A Digital Shadow in the Digital Universe

As a mathematician, I love numbers, and here are some pretty spectactular ones from IDC:

The IDC research shows that the digital universe — information that is either created, captured, or replicated in digital form — was 281 exabytes in 2007. In 2011, the amount of digital information produced in the year should equal nearly 1,800 exabytes, or 10 times that produced in 2006. The compound annual growth rate between now and 2011 is expected to be almost 60%.

Part of that digital universe is the digital data about us - our digital shadow as IDC dub it:

in 2007, when IDC developed the Personal Digital Footprint Calculator, launched this month, we discovered that only about half of the digital footprint would be related to individual actions — taking pictures, making VoIP phone calls, uploading videos to YouTube, downloading digital content, and so on.

We called the remainder “ambient” content. It is digital images of you on a surveillance camera and records in banking, brokerage, retail, airline, telephone, and medical databases. It is information about Web searches and general backup data. It is copies of hospital scans. In other words, it is information about you in cyberspace. Your digital shadow, if you will.

Talk about ghost in the machine....

The Future of Free Information

I've written a couple of times about the emerging Digital Universe - an attempt to do Wikipedia "properly", with grown-up editing. Now the man partly behind both Wikipedia and Digital Universe has written a fascinating essay considering the Future of Free Information.

One thing I'd take exception to is his belief that there will never be public information about every single living (and dead) human: since it's possible - indeed only too easy as technology advances - it's almost bound to happen, probably automatically. The other is the idea that

It seems unlikely that all of the world’s information will be open content in the future; as long as authors, artists, and coders perceive no other viable model but traditional intellectual property to support their work, many of them will be opposed to simply “giving away” their work.

We shall see. (Via Open Access News.)

Digital Universe Powers Up the Earth Portal

The Digital Universe is a fascinating experiment in trying to get all the benefits of Wikipedia's distributed approach to content creation without the well-publicised hiccoughs that an open philosophy can entail.

This makes the news that the grandly-named Earth Portal, part of the Digital Universe, has acquired some high-powered UK academics for its forthcoming Encyclopedia of Earth of particular interest. Given that Encyclopedia of Earth is likely to be the first part of Digital Universe to go live, it will inevitably be regarded as a test-case for the whole project.

Exploring the Digital Universe

The Digital Universe - a kind of "When Larry (Sanger) left Jimmy (Wales)" story - remains a somewhat nebulous entity. In some ways, it's forward to the past, representing a return to the original Nupedia that Larry Sanger worked on before Wikipedia was founded. In other respects, it's trying a new kind of business model that looks brave, to put it mildly.

Against this background, any insight into the what and how of the Digital Universe is welcome, and this article on the "eLearning Scotland" site (CamelCase, anyone?) provides both (via Open Access News). Worth taking a look.

Will Wikipedia Fork?

That's the first thought that sprung to my mind when I read that something called rather grandly Digital Universe is to be launched early next year.

Digital Universe is of interest for two reasons. First, it seems to be a kind Wikipedia plus vetting - precisely the kind of thing many have been calling for in the wake of Wikipedia's recent contretemps. The other reason the move is worth noting is that one of the people behind Digital Universe is Larry Sanger, who is usually described as the co-founder of Wikipedia, though the other co-founder, Jimmy Wales, seems to dispute this.

Sanger left Wikipedia in part, apparently, because he was unhappy with the wiki way of working and its results. Digital Universe is not a wiki, so from next year it should be possible to compare two very different approaches to generating large-scale bodies of knowledge from public input.

This is what made me wonder about whether we might see some kind of Wikipedia fork - which is where software development splits into two camps that go their separate ways. There must be many within the Wikipedia community who would prefer something a little more structured than the current Wikipedia: the question is, Will they now jump ship and help build up Digital Universe, or will the latter simply recapitulate the history of Nupedia, Wikipedia's long-forgotten predecessor?