15 April 2006

Notacon rocked!

The Notacaon main page has links to writeups and photos.

Phat talks I saw:


The Dial-a-dorks were on Notacon Radio for about five hours, including two hours of talking with Drew Curtis. (Although I had gone home by that point.)

It was fun!

5 comments:

tormp said...

curious for an opinion poll here. do you like jason scott's writing and/or ideas? his stuff often strikes me as long on arrogance and short on cogent arguments. of course, i have largely the same opinion of joel spolsky's writing, which is apparently heresy.

of course, someone might rightly demand that i present something resembling a cogent argument here. on the other hand, i'm not positioning myself as some kind of a pundit.

Drew said...

I thought about your question, and I came up with the following points:

1. Jason Scott and Joel Spolsky share the initials "JS". Maybe Gyr can tell us the rules of the JS club?

2. Yes, in both cases, I find JS's ideas interesting to think about. Even when I end up not agreeing, I am at least entertained.

3. The way I read it, both of them are sort of writing short essays about certain subjects. In such a piece, I expect a definite point of view and incomplete reasoning. In this way, I don't find either of them any more arrogant or inchoate than any other editorialist in, let's say, the newspaper.

mani said...

I had never heard of jason scott before i heard his wikipedia talk. I thought he really kind of missed the "truthiness" boat during his talk.

He never really got into why it's bad that the biographical details of that one dude in his example were incorrectly entered from the NYTimes article into the wikipedia article. Or why it's bad that certian articles are continuously vandalized. Or why the two aspects of wikipedia's defense ("it's just the wikipedia" and "it's the Wikipedia!") are incompatible. Or what standards he was using to judge wikipedia's success. Or how the perpetuation of knowledge should happen (pre-wikipedia, I wouldn't go to the library just because I was wondering about something, e.g.). et al.

Without getting into any of the real sticky questions about truth, he did nothing more than state the obvious.

Thumbs down for cogency.

Thumbs up insofar as I was entertained by the talk, and it gave me some stuff to think about (namely, all the questions he didn't raise).

And, yeah, arrogance. He sounds like those boingboing folks.

russ said...

First let me say that I'm an ass because I haven't taken the time to RTFA (LTTFS?).

Now, my opinion, arrogant and incogent:

Wikipedia, like Microsoft's OS (esp. in the early-mid 90s) is merely an example of network effect, and has all the inherent benefits and failings of same.

Good ole Windoze allowed a developer with a clue to put their work to the largest effect by exposing it to the largest audience. Wikipedia allows an author with a clue to present their ideas to a larger share of the web than their own small site might garner.

Unfortunately it also allows an author/developer to target more people with malicious software/information (i.e. viruses or defacing). Additionally it has the pitfall that those in control (MS/Wikipedia) may fall prey to the abuses of power -- outright censorship, bias, leveraging the power for further gain, etc.

As a friend points out, the Wikipedia is just the Web, easier to edit and all in one place. You must use your personal filter in both cases but you're able to digest the information of many more people more quickly before applying your own filters... so it's more expedient than the web.

I think it definitely presents a problem for snapshots of Wikipedia to be taken and displayed without context, but I think technology will improve to remedy this (more ubiquitous access and better methods of linking in) and really this is not a problem limited to Wikipedia as much as it is one that Wikipedia's strengths fall flat against.


As for the JS's, I generally dig the Joel but don't find any need to hold his word as gospel. Recall he has a lot of theories about software development but has pretty much outright failed at his original vision (CityDesk) and now survives on an ancillary product (FogBugz) and consulting. However he's a strong business owner making money how he wants to, working on interesting problems with interesting people. Can't knock that. The Jason I only have limited exposure to, but he was cool with a beer in hand shootin' the shit last year.

</punditry>

russ said...

WikiTruth