Now There's an Idea: Peer Review of Patents

I almost had to pinch myself for this one: the US Patent and Trademark Office has apparently

created a partnership with academia and the private sector to launch an online, peer review pilot project that seeks to ensure that patent examiners will have improved access to all available prior art during the patent examination process.

(Via Peer to Patent and Boing Boing.)

But wait: they can't possibly do this. I mean, it's so obviously sensible, and the right first step in fixing a manifestly broken system, there must be a catch. Maybe not: the full, wikified details of this potential wonder sound strangely plausible....

Wikis, Wikis, Everywhere...

...Nor any stop to think.

The New York Times reports on the rash of wikis that are appearing on e-commerce sites. I've already mentioned the one that's popped up on Amazon, as well as that on Chinesepod.

But I really can't see this as turning into a general component of any old shopping site. Unless there is a clear benefit for users to contribute to this communal effort - and for most e-commerce sites there isn't - then customer reviews, which at least allow people to express themselves, seems the better approach.

Access to Knowledge - or Not...

I came across the Access to Knowledge conference, which is currently running at Yale under the aegis of the Information Society Project. The latter's sub-head is "memes, genes and bits", so you can see why my interest was piqued.

Unfortunately, the main conference page given above uses a crazy non-transparent navigation system - so much for Access to Knowledge - so I can't give direct links to some of the more interesting sections. At least I can point to the obligatory conference wiki; there's not much there at the moment, but in the days to come it should fill up with some juicy light reading for those of us that way inclined.

Amazon Plays Tag, Blog and Wiki

For all its patent faults, Amazon.com is one of my favourite sites. It has repeatedly done the right thing when mistakes have been made with my orders, to the extent that I can even forgive them for doing the wrong thing when it comes to (IP) rights....

So I was interested to see that Amazon.com now lets users add tags to items: I first noticed this on Rebel Code, where some public-minded individual has kindly tagged it as open source, free software and linux. Clicking on one of these brings up a listing of other items similarly tagged (no surprise there). It also cross-references this with the customers who used this tag, and the other tags that are used alongside the tag you are viewing (a bit of overkill, this, maybe).

I was even more impressed to see a ProductWiki at the foot of the Rebel Code page (it's rather empty at the moment). This is in addition to the author's blog (which I don't have yet because Amazon insists on some deeply arcane rite to establish I am really the Glyn Moody who wrote Rebel Code and not his evil twin brother from a parallel universe). Mr. Bezos certainly seems to be engaging very fully with the old Web 2.0 stuff; it will be interesting to see how other e-commerce sites respond.

Open Peer Review

Open access does not aim to subvert the peer review process that lies at the heart of academic publishing: it just wants to open things up a little. But you know how it is: once you start this subversive stuff, it's really hard to stop.

So what did I come across recently, but this fascinating hint of what opening up peer review might achieve (as for the how, think blogs or wikis). Maybe an idea whose time has (almost) come.

After Wikia, Qwika: the Wiki Search Engine

The last time I wrote about Qwika, it seemed to be a solution in search of a problem. A recent press release suggests that it's managed to come up with an answer to that conundrum: Qwika has turned into a dedicated wiki search engine.

At first sight, you might think that's rather redundant. After all, wikis are essentially just Web pages, and one or two search engine companies seem to have that sector sorted out. But if you only want to look in wikis, and don't want the other million hits on ordinary Web pages that common words throw up, a dedicated wiki search engine makes sense.

Moreover, wikis do have some special characteristics, as Qwika's Luke Metcalfe explained to me:

[W]ikis are quite different to html documents - they have a good amount of metadata associated with them - edit histories, user information, and data embedded within the WikiMedia format. They conform also [to] a certain writing style, which makes things easier to parse from a computational linguistic perspective. Other search engines are only interested in them as html documents with links pointing to them, so they miss out on a lot.

It's early days yet - both for Qwika and the wikis it indexes (1,158 at the time of writing). But recent moves like Wales' Wikia relaunch, which I wrote about the other day, mean that the wiki space is starting to hot up.

So, in the "One to Watch" category, to Wikia, add Qwika.

Wiki Wiki Wikia

Following one of my random wanders through the blogosphere I alighted recently on netbib. As the site's home page explains, this is basically about libraries, but there's much more than this might imply.

As a well as a couple of the obligatory wikis (one on public libraries, the other - the NetBibWiki - containing a host of diverse information, such as a nice set of links for German studies), there is also a useful collection of RSS feeds from the library world, saved on Bloglines.

The story that took me here was a post about something called Wikia, which turns out to be Jimmy Wales' wiki company (and a relaunch of the earlier Wikicities). According to the press release:

Wikia is an advertising-supported platform for developing and hosting community-based wikis. Specifically, Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia--the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, where Wales and Beesley serve as board members.

Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights, but allow others to freely reuse their content under the GNU Free Documentation License, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.

Wikia supports the development of the open source software that runs both Wikipedia and Wikia, as well as thousands of other wiki sites. Among other contributions, Wikia plans to enhance the software with usability features, spam prevention, and vandalism control. All of Wikia's development work will, of course, be fed back into the open source code.

In a sense, then, this is yet more of the blogification of the online world, this time applied to wikis.

But I'm not complaining: if that nice Mr Wales can make some money and feed back improvements to the underlying MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia and many other wikis, all to the good. I just hope that the dotcom 2.0 bubble lasts long enough (so that's why they used the Hawaiian word for "quick" in the full name "wiki wiki").

E-commerce 2.0

It is striking how everybody is talking about Web 2.0, and yet nobody seems to mention e-commerce 2.0. In part, this is probably because few have managed to work out how to apply Web 2.0 technologies to e-commerce sites that are not directly based on selling those technologies (as most Web 2.0 start-ups are).

For a good example of what an e-commerce 2.0 site looks like, you could do worse than try Chinesepod.com (via Juliette White), a site that helps you learn Mandarin Chinese over the Net.

The Web 2.0-ness is evident in the name - though I do wish people would come up with a different word for what is, after all, just an mp3 file. It has a viral business model - make the audio files of the lessons freely available under a Creative Commons licence so that they can be passed on, and charge for extra features like transcripts and exercises. The site even has a wiki (which has some useful links).

But in many ways the most telling feature is the fact that as well as a standalone blog, the entire opening page is organised like one, with the lessons arranged in reverse chronological order, complete with some very healthy levels of comments. Moreover, the Chinesepod people (Chinese podpeople?) are very sensibly drawing on the suggestions of their users to improve and extend their service. Now that's what I call e-commerce 2.0.

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?

Wellcome Moves

The news that the Wellcome Trust has reached an agreement with three publishers of scientific journals to allow Wellcome-funded research published in their journals to be immediately available online and without charge to the reader is good news indeed.

Good because it will make large quantities of high-quality research immediately available, rather than after the tiresome six-month wait that some journals impose when providing a kind of pseudo-open access. Good, because it shows that the Wellcome Trust is willing to put its money where its mouth is, and to pay to get open access. Good, because by making this agreement with Blackwell, OUP and Springer, the Wellcome Trust puts pressure on the the top science publisher, Elsevier, to follow suit.

In fact, thinking about it, I was probably unkind to describe Nature as the Microsoft of the science world: that honour clearly belongs to Elsevier, both in terms of its power and resistance to opening up. Moreover, Nature, to its credit, now gets it about Wikipedia - it even made subscriber-only content freely available. And the conceptual distance between wikis and open access is surprisingly small; so maybe we're seeing the start of a historic shift at Nature.