wikis (collaboration), blogs (individual broadcast), mailing lists and other forums (self-starting conversation), video and picture hosting (this is also one-to-many and many-to-many broadcasting), ratings websites

What do Web 2.0 projects have in common?

• They take content publishing out of the hands of a top-down hierarchy and make it a matter of individual initiative.

Why do Web 2.0 projects matter?

• Hitherto, publishing was the prerogative of printers; then (with the Web) of the technically savvy; now, it’s the prerogative of everyone.

Is publishing by individual iniative a good thing?

• That’s really the wrong question. That’s like asking whether TV is a good thing. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The point is that it is a new publishing model or paradigm, and whole publishing models can’t really be good or bad, can they?
• Look at it like this. If Web 2.0 publishing involves putting the power of publishing into the hands of ordinary people, both individuals and groups, what you’re asking is whether publishing as a matter of individual and self-organizing group initiative is a good thing. This seems to be a no-brainer. Of course it can be a good thing.
• Examples (good blogs, good mailing lists, many niche websites, etc.)

What sort of projects are appropriate as Web 2.0 projects? What are worth supporting at all?

• This is a huge question
• Ones that only individuals working on their own initiative are likely to be interested in working on—and where the results of that individual initiative are useful to others. In short, projects with missions that the people are motivated to help fulfill.
• Ones that actually provide something of significant value. So, not mere entertainment.

The Meat: The possibilities are endless. So you can narrow the question down as follows.
What sort of Web 2.0 projects will satisfy your customers while keeping your business alive? For publishers particularly of B2B material:

• Use wikis to organize compendia of information that is useful to a large body of people, information that they are thinking about and using on a daily basis, and which they are willing to share.
• What forums are for is the exploration of new ideas. Use forums to discuss proposals, arguments, explanations, etc.
• Use individual blogs for getting personal takes on things out there as and when you wish.
• Use collective blogs to aggregate news about similar interests.
• Rating…
• Use citizen journalism when the people might have leads and insights that journalists might not have.

What makes Web 2.0 projects take off?

• Their viral nature; but this is a result of the others:
• Simplicity, or ease of use
• Organizers get out of the way: empower individuals to work autonomously
• Make content generally available (and searchable)

What makes them flop?

• Making it hard to sign up
• Making it hard to contribute (complicated processes)
• Failure to compete successfully with similar projects—failure to find a compelling niche
• Needless bureaucracy within the community of volunteers
• Needless formality and slick design (can actually be offputting)

What business models could be adopted?

• Ads
• Give contributors ad revenue
• Pay top contributors
• Micropatronage (others pay people that you find)
• Subscription (pay to play)

Aren’t there some significant liabilities with this sort of project?

• DMCA – Digital Millenium Copyright Act
• What do we do if the audience is saying things that the advertisers don’t like? Let them.
• Publishing can be moderated, but must be done efficiently if so.
• Advertisers should understand. Censorship tends to weaken communities and lead to mass exodus.
• It’s OK to have rules and enforcement of rules, e.g., for politeness.

How can you get started?

• Think through your idea very, very carefully.
• Hire someone who knows how these projects work. There are many of them.
• Leave non-net savvy management out of the design of the projects themselves—unless they’re very unusual, they won’t understand and they’ll get it wrong.

In 2007, what could you be doing, and what should you be doing?

• I can’t tell you you should have a blog, or a wiki, or whatever. It totally depends on your particular business and your industry in general.
• You should have an analysis of how Web collaboration/Web 2.0 impacts your industry and your business in particular.
• You should look at what your competitors are doing online.
• You should think extremely creatively and intelligently—with someone who understands what makes Web 2.0 projects work—about what opportunities are.

I got my hands on a copy of Nupecode, the Nupedia software.  It’s open source, or that’s my understanding, so I’ll be happy to send one copy to a person who will host it for general downloading.  Let me know.  Might be fun to poke around on.  Not really recommended for use.  If you really want to use it, you should talk to me first about the limitations and possible ways to get around them.

And no, tomorrow’s announcement isn’t a revival of Nupedia. 

I’ll be in Germany Thursday through Sunday and in the Washington D.C. area from Sunday through Tuesday.  The first talk will be about a new project I’m launching (at the Wizards of OS), and the second will be some casual notes about how to do Web 2.0 (at the Outsell Go! Conference).

I’m going to make a big announcement in Germany–I’ll post a link to the information here on Friday.  If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I guarantee that you will find the announcement interesting.

From Michael Poulshock:

I have been developing a collaborative, non-profit legal information website, www.lawunderground.org .  …

Law Underground is a rule-based expert system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system): legal rules are entered in an if-then format, and the program uses them to dynamically generate interviews for end users.  As a result, users are given information specific to their needs based on their responses.

The site is motivated by the vast inequality in access to legal information (I am a public interest lawyer) and many facets of its design have been inspired by Wikipedia.  Like Wikipedia, information is amassed in a bazaar-style collaboration.  Unlike Wikipedia, it is entered as rules rather than narrative text, and only law students and lawyers, rather than the public at large, are contributors.

I just recently put the site online and I’m looking for people to play around with it — preferably lawyers or law students, and preferably people familiar with Wiki-style collaboration.  It is a new technology and I need people who are not afraid of that process.

I was hoping that you could refer me to people devoted to free, collaborative knowledge who have legal experience and who might be interested in experimenting with the site.

There is a demo.

Here’s an exciting development.  Something called the Global Text Project has had the notion to develop a whole series of free, collaboratively-developed texts using wikis.  Texts are each to have editors-in-chief and chapter editors (what a concept!).  The project co-leaders are professors at the University of Georgia and the University of Denver.  I wish these gentlemen and their collaborators all the best in getting this started.

I would anticipate two challenges. 

The first challenge will be to find enough participants, and keeping them motivated: getting a quorum is the first and main problem for getting any new wiki off the ground.  My advice to them is to stick with it for the long haul, make repeated outreach efforts, and stay on top of new developments elsewhere, so that you can reassert your presence at the appropriate times.  I mean–and I have been consulted at length on this very problem, i.e., how to use wikis to build textbooks collaboratively–that the world is probably not quite ready for wiki-developed textbooks.  There are people, in the Wikimedia “Wikibooks” project, who have made a go at it, but even their featured results so far have been unimpressive.  Eventually, though, just as happened with Project Gutenberg, people will catch up with what you’ve been doing for a long time.  You want to make sure that you will have something to teach the new innovators when they come along in huge droves trying to do what you’re doing–and thinking of better ways to do it.

The second challenge is actually writing a good book using a wiki.  Good luck with that.  I have yet to see it done.  What I would like to see (perhaps someone can give me a pointer) is a long, meaty, thoughtful discussion explaining why using wikis to write good books could be made to work.  I mean, it’s obvious that wikis can be used to write long, connected series of text.  People can slap the label “book” on the result and feel warm fuzzies.  But, given that most books are bad, it would be astonishing if long, connected series of text generated by wikis had much of a chance of producing anything that anyone would take the trouble actually to read.  The problem, folks, is how to use a wiki to write a book that is really worth reading.

With respect to the founders of Global Text Project, what disappoints me is that people think they can start projects without giving deep thought to questions like that.  Perhaps they have given a lot of thought to it, but I couldn’t see any essay on their website.  For me, it’s the very first sort of question that comes to mind when I think of starting a new project–and I don’t even think about starting a project until I have really good answers.  And to do a good job at thinking this through, you have to think of all of the objections to the endeavor, and take them very seriously.  One objection is that the best books, including the best textbooks, have a single style, a single approach, a single voice, and unifying themes that make the whole thing hang together, and which make readers want to go from one chapter to the next.  Can that be achieved using a widespread collaboration?  Perhaps, using editors: but will the editors be able to make it hang together?  Won’t the result resemble an anthology?  I don’t know about you, but I much prefer reading single-author textbooks to anthology-style textbooks written by teams of authors.  The question really goes rather deep, you know, into the very questions what a book is, and is for, and what the differences between good and bad books are, and why someone might want to spend a long time reading long, connected series of text.  When I started Nupedia and Wikipedia, I think I had answers to those questions with regard to encyclopedia articles.  Writing good books is much harder, you know, than writing good encyclopedia articles.

In a fantastic new development much discussed on the “bookpeople” mailing list, Google is now returning full and searchable versions of public domain books.  A huge part of the dream of a real online library is now finally coming to fruition.  As with archive.org’s offerings, there is still a great deal to be done, and kinks to be worked out.  But just imagine what all this will be like in just five or ten years.  The world is about to change radically again, forever, because scholarship will be able to be performed anywhere in the world.  The impact this will have for scholarship in the developing world and places with underfunded libraries will be profound.  And the results will not just affect scholars themselves: by being able to become more properly educated, scholars everywhere will now be able to enlighten the rest of the world in a way never before possible.  Imagine if duplicates of Harvard’s library were put in every house connected to the Internet.  What will result?  Something amazing and fantastic, I think.  A sort of second renaissance, a global one.

I’ll be speaking on Friday, September 15, at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin, as part of a panel on the topic “Quality Management in Free Content.”

I think I can guarantee that the talk will be stimulating for those following this topic.  I will, I promise, have some interesting new things to say.  I will be publishing the text of the talk just after giving it.

In Who Writes Wikipedia?, a Wikimedia Board candidate “AaronSw” makes the very interesting point that the bulk of substantive edits are made by newcomers and outsiders, and that the core group of editors tend instead to make relatively piddling edits.  That is consistent with my own experience–I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised.  (Actually, like many sweeping generalizations, I’m not quite sure what the claim amounts to.)  He then says that Jimmy Wales ought to be encouraging those outsiders, instead of encouraging more insidership.  With that I couldn’t agree more.  In fact, this is something I personally worried a great deal about: toward the end of 2001, I could already see people dividing themselves into “old hands” and “newbies,” as if having wasted months of your time on an Internet project could somehow convert you into an authoritative encyclopedia article writer.  Sorry, folks: old-handship isn’t what will make your work appreciably better; but education will.  Granted, working on Wikipedia can itself be educational.  But it isn’t as efficient as, you know, reading books, writing papers very carefully, doing drills, and taking classes.

In Who writes Wikipedia?–Responses, our candidate then quotes someone else who really hits it on the nose: “To allow Wikipedia to grow and really pick the brains of the experts around the world, you need to do something to break up this inner gang and the mini empires they are building for themselves.”  Probably the central governance problem of Wikipedia is precisely that its trolls and gangs are allowed to run roughshod over valuable contributors.  And that of course is what I’ve been saying for quite some time now.  But then we have this:

Larry Sanger famously suggested that Wikipedia must jettison its anti-elitism so that experts could feel more comfortable contributing. I think the real solution is the opposite: Wikipedians must jettison their elitism and welcome the newbie masses as genuine contributors to the project, as people to respect, not filter out.

Well, of course, gang rule is not elitism.  If you want to open Wikipedia up to really valuable contributors, then you’ll take the advice that I’ve very long been urging: rein in the trolls and give experts their due.  Wikipedia, I think, will never do this, however.

The Random Chaos weblog has an excellent analysis of the discussion.

Here are some very old links I’ve been sitting on…more on the way, but not nearly as detailed a selection.

Whose Video Is It, Anyway? (BusinessWeek Online)

“When YouTube Inc. was sued on July 14 for copyright infringement, the shock wasn’t that the video-sharing service was being yanked into court. Questions had been swirling for months about whether the upstart, which now dishes up 100 million daily videos, was crossing copyright boundaries by letting its members upload videos with little oversight. What was surprising was that it was an individual who fired the first shot — Robert Tur, an independent photographer famous for filming the 1992 Los Angeles riots — instead of a big Hollywood studio or major music label. … The 17-month-old site now accounts for an astonishing 60% of all videos watched online.”

Canberra looks at wiki services (The Australian)

“The [Australian] Department of Finance’s lead information technology body, AGIMO, has begun experimenting with wikis and blogs with a view to expanding their use throughout commonwealth departments and agencies.”

Whose space?  Abuse and control in social networks (openDemocracy)

“A handful of cases of molestation and comparable incidents have occurred in the United States, in which adults have used false profiles on social-networking sites to lure teenagers into liaisons in the real world. The problem that such sites face is that it is nearly impossible to verify a minor’s status online. While adults-only sites, like those devoted to gambling and pornography, can use credit cards as a proxy for establishing that a user is over 18, verifying remotely that a user is under 18 is much harder without access to school records or other highly-guarded data.”

US social networking ban could unfairly block some sites (The Register)

Obviously related to the foregoing story: “The US House of Representatives has voted by an overwhelming majority to ban social networking sites in schools and libraries. Critics have warned that the ban could apply to a wide variety of sites, some of them of vital educational value.”

Open Source Licenses are Obsolete (Tim O’Reilly’s blog)

“…my message: not that open source licenses are unnecessary, but that because their conditions are all triggered by the act of software distribution, they fail to apply to many of the most important types of software today, namely Web 2.0 applications and other forms of software as a service.”  Here’s a useful clarification: maybe we need an “open services definition.”

An Interview with Dan Gillmor (OhmyNews)

“What are the strong and weak points of citizen journalism?”

“The strongest point is that there is no barrier to entry. Anyone can try it, and when a large number of people try anything we always find at least a few who do it well. Citizen journalists are covering topics that traditional media organizations don’t cover, which means we get more journalism about “niche” topics.”

The weakest point is that there are key principles in quality journalism, and not every citizen journalist either knows what they are or cares. We need to find ways to bring the high-quality material to the surface.”

Wikipedia founder seeks more quality (AP)

It’s about time, but notice that it’s the Germans who are pursuing any meaningful innovations here.

Lessig seeks legal ground for content exchange (CNET News.com)

Lessig’s trying to bridge the gap between Creative Commons and the GFDL, essentially; this would make it possible to use DU content on Wikipedia.  The DU will not be using Wikipedia articles, in part because of the license incompatibility.  Nice to have Lessig on our Board of Advisors and thinking about this.

UK universities love open source (The Register) 

Interesting data point: “UK colleges and universities routinely consider open source solutions to IT problems - even when official policy might not support it.  A survey of colleges and universities by the Open Source Software Advisory Service (OSS Watch) found 77 per cent regularly consider open source software during procurement even though only 25 per cent mention open source in their IT policies.”

Xbox offers do-it-yourself games (Seattle PI)

Microsoft “is coming out with a new software development program meant to let technology hobbyists, students and others with relatively basic skills create their own games for Windows and Xbox 360. The company is due to announce the program, XNA Game Studio Express, today at a Microsoft game conference in Seattle.”  This could change the industry.

Someone else has been catching up as well, with interesting results.

From the Anchorage Daily News, my hometown newspaper:

Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia the world has ever known, was designed by a kid from Anchorage. Well, he’s not exactly a kid anymore.

Larry Sanger grew up in Anchorage and, after graduating from high school in 1986, went off to college, where he majored in philosophy. I can visualize the scene in his high school counselor’s office when he announced his intended major. “Kid,” I can hear the counselor say, “What are you ever going to do with philosophy?”

Well, change the way the world thinks, for one thing.

…

Meanwhile, we can be proud that a kid from Anchorage helped change the course of history because he majored in philosophy.

Majoring in philosophy–vindicated!

(I’ll be back to regular blogging next week.)