Monday is a travel day: It’s not cold enough for me in Nashville, so during the coming couple of days, I thought I’d travel to places with snow in their forecasts. Just the thing to get one in the Christmas holiday spirit.

Buzzword attenuation: What Kathy Sierra said: “A buzz-phrase should explictly state how it directly benefits the user.“

Observation: I guess it’s not just me.

Technorati Tags: web2.0

What Scott Adams said: “There are a lot of jobs that I wouldn’t want, and “third highest ranking al-Qaida leader” is right at the top. But I can tell you for sure that if I ever got that job, the first thing I’d do is narc out one of the top two guys so I could move up a notch. Apparently one of the perks of being in the top two is having a really, really good hiding place. The number 3 through 10 leadership guys are pretty much scurrying between mud huts and looking at the sky a lot.”

Technorati Tags: humor

Magazine viral marketing gimmick of the year: Yes, you too can have your picture above Times Square as Time magazine’s “person of the year” (for eight seconds). And please, before anyone says this is Web 2.0, let’s recall Joe Boxer, 1995.

Technorati Tags: magazines

Where have all the boys gone? (From today’s Washington Post): “Colleges and universities across the country are grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated.”

Technorati Tags: demographics

Use Wikipedia as a gateway to facts, not a source of them: I am a fan of John Seigenthaler Sr. He is a great man and a legend to many (including me) here in Nashville. I feel sick that a man who has done so many great things was heinously libeled in a Wikipedia entry.

What happened to Mr. Seigenthaler is unfortunate, and if it happend to me and I had access to the platform, I also would use USA Today to go after low-lifes who would assasinate my character. John Seigenthaler has never been a back-down sort of guy. And after a story in Sunday’s News York Times, he will become poster victim for everyone who has experienced the darkside potential of Wikipedia.

But Wikipedia is not the problem. Something resembling accuracy will typically win-out in a Wikipedia war. It’s like watching sausage being made, but there is typically some wisdom in the crowds who work on entries. The debate that goes on in the creation and development of a Wikipedia post is an amazing thing to watch. I highly recomend John Udell’s screencast, “Heavy metal umlaut: the movie,” as a fun way to observe this process.

The problem is how people use Wikipedia. You learned the key to using Wikipedia before kindegarten, but you’ve forgotten it. I mean, really: How many times did your parents tell you, “Don’t believe everything that you read or hear!” Wikipedia, friends, is what they were talking about.

I agree with Dave Winer (who has been on the victim of lots of Wikipedia malicioius graffitists and axe-grinders), who wrote yesterday, “the bigger problem is that Wikipedia is so often considered authoritative. That must stop now, surely. Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest”

I’ll be even more blunt: You’re crazy if you take what you read in Wikipedia at face value. Don’t do that with what you read anywhere. Don’t do it with newspapers or magazines. But especially don’t do it with a personal medium like blogging (especially not this one) or a collaborative one like Wikipedia.

Use Wikipedia as a gateway to facts, not as a source of facts. People who make Wikipedia entries often have personal (and passionate) points-of-view on the topic that taint their contributions with a clear bias. If it’s a tech-oriented or political topic, this often leads to months-long feuds and flames. Accuracy often takes months (if ever) to achieve and truth can have many sides.

Despite those caveats regarding how it should be used and scrutinized, I’m committed to the radically-opened Wikipedia model — especially, with certain filtering and judgement tools that will no-doubt evolve. I will be writing on this topic much more in the coming weeks, I feel certain. Along with a dozen or so others, I spent a couple years of my life pondering the dynamics of trust online in the context of collaborative knowledge sharing. There are ways to address the problems. Trust me. (Or don’t.)

Technorati Tags: nashville, wiki