He argues that shooting for the head (#1) takes too much effort and money, but it doesn’t mean you have to resign yourself to life out on the thin part of the long tail (#3) — you can aim for “profit pocket #2″.

“Wikipedia is considering a basic change to its editing philosophy to cut down on vandalism. In the process, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit would add a layer of hierarchy and eliminate some of the spontaneity that has made the site, at times, an informal source of news. It well could bring some law and order to the creative anarchy that has made the site a runaway success but also made it a target for familiar criticism.
…
The German site, which is particularly vexed by vandalism, uses the system to delay changes from appearing until someone in authority (a designated checker) has verified that the changes are not vandalism. Once a checker has signed off on the changes, they will appear on the site to any visitor; before a checker has signed off, the last, checker-approved version is what most visitors will see. (There are complicated exceptions, of course. When a “checker” makes a change, it appears immediately. And registered users, who make up less than 5 percent of Wikipedia users, will also see “unchecked” versions.)”

The process adds a new category of Wikipedians, Surveyors, who are “trusted editors” able to review the tentative modifications and promote them to be “sighted pages”. There is a public test-wiki for the English Wikipedia that allows people to try out the new software.

Adding a system of positive endorsement from trusted editors is is an interesting approach that I think could work well. It’s not invulnerable to subversion and gaming, but few non-oppressive systems are. Wikipedia works as well as it does because most people are usually are reasonable cooperative. Even with the three qualifiers in the previous sentence, it works pretty well.

1. History — we remember the last 15 shortened URLs you’ve created. They’re displayed on the home page next time you go back. Cookie-based.
2. Click/Referrer tracking — Every time someone clicks on a short URL we add 1 to the count of clicks for that page and for the referring page.
3. There’s a simple API for creating short URLs from your web apps.
4. We automatically create three thumbnail images for each page you link through bit.ly, small, medium and large size. You can use these in presenting choices to your users.
5. We automatically mirror each page, never know when you might need a backup.
…

A post in ReadWriteWeb, Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future, points out some interesting ’semantic’ features.

“In the background, Bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters! Calais is something we’ve written about extensively here. Bit.ly will use Calais to determine the general category and specific subjects of all the pages its users create shortcuts to. That information will be freely available to the developer community using XML and JSON APIs as well.
    As if that’s not a whole lot of awesome already - Bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of all the web pages it collects.
    You want to see all the web pages related to the US Presidential election, Barack Obama and Asheville, North Carolina? Or about Technology, Google and The Dalles, Oregon? That will be what Bit.ly delivers if it can build up a substantial database of pages. Once it does, it will open that data up to other developers as well.”

The idea of using a URL shortening service to identify significant or interesting Web pages for further processing is a new twist. It would be great of other services with catalogs of interesting pages, like del.icio.us, did this as well. Eventually, this will be done to the entire Web, but for now, it’s too expensive. This is an interesting intermediate step.

Their site says

“HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.”

The work was done in part with support from Google, as described in a story on ABC news, Researchers Track Disease With Google News, Google.org Money

So of course we played with Akshay’s hack, hosted it on one of our university boxes for a few months, but didn’t really have the bandwidth or compute (or time) resources to keep up. Startups such as summize appeared later and provided similar functionality. For the last week or two we’ve  been moving the code of twitterment to Amazon’s cloud to restart the service. Of course, today comes the news that twitter might buy summize, quasi confirmed by Om Malik. Lesson to you grad students — if you come up with something clever, file an invention disclosure with your university’s tech transfer folks. And don’t listen to your advisors if they think that there isn’t a paper in what you’ve hacked — there may yet be a few million dollars in it

“Conrad Barski will be presenting excerpts from his new book for community feedback. Join us at Sova Espresso & Wine for a presentation from Conrad Barski, M.D. from the new book “Land of Lisp” published by No Starch Press, due this Fall. We’ll discuss Lisp and see never-before-seen comics and game examples from the book! Afterward, we’ll be talking over some wine, coffee and food at this great little hangout in DC’s H Street Corridor.”

“FIPA is currently working with the OMG on agent standardization, including an SOA standard that includes agents (SOA-Pro) and an Agent Metamodel and Profile (AMP). The Agent Metamodel and Profile RFP has many companies that are participating, including (but not limited to): HP, Unisys, CSC, Deere & Co, Thales, Metropolitan Life, SINTEF, and DFKI. If you are interested in participating, please let me know.

Any comments on the Agent Metamodel and Profile (AMP) RFP are welcomed. (The above companies and RMIT have already submitted their suggestions. The current release can be downloaded from: http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ad/2008-06-02”

The OMG Agent Platform Special Interest Group page maintains links to documents about these emerging agent standards.

“College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to download music and movies. Feeling threatened, book publishers are stepping up efforts to stop the online piracy. One Web site, called Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations. Users must simply set up a free account and download a free software program that uses a popular peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent. Other textbook-download sites are even easier to use, offering digital books at the click of a mouse.”

Text books are an interesting niche for file sharing. They are surely expensive and publishers manage to publish new editions of popular titles almost every year, undermining the market for used texts. On the other hand, digitizing a text book requires scanning it, which takes time, attention to detail, equipment, and labor. It’s not as simple as ripping a CD.

Update 7/7/08: The Chronicle of Higher Education has a follow up story, Founder of Textbook-Download Site Says Offering Free Copyrighted Textbooks Is Act of ‘Civil Disobedience’

“… But the founder of Textbook Torrents calls his actions “civil disobedience” against “the monopolistic business practices” of textbook publishers. The site’s founder, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal action against him, talked to The Chronicle over an Internet phone call last night and defended his creation, though he described it as operating in a “legal gray area.” He said he is an undergraduate at a college outside of the United States, though he would not name the institution or country, and that he operates the Web site from there. His biggest complaint: that textbooks are just too expensive, and that prices climb each year. “We’re showing both students and textbook publishers that this isn’t acceptable anymore,” he said. “A lot of users are absolutely fed up with the system.” He said he views the 64,000 registered users of his textbook-download site as votes against that system.”