Looks like the viral marketing has been working well for Firefox 3. You can keep track of the progression at the download counter page.
It would be interesting if they released a graph of downloads per hour.
2008-06-18
Wikia Search Again
Two weeks after my last rant, I just would like to say that I feel things are working better in the project now. People are being able to discuss ideas and there is better communication about what is going on.
2008-06-03
Wikia Search New Launch
Today a message has been sent by Jimmy Wales to the Wikia Search Mailing List:
My first question is how the other people who wrote reviews knew about it already. Did they find out by themselves as soon as the got up in the morning, or were they told about it? And in this second case, they were told by whom? Anyway, the real question is how come the list of people who are really interested in the project never knows what is going on in it?!
Is Jimmy Wales following Jason Calacanis strategy and thinking the main advantage of having a community is doing viral marketing of their product? But hey, the people subscribed to the Wikia Search list knew that the new features of Mahalo were being launched before it was publicly announced! So looks like Calacanis is doing a much better job at that. To be fair, Jeremie Miller told us they planned to launch the new features sometime (almost one month ago), when John McCormac asked if there was any updates. Now let's compare that with the almost daily updates that I received when I was in the Mahalo list.
So, basically, this is how it works: if you are a developer, maybe you can find your way through the code (after you find the code itself, which isn't exactly a straightforward task), and then you can try to contribute. From the activity I see on the dev lists they don't talk much to each other, but it is enough to get things done. However, there is one not so little problem with this approach: although they say the project is open source, there is no license! And if you aren't a developer, your contribution is limited to promoting the site and using it.
Now, about using the site. They really have new cool features! The interface improved a lot and you have much better control over the search results. You can not only give a rating to each link, but also edit, delete, add, etc. I think this is how it should have been from day one. There is even a feature in which you can change the background of a search result to add a relevant image. On the other hand, the index doesn't seem to be that much better. It's still missing lots of sites and sometimes the same site appears more than once. So I'm not sure it is really ready to be used in large scale yet, what is important to get the critical mass needed to make collaborative production work.
Wikia Search started as four organizational principles: Transparency, Community, Privacy, and Quality. But the real work is done by a small group, cathedral style, ignoring feedback that comes from the outside. So far the search quality isn't high and even the privacy isn't that much respected considering anyone can see the IP of the people who edited anything on the search results.
But it is slowly getting better. Let's see what comes next. Maybe they will even figure out how people can actually play a larger role in it.
Just pinging this list to make sure everyone here is seeing the new
launch today... lots of new features, new and much better index, etc.
Getting favorable reviews so far...
My first question is how the other people who wrote reviews knew about it already. Did they find out by themselves as soon as the got up in the morning, or were they told about it? And in this second case, they were told by whom? Anyway, the real question is how come the list of people who are really interested in the project never knows what is going on in it?!
Is Jimmy Wales following Jason Calacanis strategy and thinking the main advantage of having a community is doing viral marketing of their product? But hey, the people subscribed to the Wikia Search list knew that the new features of Mahalo were being launched before it was publicly announced! So looks like Calacanis is doing a much better job at that. To be fair, Jeremie Miller told us they planned to launch the new features sometime (almost one month ago), when John McCormac asked if there was any updates. Now let's compare that with the almost daily updates that I received when I was in the Mahalo list.
So, basically, this is how it works: if you are a developer, maybe you can find your way through the code (after you find the code itself, which isn't exactly a straightforward task), and then you can try to contribute. From the activity I see on the dev lists they don't talk much to each other, but it is enough to get things done. However, there is one not so little problem with this approach: although they say the project is open source, there is no license! And if you aren't a developer, your contribution is limited to promoting the site and using it.
Now, about using the site. They really have new cool features! The interface improved a lot and you have much better control over the search results. You can not only give a rating to each link, but also edit, delete, add, etc. I think this is how it should have been from day one. There is even a feature in which you can change the background of a search result to add a relevant image. On the other hand, the index doesn't seem to be that much better. It's still missing lots of sites and sometimes the same site appears more than once. So I'm not sure it is really ready to be used in large scale yet, what is important to get the critical mass needed to make collaborative production work.
Wikia Search started as four organizational principles: Transparency, Community, Privacy, and Quality. But the real work is done by a small group, cathedral style, ignoring feedback that comes from the outside. So far the search quality isn't high and even the privacy isn't that much respected considering anyone can see the IP of the people who edited anything on the search results.
But it is slowly getting better. Let's see what comes next. Maybe they will even figure out how people can actually play a larger role in it.
2008-05-27
Wiki Books
Once Alexander Pope wrote
But I'd like to share with you some books written collaboratively that are worth reading:
- The Wealth of the Networks
- Code 2.0
- Wikinomics Playbook
Forever reading, never to be readThat is what is happening here. Lately I've been too busy reading so I didn't have time to write on this blog.
But I'd like to share with you some books written collaboratively that are worth reading:
- The Wealth of the Networks
- Code 2.0
- Wikinomics Playbook
2008-05-08
Wikia Search Hype Cycle
The graphic above is known as the Gartner Hype Cycle. Wikia Search had its peak of inflated expectation on January 7th, and this is where I think it is now.
Are you going to help take it to the next level?
2008-05-07
Meta-info
I'll use this post to explain about the title: Iridescence is an optical phenomenon in which the color seen in a surface changes according to the angle of view. This means that when more than one person is looking at the same thing from different perspectives they can be seeing different colors. This is how the stuff I plan to write about here works: different people see each project by their own point of view and contribute to it in a holistic way, creating a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The name Iridescence is based on the Iris character from the Greek mythology, a messenger who travelled around bringing news to the mortals, and as such can represent the communication power of the Internet.
Update: change of plans, this blog isn't moving anywhere for now.
Update: change of plans, this blog isn't moving anywhere for now.
2008-04-26
Navigating the Ocean of Information - Past, Present and Future
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, considered the grandfather of hypertext, was already concerned about the information explosion in which we live today. In his essay As We May Think he wrote: "The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships."
Since then, with the emergence of the Internet and the evolution of the search engines, great progress has been made in this area. In the beginning, when the available information was very limited, a simple pattern matching to search for words was enough to return to the users the relevant documents. Because the number of documents was small, the user was able to rapidly inspect the results and decide if he had found the information he was looking for or not.
As more information was added to the world wide web, more advanced techniques to rank search results were needed, since it was no longer viable for the user to analyze all documents that contained the keyword. Many heuristics are used to try to determine the relevance of a document in relation to a keyword, such as its presence in the title of the page, the number of times it appears divided by the total number of words, the distance between the searched terms in a document, etc. In the same manner, information external to the document is also used to determine its relevance, such as anchor texts of other sites that link to it.
Ranking algorithms that take better advantage of external information tend to present better results. With the increasing volume of information available, companies desire better visibility in search engines results, a fact which gave birth to the area called Search Engine Optimization. The information contained inside a document is easily manipulated, therefore it is easy for a company to create a site with poor quality content that appears among the first results of specific queries. On the other hand, changing the relative importance that other people attribute to a site is more difficult. This led search engines to start using algorithms that give more weight to pages linked to by other important pages, the most famous algorithm being PageRank developed by the Google founders. In this case, the relevance of a link is determined through a collaborative production, in which all sites in the search engine database participate, lowering the impact that local optimization techniques could have in the global results, bringing better results to all of the users of the search engine.
Yet, specialists in Search Engine Optimization develop techniques to try to cheat even the more advanced algorithms by, for instance, buying several domains that link to each other, or paying sites with high visibility to include links to their sites. It is a constant war between search engines and spammers, the former trying to improve their algorithms and increase their computation power, while the latter study new ways to increase the visibility of their sites.
However, a new model to determine what is interesting in the Internet has been gaining more space in the last years. Instead of leaving the work to determine the relevance of a document solely to an algorithm that makes a superficial analysis of the whole Internet production, communities of people interested in the subject adopt this task, constantly providing and updating data about the quality of the documents. Many people believe this will be the future of the search engines. One such example is Wikia.
But how will people and algorithms interact, in some sort of Human-based computation, to achieve the best results? This question is far from a definitive answer, but rests upon the many people interested in working together for a solution.
Since then, with the emergence of the Internet and the evolution of the search engines, great progress has been made in this area. In the beginning, when the available information was very limited, a simple pattern matching to search for words was enough to return to the users the relevant documents. Because the number of documents was small, the user was able to rapidly inspect the results and decide if he had found the information he was looking for or not.
As more information was added to the world wide web, more advanced techniques to rank search results were needed, since it was no longer viable for the user to analyze all documents that contained the keyword. Many heuristics are used to try to determine the relevance of a document in relation to a keyword, such as its presence in the title of the page, the number of times it appears divided by the total number of words, the distance between the searched terms in a document, etc. In the same manner, information external to the document is also used to determine its relevance, such as anchor texts of other sites that link to it.
Ranking algorithms that take better advantage of external information tend to present better results. With the increasing volume of information available, companies desire better visibility in search engines results, a fact which gave birth to the area called Search Engine Optimization. The information contained inside a document is easily manipulated, therefore it is easy for a company to create a site with poor quality content that appears among the first results of specific queries. On the other hand, changing the relative importance that other people attribute to a site is more difficult. This led search engines to start using algorithms that give more weight to pages linked to by other important pages, the most famous algorithm being PageRank developed by the Google founders. In this case, the relevance of a link is determined through a collaborative production, in which all sites in the search engine database participate, lowering the impact that local optimization techniques could have in the global results, bringing better results to all of the users of the search engine.
Yet, specialists in Search Engine Optimization develop techniques to try to cheat even the more advanced algorithms by, for instance, buying several domains that link to each other, or paying sites with high visibility to include links to their sites. It is a constant war between search engines and spammers, the former trying to improve their algorithms and increase their computation power, while the latter study new ways to increase the visibility of their sites.
However, a new model to determine what is interesting in the Internet has been gaining more space in the last years. Instead of leaving the work to determine the relevance of a document solely to an algorithm that makes a superficial analysis of the whole Internet production, communities of people interested in the subject adopt this task, constantly providing and updating data about the quality of the documents. Many people believe this will be the future of the search engines. One such example is Wikia.
But how will people and algorithms interact, in some sort of Human-based computation, to achieve the best results? This question is far from a definitive answer, but rests upon the many people interested in working together for a solution.
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