jill/txt

My belly has grown a LOT since October. Only a month left now and my little boy will be born! While he’s been growing, videos have been processed, and video of the talk I gave at the Wikipedia Academy in October is now online, nicely put together so you can see the slides and me talking. I posted a summary of the talk the day I gave it - my main argument is that the current community norms in the Wikipedia discourage experts from contributing their knowledge.

I just gave a talk for Forskning.no’s seminar about research dissemination/popularisation, Fra forskning til forside v3.0. Here are the slides:

I had to leave right after my talk, because my Remix Culture students are presentating their research projects at noon, but I was able to hear Ove Dalen’s talk before mine about how to write online. He gave an engaging presentation with some interesting points: did you know that we now read more of an article presented online than we would if it were presented on paper? Also, while Jacob Nielsen in 1997 found that 80% of us scan online texts rather than reading them, that number’s dropped to around 50% according to a study by Poynter in 2009 (I’ll have to ask Ove Dalen for a more complete source for that: luckily he’s on Twitter so that’ll be easy!). Oh, and the first thing we notice on a website? The text, not the images. Ove Dalen has written a couple of books on writing for the web, and gives classes frequently, so I’ve seen his work online regularly over the last years, but this is the first time I’ve heard him speak in person.

I’m giving a talk at the Wikipedia Academy in Bergen Oct 14-15, and since it’s the Wikipedia, I thought it would be better form to plot the talk out in a blog post rather than making a shiny Powerpoint. Here’s the abstract, titled “Has Wikipedia grown up?”

[Update Jan 4, 2010: the “>video of the talk is now up]

Historically, social media sites don’t last for long. The Wikipedia has lasted far longer than most of its peers, but will it last forever?

The Wikipedia seems to have avoided the last phase - spam and monetization. Or at least, spam is largely kept at bay. Unfortunately, I think the greatest threat to the Wikipedia is its community.

I’m one of those occasional contributors who sometimes adds content about topics I’m an expert on. I find the nitty gritty editing and the debates between deletionists and inclusionists rather dull. In fact, until I started gathering links for this talk, I hadn’t logged in to my account in a few months, and was surprised to find on my talk page that one of the articles I contributed had been nominated for deletion. Fortunately nobody except the nominator wanted it deleted (one person even posted a great link to a statement by Jimmy Wales about how we should relax and accomodate someone who adds a good article about a possibly trivial thing. But really: what a wonderful confirmation of the recent articles arguing that the Wikipedia is scaring away the experts… I add information about something I’m knowledgeable about and it’s nominated for deletion by someone who calls a major research centre a “club/organization”? In both the articles I started that have been nominated for deletion, the nominator clearly knows nothing about the topic whatsoever.

My unhappy reunion with the Wikipedia easily connects to recent reports that the number of contributors to the Wikipedia is stagnating. Perhaps because there already are articles on most obvious encyclopedia topics. Or perhaps because of the Wikipedians, that tight community of copy-editors. Sue Gardner of the Wikimedia Foundation argues that the natural resource of the Wikipedia is emotion, “the rush of joy that you get the first time you make an edit to Wikipedia, and you realize that 330 million people are seeing it live”. Today most often that edit will be deleted.

And who deletes it?

The thing that surprised me the most in Jimmy Wales’ presentation on Wednesday was the extremely skewed demographics of Wikipedia contributors - 85% male, 65% or so single, almost all childless, and heavily weighted towards the under-thirties. I actually hadn’t realised how out of place I am as a contributor, old, married mother that I am. Given that the contributors are so young, male, childless and single, the idea that the Wikipedia has “grown up” seems rather out of place.

Mind you, as far as I can tell, these demographics are self-reported by heavy Wikipedia contributors, so quite likely not very representative. This preliminary survey analysis seems to be the source. Here (as a PDF) are the slides Wales spoke from, pretty much.

And the readers are a different kettle of fish. In Norway, at least, the Wikipedia is mainstream. When I tweeted about the demographics Wales presented, Petter Bae Brandtzæg, a PhD fellow at SINTEF, sent me some more info and gave me a link to slides for a talk he gave in Trondheim today with lots of statistics on Norwegian usage of social media. Slide 14 shows how huge the Wikipedia is and how fast it’s still growing. Over 2/3 of online Norwegian read it at least once a month. But slide 15 shows that daily or weekly reading is skewed by gender - 35% of men and only 21% women read the Wikipedia that often. However, Pew Internet found a far more even gender balance: in 2007, 39% of US men online read the Wikipedia, as did 34% of US women online. The differences make you wonder about the surveys’ methodologies.

[An aside: Men “define the net” Brandtzæg writes. I think that is to leave out vast portions of the net - google anything to do with children, pregnancy, home, work-life balance, crafts or fashion and you’ll find women discussing it extensively. These things are a major part of the net, though perhaps invisible to those who don’t participate in these discussions. Also, a presentation from Pew Internet given just last week gives stats showing that there are more women than men using social networking sites (see slide 8) - this is another major part of “the net” that’s left out of Brantzæg’s assertion. Regardless: I’m rather saddened that the gender differences are so traditional.]

Anyway, let’s get back to the Wikipedia. I think the question of demographics is huge. And yes, I definitely think it can scare people away. Look at any nomination for deletion, say this current nomination that the article on WoWWiki be deleted, for instance, and the bickering and aggression is really very off-putting. Someone wants it deleted because WoW is stupid. Great. Someone else thinks that numerous academic articles citing WoWWiki doesn’t show its notability because academic articles are “primary sources” and Wikipedia doesn’t allow original research in articles. Talk about misunderstanding. This discussion certainly sounds as though its being conducted by those sad 18 year old boys who can’t find girlfriends.

boyd’s law: “Adding more users to a social network [site] increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” With the Wikipedia, the problem is that it’s too good. There are so many articles out there that most of the activity is nit-picking.

Clearly we need copy-editors, which to a large extent is what “wikipedians” are. Without them, most articles would probably look like an “incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids (..) that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts”, as Nicholas Carr accused the articles on George Bush and Jane Fonda of being in 2006.

But there’s a rather dangerous balance between the copy-editors and the content-contributors. Certainly the copy-editors - the “Wikipedians” - do most of the editing. According to Aaron Schwartz in his interesting article “Who Writes Wikpedia“, Jimmy Wales has said that:

it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”

However, when Aaron Schwartz looked at several individual articles, analysing instead who had contributed the most content (i.e. words) rather than simply moved things around or formatted things, the proportions were almost reversed. Most of the content is contributed by people who have made less than 50 edits to the Wikipedia in total.

That might turn the demographics around significantly, too. Maybe 85% of the copy-editors and formatters are young, childless, single men, but occasional contributors - the people who actually write the Wikipedia - are more representative of the general population?

I love the Wikipedia, and I hate the Wikipedia. Most of what I hate about it is the bickering, the ignorance and the hidden agendas camouflaged by acronyms and templates and bragging about superior knowledge of the rules of Wikipedia. What I love about it is the content, the articles, and the freedom. I want to be able to read an article about anything I’m curious about. I’m thrilled to finally have access to a copy of something very close to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Despite the work of dedicated field researchers such as Ford Prefect, much of the contributions to the Guide are made on a strictly ad-hoc basis. With the permanent staff more likely to be on a lunch break than working, “most of the actual work got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing.”[7] This has led to the Guide being patchy in its coverage, cobbled together (Its entry on “The Universe” was copied from the back of a packet of breakfast cereal)[8] and often riddled with errors.

I want the Wikipedia to still be around in ten, fifteen, twenty years time.

I gave a talk today for the staff of Bergens Tidende, one of our regional newspapers, on social media and journalism. Slides and links follow - all in Norwegian.

Takk til @benteka, @idaaa, @jeanburgess, @andemann og @carlchristian for tilbakemeldinger underveis!

Her er noen lenker fra foredraget og steder å begynne:

• Everyblock.com gir datagenererte nyheter om amerikanske nabolag. Er det et eksempel på “asosiale medier”? Her hjemme kan vi bl.a. søke i norske solgte boliger - men informasjonen er foreløpig ikke samlet. Outside.in bruker i stedet brukerskapt innhold for å lage lokale nyheter.
• About the Norwegian “drittunge” scandal
• Jack Schafer: In Praise of Insensitive Reporters
• Washington Post: Faces of the Fallen
• Bloggurat, Sonitus.org, Google bloggsøk, valgprat.no, Norske hageblogger
• Avansert Twittersøk (prøv f.eks. å søk etter alle twitters fra Bergen)
• Mashable: The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter
• NONA: Personer journalister bør følge på Twitter, fra NONA: Nettverket for oss som jobber med nettmedier (mye om journalistikk på nettet)
• Carl Christian Grøndahl om journalister og sosiale medier
• Tvitre.no

Om det er noe jeg har glemt, skriv det gjerne inn i kommentarene!

I’m presenting my book Blogging at our university bookshop, Studia, today at 2:15 pm. If you’re in town you’re very welcome to come! I’m going to talk for 25 minutes and Studia’s serving snacks of some kind, so I think it’ll be good. (I always appreciate snacks.) Oh, it’ll be in Norwegian.

I gave a talk for local librarians on Wednesday, which ended up being about the idea that the age of print was but a short blip in the history of human culture, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, as Tom Pettitt and others have called it (see this PDF for Pettitt’s paper on the topic at MIT5), and that we’re now in the post-parenthetical period. I love the Gutenberg Parenthesis concept - it seems such a great way of explaining the changes we’re going through. But the librarians did point out some problems - for instance, why did copyright appear so late in the age of print if it’s one of the defining features of the Gutenberg Parenthesis? Ibsen didn’t actually own copyright to his own works at the end of the nineteenth century - his publisher did, though. And did I realise that early printers used to travel around from village to village and set up their portable printers and publish small runs of whatever people wanted? Well, no, I hadn’t. Well, the librarian continued, the “authority” and mass-media quality of print wasn’t an issue until Richelieu decided that the state needed more information about its citizens and suddenly required all printed material to be sent to the government - and this idea that print should be controlled by the government quickly spread to other countries. Isn’t that a great example, by the way, of how technology and culture/society are interdependent?

I think these objections merely show that the transitional periods are extremely long, and that norms and expectations based on a previous technology carry over far past the extinction of that technology. That’s why copyright extends and even increases in today’s world, despite its being largely unsuitable for today’s technology and communication.

Having thought about this all Wednesday, Thursday’s lecture to my web design students ended up circling around the same issues - and all the links and so on are summarised in the class blog [Update Sept ‘09 - Oops - a teaching assistent deleted THE WHOLE BLOG for that class so that link won’t work and all my notes are lost. GRRR!]

I enjoyed my First Tuesday Bergen experience yesterday. Interesting people at dinner beforehand, and the two other presenters gave very engaging talks from a business point of view - Rune Røsten (long-time Norwegian blog enthusiast who ran the blogs and more at Dagbladet before going to Nettby last year) talking about Nettby, the biggest Norwegian social network site at the moment (Spray Date and Blink no longer rule, though Facebook arguably has more Norwegian users), and Kjetil Manheim talking more generally about community and social sites and how businesses should think about using them - hey, his slides are already on Slideshare, cool.

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As the voice from academia I started by talking about strong and weak links, as Granovetter theorised them in the 70s, and went on to talk about how some social network sites, like LinkedIn, primarily try to help us use and develop our weak ties, whereas others, like dating sites, are more about finding new friends and contacts. Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook has become a social site where all sorts of networks are mixed - I have contacts there ranging from acquaintances from high school, students I had three semesters ago, neighbours, colleagues I met once at a conference, through to colleagues I see or talk with regularly and close friends and family. The collision of networks is one of the problems with sites like these, as “boyd’s law”, formulated by Cory Doctorow expresses: “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” According to Doctorow, that’s one of the reasons social networking sites only tend to last for a couple of years - once there are enough people in your “network” that you don’t want to have contact with you’ll move to another site. I then told boyd and Heer’s story about the teacher whose students found her Burning Man style profile on Friendster (PDF, and noted that services like Spock and Open Social are making these kinds of collision more and more likely, even when we try to keep our networks separate. danah boyd’s post yesterday was great as a round-up: Tim O’Reilly’s argument that this kind of openness is a kind of vaccination against the foolish belief that we can be private online (”We have a moral responsibility to eliminate “security by obscurity” so that people aren’t shocked when they are suddenly exposed.”) vs. danah’s argument that that’s all very well if you’re privileged, as tech geeks in Silicon Valley are, but if you’re not in a position of power - say, if you’re a teenager, or a dissident in a dictatorship, or queer in an oppressed society, or a whistle blower - that vaccination may damage you badly, or even get you killed.

I’m giving a talk for First Tuesday here in Bergen this Tuesday evening, on social networks. They got an interesting line up - Rune Røsten, who runs one of Norway’s large social networks, Nettby, is speaking, and so is Kjetil Manheim, from Tarantell. I heard Kjetil speak on Web 2.0 at the graphic designers’ conference, RELEVANS, and he was excellent; very informative and inspiring at the same time. My job is to be the academic giving perspective and cultural implications and so on, which should be fun, especially in a brief and efficient twenty minutes each.

It’s free, so if you’re in Bergen you’re welcome to attend. I think you have to sign up, but that’s it.

I’m speaking in Oslo today, at the Fleksibel læring (flexible learning) conference at the University of Oslo. Here’s the slideshow I’ll be using. It’s in Norwegian, sorry to all you non-weegies - you might be able to follow it anyway, though.

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My main point is that despite today’s students having grown up with technology, and despite their using the net extensively, they still lack very basic skills for using the net in learning at a university level - and the ways teens use the internet differently from older users (e.g. games, IM, social networking) can almost hide the fact that many of them lack skills seen as basic in what we oldies call digital literacy - such as being able to find relevant information, evaluate it, synthesize it and present it. Of course it’s also possible that they’ll simply redefine “digital literacy” so it means something else once they’re adults, but I somehow doubt it. I think actually the idea of “digital natives” is dangerous - it lets us as teachers and parents off the hook.

I absolutely love the babies on the first slide. I found them at a stock photo site, and they only cost me a dollar to download and use as much as I like with only a few reservations (I can’t make a company logo using them, or sell them to you, for instance). Actually I didn’t even pay the dollar because when you sign up you get five free credits. It’s the first time I’ve bought stock photos for presentations - usually I use creative common licenced photos (there are a few of them in the presentation too) or my own photos or I ask the photographer for permission. I love finding photos I can use as a sort of framework for building my slideshow around - my mind works well that way. And those babies are so cute.

The other improvement I’ve made to my slidemaking is using cross-platform fonts. I’ve been so fond of mac-only fonts that my slideshows look bad on Windows - or on slideshare.net. This time I found the list of fonts that both macs and Windows know about and stuck to it - and lo and behold, the result looks far better.

Tomorrow I’m guest lecturing at NHH in Ingeborg Kleppe’s class Exploring Online Consumer Communities.

I’m gong to talk about corporate blogging in general, and about the ethics of commerical blogging. Students will have their laptops, and as it’s a three-hour class there’ll be ample time for students to do some work of their own as well. I’m planning to do an in-class blog analysis session, building on the blog reviews I used to do with my web design students, and with further inspiration from Mack Collier’s Company Blog Checkup Series. I’ll show the students some examples of Mack’s posts about company blogs, too, and perhaps use his hints on how to revitalise a company blog (warning: you have to sign up for a free but advertisement-ridden membership to read that). Main points: don’t primarily try to sell stuff on the blog, it’s not a brochure (that’s your homepage) - make it a conversation: link to other sites, not just to your own site, share information about more than just your products, respond to comments, link to readers’ blogs, comment on their blogs. The advantages? You’ll get rapid feedback from customers, and customers will trust you more.

The assignment sheet I’ll hand out follows the fold, along with a list of blogs for students to analyse.
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I’m at Grafill’s Edit 8.0 conference, RELEVANS, which is being held at the lovely Dr. Holms hotel at Geilo this year. Geilo is halfway between Bergen and Oslo, high in the mountains, and the train trip here set the atmosphere with its ice-laced scenary.

RELEVANS is a graphic designers’ conference, but Tom Halsør asked me if I’d like to come and speak about my blog - because they wanted something from outside of the design world. They were interested in branding, self-portrayal, blogging, the web.

Next conference I organise I want to hire an improv actor as the announcer (konferansier) - Bård Brænde has been doing the honours here, and is doing a fabulous job. He insisted that the audience should think of my presentation as a blog itself, and should send in comments by SMS to his mobile phone - what a brilliant idea!

Here are the slides for my talk.

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Here are the slides for my bit of the panel I’m doing with Scott Rettberg and Nick Montfort on Appropriation and Collaboration in Digital Writing. Scott and Nick (who are also GrandTextAuto’s representatives here at MiT5) will talk more about artistic/writerly collaboration and appropriation, drawing on their own literary work as well as (appropriately) that of others. I’m being kind of contrary here, and also hoping to get some discussion. Our panel’s at 5 pm, so people will be exhausted - but hopefully still around, at least, since there’s a reception right after our panel.

Thanks to alev.adil, who kindly gave me permission to use her photo Mirror Mise en Abyme.

Several people have been writing about my concept of feral hypertext in the last few days (Beth Kantor, Tags/Network/Narrative, a discussion in English 518’s Course Blog (taught by Chutry) - or see Technorati’s up-to-date list), so I thought I should provide a brief description of what I mean by it, for those who don’t want to read an 8000 word PDF. Though of course, I recommend the full paper! Here’s my slideshow from the talk I gave (fonts a bit weird and notes missing, but still), followed by a quick resumé of my argument.

I proposed the term in a paper I gave at Hypertext 2005domestication of technology, that is, the way technology is becoming an everyday, safe tool for homes and businesses. I propose seeing hypertext (and the web) from the exact opposite perspective. Hypertext is a technology that was bred in captivity (i.e. in research labs), and it was intended to be used as an intimate technology, for private individuals. It started off by being tame, and it was expressly intended to help tame our overloads of information. You see this in early researcher’s focus on standardisation, typologies and various methods of disciplining links. This never really worked. Throughout the nineties, researchers anguished about the difficulties of disciplining links. They talked about being “lost in hyperspace”, about the lack of closure, about how to use breadcrumbs and guides to help users feel confident that they know exactly where they were in the confusion of links everywhere. The semantic web may be the last grand project to attempt to discipline hypertext. Research was all about keeping hypertext under control, keeping it disciplined.

Fortunately it didn’t work. Hypertext broke free and went feral, just as rabbits in Australia. We know today that we can’t discipline links. We can, however, be quite happy with a messy network of information, conversations and ideas that will never be fully under our control. We just have to give up our ideas that we can discipline it from above in an all-encompassing way. What does appear to work is decentralised organisation that matches the feral nature of the hypertext itself: folksonomies, tagging, and just accepting that the streams of information are endless and that we will never and need never try to read everything.

Feral species are glorious in their success, but they can be disastrous. Those who still think we should try to control hypertext (the web, blogs, social software) might want to combat feral hypertext as we’ve fought feral rabbits in Australia: myxomytosis, the rabbit proof fence (ban Facebook from universities! No Myspace in libraries! Block blogs in China!) but it’s not going to work. Fortunately, unlike feral rabbits, feral hypertext isn’t going to destroy us - so long as we accept that top-down control is a thing of the past.

The full paper has lots more details: Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control (PDF)

I’m speaking at Article in Stavanger today. It’s a beautiful sunny day here (finally, it’s rained for weeks, I’m sure) and the city is full of “unstable art” installations. Should be good!

This morning I’m talking about blogs and learning for my university’s Kompetanseforum i IKT og læring. I’m going to base this on my keynote in Hawaii (ssshh, don’t tell anyone that it was online and I wasn’t really in Hawaii, let me pretend I was wearing a lei on the beach) about blogs, web 2.0 and learning, and depending on what people want I’ll also talk about the Wikipedia, Flickr, and give some practical examples. The people who go to these talks have lots of ideas and experiences of their own so I’m thinking flexible is good.