Friday, January 20th, 2006 10:56 pm GMT +8

One of the memes of web 2.0 is the Wisdom of the crowd.? I’ve always been suspicious that the wisdom of the crowd is not always that wise.? A couple of weeks ago, an O’Reilly Network editor was accused of stealing Digg’s CSS pages.? Problem one is that this accusation was completely false.? Problem two, the real problem, is the matter of hundreds of
thousands of readers and thousands of active voters voting up the
article about how “O’Reilly writer Steve Mallett” is a thief and a
spammer.

This isn’t the first time at Digg.com where the mob mentality has taken over.? For example, at the time of writing, this digg.com search gave two stories; The first has over 2100 diggs, the latter has 20 or so.

The first is the outrage of the mob that loves the idea that Bush is evil and so assumes the story MUST be true. The retraction, in which the student admits he pulled it all out of his ass has gotten 20 diggs (over 2 weeks later).

Importantly, Digg makes no attempt to check the veracity and accuracy of any of these postings. Yes, the notion is that the other Digg readers will do the fact checking, but that notion is of dubious credibility and, in any case, happens after the fact, The time to check veracity and accuracy is prior to publication.

From Popular elements of a 2006 web site or service:

A lot of the features and functionality of so-called Web 2.0 sites are now common elements in most current web apps and sites. It’s really gone beyond what was labelled ‘Web 2.0′ last year, because so many mainstream websites are now using these elements.

The features listed in the arcticle include:

• Tagging – the process of labeling a piece of content with metadata. del.icio.us and Flickr were two early examples, but recently we’ve started to see tagging adopted by more mainstream companies such as Amazon. Tags are really just keywords, so there’s no reason most websites can’t utilize them more to help their users navigate.
• Aggregation – User-generated content makes up such a large proportion of the data in many web apps these days, so it is essential that there is an effective way to aggregate that data and extract the value.
• Filters and ranking – Sites like Amazon.com need to have efficient ways to filter content and rank according to criteria that reflects its usage. Amazon.com is a great example of the value of good filters and ranking systems. One way to create filters is to enable your users to review the content and rate it – Netflix.com is an example of this.
• Syndication – RSS feeds are a common feature in web sites and services, because they allow users to subscribe to and get instant updates of content that interests them. 2006 will be the year when non-blog content and data gets turned into RSS on a much wider scale than we’ve seen before.
• Mash-Ups – A Mash-up is a service that takes data from two or more existing web apps or services, and combines them to create a new web service (see this quick and dirty.

A study issued last month by the Common Ground Alliance, or CGA — an industry group comprised of utilities and construction companies — calculated that there were more than 675,000 excavation accidents in 2004 in which underground cables or pipelines were damaged.
A reminder that the most vulnerable parts of our critical infrastructures lie literally beneath our feet. (Wired magazine also have an article).

Anonym.OS is a Live CD based on OpenBSD 3.8. The idea is that the Operating System is ‘hardened’ to ensure that all incoming traffic is silently dropped/denied, and that all outgoing traffic is transparently encrypted and/or anonymized — optimally both — from the host computer to its final destination.

It uses the tor onion routing network so that a host machine can be introduced to an arbitrary network (hotel broadband, WiFi hotspot, client network, etc.) without leaving any discernible fingerprints or telltale footprints. There’s also a presentation (PDF) available.

The guiding process was to create a totally anonymous and secure computer so easy to use you can hand it
to your grandmother and send her off on her own to the local Starbucks. Interestingly, kaos.theory members say that Anonym.OS is just the first step in making anonymity widely available. Future versions, they say, may run on a USB keychain. Additionally, they plan to implement Enigmail to allow encrypted e-mail for Thunderbird and Gaim Off-the-Record, which allows users to use instant messaging without their logs being tied to them.

from the most obvious of places, includes an introduction / justification, some doco, the FAQ and System requirements. there’s also a simple search engine.

There’salso a search engine for public domain stuff as well.

Other links:
mininova
torrentspy (which comes with a nice fx extension)
web-of-knowledge.blogspot.com torrents-sites

Another Guy Kawasaki post:
Apparently, “evangelist” is becoming a mainstream job in the tech industry.  as people hit the streets with this title, they need a foundation of the fundamental principles of evangelism. According to Kawasaki,  these are: 

1. Create a cause. 
2. Look for agnostics, ignore atheists. A
3. Localize the pain. 
4. Let people test drive the cause. 
5. Learn to give a demo. 
6. Provide a safe first step. 
7. Ignore pedigrees. 
8. Never tell a lie. 
9. Remember your friends

more detail here.

From Guy Kawasaki: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than
twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.
BTW, The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

Link from RusellBeattie.com: details a Nokia presentation (pdf format) about smartphone usage.  Key points is that browsing is the number one (by far) mobile application that uses data.  Fits in with the recent Robert Scoble posts about wireless and mobile websites.

This is a poll from dpolls.com.

Andy Kessler, who made his bones with Wall Street Meat, a book that skewered people being welcomed back by John Battelle sums up the current silliness around Google�s price targets in his latest post�.

Ah, price targets are back in fashion. And stupid investors will fall for them again. It�s what we do on Wall Street while we wait for real news. Analyst Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray made a splash with a $600 target on Google. Not to be outdone, an old competitor of mine, Mark Stahlman (is he still at it?) now at Caris & Co., declared Google will hit $2000, or about a $650 billion market cap. Yeah, maybe.

Posted on January 9th, 2006 ??” 2 Comments �