Gutenberg galaxy lags behind the shapeless web world
January 28, 2008
“Billions of web sources” sounds abstract. “Billions of stars” sounds like a universe. John Naughton points out in his Observer article how the Gutenberg universe evolves into a much less-known and difficult to envision world of web. The web transformed the processes of thinking and knowledge-gathering in a rather more dramatic way then even the Gutenberg bible did, Naughton writes.
Alan Moore reacts to the Observer article on his Communities Dominate Brands blog, and raises new challenges to the understanding of the digital world. “The point is,” Moore writes, “that our once familiar analogue world, which we understood, no longer exists in our digital universe.”
Picture: Flickr
Multi-language Facebook would claim world hegemony in social networking
January 25, 2008
Jennifer Woodard Maderazo digs in to discover why the all-English Facebook plays such a universal game and wins over the native-language social networks in non-English-speaking countries like Turkey, on the MediaShift blog.
It was initially designed for “a very specific audience” – American Ivy leage college students. Now, Facebook has infiltrated not only the American pop culture, but has also gained audiences worldwide, Jennifer writes. Australia and Canada are of no surprise, but there are less Anglo-Saxon countries out there that embraced Facebook as their first choice social network site.
Jenniver points out how language-independent the service gets, and even adjusts dynamically to a culture that is very different from the Western. For example in Turkey, users have developed applications that dub online the cultural traditions of the nation – sending “meze,” a Turkish entrée, from “one table to another.” This universality, adjustability and cleanness of its design generally allow Facebook to beat the existing local options, the author writes.
As a downside, in some countries users experience a social pressure to accept as friends people they wouldn’t necessarily call so just because the society asks for it. Jennifer also points out some other shortcomings that annoy the spam-tired user.
On a coincidental note, Nick O’Neill announced on allfacebook.com the network’s intention to go multi-language. Reportedly, Facebook would use crowdsourcing for translating its content, to defer the costless translation to “third party [application] developers who unlike Facebook will not necessarily have the financial backing to have their [applications] translated,” Craig Bovis writes in a comment on the same blog.
Picture: pbs.org
Google to dominate internet knowledge disseminations?
December 14, 2007
Google aims at combinging the better sides of Wikipedia, about, and Mahala, to name a few of online knowledge-dissemination services, writes PG on Personomies.com.
The new services, recently announced by Google, the knolt, will give the e-authors what they’ve been lacking so far: credit.
Google’s approach will be to have a world-wide team of experts who would submit writings on specific topics, would get peer-reviewed and edited by the whole online community, and rated, using crowd-wisdom, the author writes. All this – keeping the name, picture and references of the original author.
The Google giant seems to be aiming at wide, source-backed dissemination of knowledge, intending the knolt as the first search hit on its subject. Google promises to prioritize the competing knolts, as it claims competition would only benefit the subject, based on a rating system. The more good marks the merrier.
With credited authors, thousands of edits and peer reviews and mass rating, Google seems to be leading a yet another breakthrough in Internet knowledge dissemination.
Picture: Googleblog