wikis

Wired: Listening Post: Amazon Takes On Wikipedia With Editable Music Data

Wednesday, 3 September 2008, 09:10

Amazon launches user-editable music database: "To get the ball rolling, Amazon has included music information from its retail site as well as data from the Internet Movie Database and Musicbrainz … As with Wikipedia, users can edit this information, but not directly. All changes must be vetted by Amazon staff before appearing on the site."

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A crash course in journalism and Web 2.0

Monday, 22 January 2007, 10:46

A lot of people have been linking to the new issue of Nieman Reports, a special issue titled “Goodbye Gutenberg” and about the transformations happening in newspaper journalism and the rush to digital.

There’s a lot to get through, but a good place to start is the introduction to Journalism and Web 2.0 by Francis Pisani. It begins with a summary of the always-controversial discussion of what “2.0″ actually means, and then admonishes journalists to take note of these developments even if they can’t see the immediate relevance to their craft as it is traditionally understood:

Change starts at the edges. That’s where people—our readers and viewers—probe new practices. That’s also where their emerging culture is forming, a culture in which they look at media from a different perspective. And so journalists’ new thinking needs to begin at the periphery, where change comes quickly among the younger generation of users, and a lot more slowly for us. Tomorrow’s potential readers are using the Web in ways we can hardly imagine, and if we want to remain significant for them, we need to understand how. Yet news organizations have been all too slow to notice movement in places that are away from what has been their center. 

In remarkably few words, Pisani runs through the effect on traditional media being caused by the ideas underlying Google, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Digg, Newsvine, and news mashups like ChicagoCrime.org. Blogging, citizen journalism and RSS are covered, too. It’s an invaluable crash-course introduction.

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A wiki for leaking secrets

Thursday, 4 January 2007, 18:13

The discerning modern whistleblower knows that making a little public-interest disclosure no longer requires cloak-and-dagger games with journalists — these days, you can just post your revelations on YouTube.

But if that option doesn’t allow enough privacy, there’s always Wikileaks, a new service reported by Secrecy News.

Wikileaks which claims to offer “an uncensorable version of WikiPedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis”. The site’s creators told Secrecy News that it is aimed primarily at those working in repressive regimes, but could also be used by those in government or corporations in democratic states.

Although not yet fully live, the site already contains a document purportedly by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, leader of Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union.

There could be problems for something like this, though.

“In the absence of accountable editorial oversight, publication can more easily become an act of aggression or an incitement to violence, not to mention an invasion of privacy or an offense against good taste,” wrote Steven Aftergood, explaining why Secrecy News declined an invitation to serve on the site’s advisory board.

Accountable editorial oversight? How quaint.

Aftergood seems to be making the right call. As we saw with the Saddam hanging video this week, gatekeeping is over. There is no way to require “accountable editorial oversight” as a barrier to entry to the public sphere anymore — a determined leaker will find a way to publicise their material online. But that doesn’t mean a responsible journalist has to cooperate with a project that carries a high risk of being used irresponsibly and seems to abdicate all responsibility for the actions of its users.

Update: SpyBlog has some technical questions for Wikileaks.

Update2: Federal Times has a few more details.

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