Persistent Search for the Ideal? I Think Not

Baidu.com, Google's main rival in China, has launched its own version of Wikipedia (called Baidu Baike). It turns out that Baidu's name is rather poetic. According to the site:

"Baidu" was inspired by a poem written more than 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty. The poem compares the search for a retreating beauty amid chaotic glamour with the search for one's dream while confronted by life's many obstacles. "…hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood." Baidu, whose literal meaning is hundreds of times, represents persistent search for the ideal.

Alas, neither Baidu nor Baidu Baike show much evidence of that persistent search for the ideal, since they censor great swathes of knowledge. The real, warts-and-all Wikipedia has some details:

According to Baidu Baike's policies, these kinds of articles or comments would be deleted:

1. pornographic or violent articles
2. advertising
3. politically reactionary content
4. personal attacks
5. unethical content
6. malicious, meaningless content

The third point is particularly notable, as the content of the encyclopedia will have to satisfy Chinese government censors. There are no articles about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, "六四" (literaly "six four", a common acronym for the protest), human rights ("人权"), democracy ("民主") or Falungong ("法轮功"). In fact, due to the effects of Great Firewall of China, attempts to search for these terms from some domains lead to denial of access to the Baidu search engine for several minutes, even for users outside China.

The last point is interesting. As this blog posting explains, if you cut and paste the Chinese characters for terribly naughty words like "democracy" (民主) into Baidu,

Not only will you receive no response, but you won’t be able to access the site again for a while. First-hand evidence of censorship.

Maybe we should all give it a whirl to show our unquenchable interest in concepts such as democracy: let's just call it a persistent search for the ideal.

Meta-Social Networking

Social networking sites have always seemed rather pointless to me: I mean, OK, so you've got lots of friends. And?

Maybe CollectiveX is the answer. This seems to be a social network for social networks. There's a good explanation at TechCrunch.

Not that I'd ever want to be a member of a meta-social network that would have me as a member.

OpenStreetMap Takes the Path of Stallman

There's a piece in the Guardian about OpenStreetMap's Isle of Wight effort. I was struck by this wonderful quotation:

The weekend drew around 40 people. By Monday, OpenStreetMap's founder Steve Coast estimated that more than 90% of the island's roads had been recorded. When asked if volunteers used OS [Ordnance Survey] maps, Coast says: "No. It's a taboo." Someone who did pull out an OS map was told to put it away immediately.

Which is precisely analogous to Richard Stallman's attitude when he started GNU, his project to create a benevolent Doppelgänger of the Unix operating system. This is what he told me for Rebel Code:

"I certainly never looked at the source code of Unix. Never. I once accidentally saw a file, and when I realised it was part of Unix source code, I stopped looking at it." The reason was simple: The source code "was a trade secret, and I didn't want to be accused of stealing that trade secret," he says. "I condemn trade secrecy, I think it's an immoral practice, but for the project to succeed, I had to work within the immoral laws that existed."

Google Strives for More Openness...

...says the BBC.

And about bloomin' time too: the cognitive dissonance between what the company enables externally - opening up all kinds of conversations, both human- and machine-based - and what the company enforces internally, like clamping down hard on staff who blog, is becoming downright painful.

Indeed, it will be hard to believe that Google really gets it until it starts to practice what millions of its customers already know: that the future belongs to openness.

The Digital Sum of Human Knowledge

Most of us think of open access as a great way of reading the latest research online, so there is an implicit assumption that open access is only about the cutting edge. This also flows from the fact that most open access journals are recent launches, and those that aren't usually only provide content for volumes released after a certain (recent) date, for practical reasons of digital file availability, if nothing else.

This makes the joint Wellcome Trust and National Libary of Medicine project to place 200 years of biomedical journals online by scanning them a major expansion not just to the open access programme, but to the whole concept of open access.

It also hints at what the end-goal of open access must be: the online availability of every journal, magazine, newspaper, pamphlet, book, manuscript, tablet, inscription, statue, seal and ostracon that has survived the ravages of history - the digital sum of all written human knowledge.

On the Bolivian Commons

An interesting alternative view of the recent events in Bolivia as a kind of re-creation of the commons there.

Anti-ODF Stuff Turns Nasty

With his customary sharpness, Andy Updegrove skewers a particularly nasty piece of lobbyist punditry. The statement in question manages to twist the news that Massachusetts is calling for an ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office - an eminently sensible thing to do, which the open source world is keen to support - into some kind of act of desperation.

It then goes on:

the Massachusetts ODF policy ... is a biased, open source only preference policy. We believe such preference policies exclude choice, needlessly marginalize successful marketplace options, and curtail merit-based selections for state procurements. In short, they disserve citizens who demand cost-effective solutions for their hard-earned tax dollars.

This is rich. It is factually incorrect - there is no open source only preference policy; it is hyperbolic - the idea of Microsoft Office being "marginalised" is droll, to say the least, as is the idea that "successful marketplace options" deserve to have their near-monopolies preserved; and ultimately (wilfully) misses the point, which is that a truly open standard is the only way to guarantee future access to files, the only way to allow competition among software manufacturers, and so the only way to provide "choice" and the "merit-based", "cost-effective" solution the statement purports to espouse.

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.

British Music Industry See the Light - A Bit

I've written often enough about the rapacious, egotistical, and totally unreasonable demands of the recorded music industry when it comes to copyright, so it behoves me to record when part of it seems to be doing the right thing - at least, to a certain extent.

Apparently, the guardians of the British music industry, the BPI, have actually recommended to the on-going Gowers Review of "intellectual property" that you and I be allowed to copy our own CDs and records for personal use.

Now, you might have thought you could do that anyway, but in the UK the current legislation doesn't really allow it (but that's not surprising, since it was probably drafted when music technology meant men in tights playing lutes). So, two cheers for the BPI.

Well, maybe one: its Web site is still a pretty unedifying spectacle, full of the usual veiled threats to parents over their children's use of P2P software, and plenty of fanciful avast-there-me-hearties pirate stuff. But credit where credit's due: the Gowers submission is a step in the right direction. (Via TechDirt.)

Open Knowledge Development

The Open Knowledge Foundation has some thoughts on the principles of open knowledge develoment:

Open knowledge means porting much more of the open source stack than just the idea of open licensing. It is about porting many of the processes and tools that attach to the open development process — the process enabled by the use of an open approach to knowledge production and distribution.

New Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Actually, I was wrong: wikis aren't the only form of open collaborations that are thriving. Remixes are coming on strong too. As well as the mother ship at ccMixter, there's now this great offering, courtesy of two of my favourite artists: David Byrne and Brian Eno.

British "Library", National Disgrace

A stunningly good - and staggeringly depressing - article on Groklaw examines how the British Library has sold its intellectual soul for a mess of DRM'ed pottage.

Groklaw explains in appalling detail how it is now a waste of time trying to get anything digital from the BL, since it will be locked down with idiotic DRM, will require you to sign away all rights past, present and future (and those of your family, dog and local hairdresser) and probably won't work on any system not identical to the one that sits on Bill Gates' desk.

Somebody should have told the BL that you need a long spoon when you sup with the devil, but having chosen Microsoft as its "partner" (i.e. the brain surgeon carrying out the frontal lobotomy), it now cannot think straight. Worse, it wants to spread its spongiform encephalopathy to the nascent European Digital Libary.

The so-called British "Library", as we must now call it, is a total and utter disgrace to the country.

Painless Micropayments

This is nice: a system that lets you pay tiny amounts to sites as you float through them - without needing to do anything.

Nice, because it all happens in the background; nice because it builds on the fundamental assumption that people are, well, nice. (Via Bubblegeneration.)

The Elephant Has Landed

No, not that elephant, this elephant (via LXer).

Enter the Graphiki: a Wiki for Graphics

Wikis are a striking success. I don't just mean the epistemological juggernaut that is Wikipedia: there are now hundreds, perhaps thousands, of wikis springing up everywhere. And that's just on the public Web: they are also cropping on corporate intranets, though not visible to anyone outside the company concerned.

But what's striking about this rash of open collaboration is that it is all textual: there is nothing equivalent for images. Or at least until now: with the arrival of kollabor8 we have perhaps the first glimmerings of what a graphics wiki - a graphiki? - might look like.

The idea is simple: somebody uploads an image, someone else edits it and passes it on. As with wikis, the result can be an improvement, or just a mess. Occasionally, it produces something really striking. (Via eHub).

More BitTrickle than BitTorrent...

...but it's a start. Warner Bros, not always the most clueful of studios, has signed up to use the wonderful BitTorrent as a way of distributing its films and television shows. Yes, people: the peer-to-peer (P2P) file transfer protocol BitTorrent is the solution, not the problem.... (via C|net).

Update: Techdirt digs a little deeper, and points out some limitations of the deal.

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....

The EU Bottles Out

I wrote recently about the approval of ODF as an ISO standard, and how this might open the way for it to be backed by the EU. But now comes this story from Ingrid Marson: since she is usually impeccably informed, it is (sadly) likely to be true.

According to the report, for some reason the EU in the shape of the memorably-named Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens (understandably known to its friends as IDABC) is bottling out of outright recommendation, and sitting on the fence instead. I just have one thing to say to the lot of them: infâmes.

How to Flaunt Your OPML

When the history of computing in the 1990s comes to be written, the name of Dave Winer will figure quite a few times. For those with long memories, he was a pioneer in the field of outliners like ThinkTank, but he is probably best known for his work on blogs, both in terms of drafting the indispensable RSS standard, and his use of pings to track blog updates.

Now he's at it again, setting up Share Your OPML.

Few will have heard of Outline Processor Markup Language (there's the ThinkTank link), but that may well change with the new site, which uses OPML to collate blog subscription lists from RSS aggregators (or similar) in order to extract higher-level information. In effect, it provides a new cut of the blogosphere, showing things like the top 100 feeds, and who the most prolific subscribers are.

In other words, it'll become another occasion for some healthy geek competition. But it does also serve a potentially more useful role by offering other feeds you might like on the basis of what you already read: think Amazon.com's suggestion service for blogs.

Interestingly, Winer describes this new idea as "A commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy." Watch out, it's that meme again....

Cluelessness in the Echo Chamber

I've already dealt with the daft idea of open source being "acquired en masse" elsewhere. I'm just surprised that it took the great echo chamber of so-called market analysis so long before chiming in on this cracked note.

O Happy, Happy Digital Code

My book Digital Code of Life was partly about the battle to keep genomic and other bioinformatics information open. So it's good to see the very first public genomic database, now EMBL, spreading its wings and mutating into FELICS (Free European Life-science Information and Computational Services) with even more bioinformatics goodies freely available (thanks to a little help from the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics, the University of Cologne, Germany, and the European Patent Office).

A Rough Cut of the Beta Book Idea

Books are lovely objects, but problematic in terms of their content - once they're published, you can't correct the errors easily. But here's an idea: publish beta versions of books, so that at least some of the bugs can be ironed out before they're published.

O'Reilly have taken the plunge, and kudos to them. One thing: given that the beta-testers are adding value, shouldn't they at least get the nascent titles free? (Via Linux-Watch.)

Get the Facts: Open Access in India

Richard Poynder offers an interesting interview with Professor Subbiah Arunachalam on open access in India, conducted with his customary thoroughness and professionalism.

What's so good about this piece is that it fleshes out all the generalities people (like me) make about how open access can be helpful for developing nations, where a huge amount of knowledge is generated, but little is let through by the traditional gatekeepers of the Western academic tradition.

This is in addition to flows in the other direction, which allow those with modest library budgets to access leading-edge research in freely-available journals like those published by the Public Library of Science.

The Law According to Wikocracy

We've had Openlaw, where anyone can contribute information to the crafting of a legal argument; now we've got Wikocracy, where anyone can edit and revise laws (via Bubblegeneration).

After Open Access

A truly fascinating piece by Clifford Lynch explores what might be possible once we have total open access to scholarly writings, and can apply computation to this mass of raw data in an unfettered way. As he points out:

The opportunities are truly stunning. They point towards entirely new ways to think about the scholarly literature (and the underlying evidence that supports scholarship) as an active, computationally enabled representation of knowledge that lives, grows and interacts with its contributors rather than as a passive archive or record. They suggest ways in which information technology can accelerate the rate of scientific discovery and the growth of scholarship. It would be a disgrace if we allowed the inertia of historic scholarly publishing practices and the intellectual property arrangements that underlie these patterns to foreclose such opportunities. Open access offers an important simplification and reduction of the barriers if its development is shaped in a way that is responsive to these opportunities, although it is certainly not a panacea in its current form.

(Via Open Access News).

Update: Don's miss this splendid interview with Lynch: I wish I were half as articulate....