Month: January 2007

Did Wikipedia Really Ban Quatar?

Of course they didn’t. But for a little while, it looked like they might have done:

Apparently Qatar has a single ISP, Qtel, with a single IP address
shared by the entire country. Wikipedia has blocked that IP address for
anonymous edits, but is allowing users of that IP address with actual
Wikipedia accounts to continue to edit articles. There’s one problem,
though. You can’t create an account if you enter Wikipedia from that IP
address.

Jimmy Wales quickly responded on the wiki talk page for the IP address in question:

Iff [sic] you came here from a news headline saying that Wikipedia has banned all of Qatar, please pop right back over there and post in the comments that the story is not true. This IP number was temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours, and a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy. In the English Wikipedia, such an action would require approval of at a minimum the English Arbitration Committee and/or me personally, and would never ever be undertaken lightly, nor without extensive attempts at direct negotiation with the ISP and/or nation in question.

To any and all reporters, from Slashdot, TechCrunch, mainstream media, etc.: You may email me and ask me for my personal cellphone number, which I will answer 24 hours a day to confirm or disconfirm any such story of this type.
–Jimbo Wales

Fair play to Wales, he does his best to put things right (he commented on the TechCrunch thread pretty quickly).

Once again, this ruckus has brought up the issue of Wikipedia requiring people to log in to edit. Wales seems set against it, determined that Wikipedia remains open.

[tags]Wikipedia, Techcrunch, Jimmy Wales[/tags]

Microformats

Stuff about microformats seem to be popping up all over the place at the moment. I first came across them in a post by Simon Dickson.

The latest piece appeared on the Read/WriteWeb blog, which in turn introduced me to a great series of posts by a Mozilla developer by the name of Alex Faaborg, in which he moots the notion that microformats might be an integral part of FireFox 3.

So what are microformats? Well, it’s all a part of the so-called ‘semantic web‘ – embedding the documents that make up the web with information that will allow computers to find stuff quicker and better. Here’s Wikipedia’s example:

For example, a computer might be instructed to list the prices of flat screen HDTVs larger than 40 inches with 1080p resolution at shops in the nearest town that are open until 8pm on Tuesday evenings. To do this today requires search engines that are individually tailored to every website being searched. A semantic web would provide a single standard for all websites to publish the relevant information.

Microformats, then are a way of embedding this metadata into html pages, or, in Faaborg’s words,

adding semantics to markup to take it from being machine readable to being machine understandable.

Sounds useful. But there’s more:

Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online. This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc.

If FireFox could understand all this stuff – and if the microformats are being used – then all sorts of things are possible, allowing all your data to be tied to the services you use, and not shoe-horning you into using a suite of web apps because they all link up nicely. You can use Gmail for your email, Zoho for your word processing and Skype for your calls, and it will all be handled for you automatically.

Here’s a graphic example of how it looks, courtesy of Mozilla:

There’s a FireFox extension out there now for handling metadata, called Operator, so you can get in on the action straight away. Check out the microformats website for more information on what can be done right now with them. But the real benefits of this technology will come in the future, when all the information scattered across the web can be brought to order.

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Vista and DRM

Quentin Stafford-Fraser (British web pioneer, who helped devise the first webcam) points to a frightening article by Peter Gutman about “Microsoft’s devotion to ‘content-protection'”. From Peter’s executive summary:

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server).

The ‘Executive Executive Summary makes things plain:

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

It’s very worthwhile reading. As Stafford-Fraser points out:

The good news is that you may be able to play Hollywood movies in high-definition on your Vista machine (as opposed to, say, on a dedicated DVD player). The bad news is that almost everything else about the PC platform will be made worse as a result.

John Naughton, author of the excellent A Brief History of the Future, has further comment:

The strange thing is that most of this DRM lunacy seems to have been created at the behest of the recording and movie industries. Microsoft is bigger than all of those companies combined…

Before Vista, I thought that anyone who willingly used a Microsoft
operating system was merely foolish; from now on, I think they will
have to be regarded as certifiable.

Like Chris Garrett, the spectre of Vista was what pushed me into switching to Ubuntu for my main OS – though my conversion was more successful than Chris’, who eventually went and bought a Mac.

The growth in number and sophistication of web services will further make the OS irrelevant. It’s perfectly possible to imagine a situation not too far in the future where all media, whether movies, music, tv, radio is all held online, accessible on demand. DRM won’t be an issue, because people can view the stuff they’ve paid for wherever they are. The sooner we get to that position, the better.

In the meantime, get yourself a quick, reliable and open operating system. And compared to Vista, Windows XP probably counts.

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When is a Blog not a Blog?

Mike Arrington has opened up a storm of a debate over at TechCrunch, criticising the official Google blog for not allowing comments. He’s picking the issue up from a post by Zoli Erdos. He asks

Is a blog really a blog if there are no reader comments?

It’s an interesting question, but the answer is pretty obvious. Yes, of course it’s still a blog.

As Arrington notes, most definitions of a blog is a regularly updated website with content in reverse-chronological order. I reckon that’s about right.

Comments are nice, but not a requirement. John Naughton’s blog, for example, doesn’t have comments open, but that doesn’t make his site into something other than a blog. It’s not something I would personally do, but on a popular blog, the moderating of comments could turn into a serious business. If Google allowed comments on their blog, they’d probably have to employ someone full time just to deal with them.

And people can still comment on the articles, through their own blogs. Such comments will soon be found through Technorati, or Google’s own blog search.

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