Well, isn't this interesting? Wikipedia went out to raise $6 milliion in a PBS-style donations-only campaign and today exceeded its goal, raising $6.2 million.

This feat comes at a time when I am studying the issue of reputation ranking and filtering on the Web. I see this as being a critical issue that could become the bottleneck that stalls the Web's otherwise phenomenal growth. As more and more information flows through the Web, it becomes increasingly difficult to filter the wheat from the chaff, the nuggets from the nutjobs. The amount of disinformation peddled on the Web during the just concluded U.S. Presidential election was so effective that it is inevitable that the amount and ugliness quotient of this crap is going to increase.

Wikipedia has done amazing things. I won't even attempt to repeat their statistics here; they're available everywhere anyway. They have out-done every encyclopedia ever published in terms of sheer volume, both of topics covered and number of contributors. Surely more people use Wikipedia every day than consult all of the world's printed encyclopedias combined. (I don't know that's true, but I'd be truly stunned if it weren't.)

The fact that Wikipedia has accomplished this as a non-profit is one thing. But when you consider that there are no real constraints on content of the user-edited encyclopedia -- and that credibility is therefore impossible to guarantee -- you have an intriguing phenomenon on your hands. In August 2007, Wired magazine did a fairly thorough hatchet job on Wikipedia by pointing out who was editing some of the content on the site. It turned out that corporate editors were cutting critical content. So was the CIA.

And yet when asked to show their support -- their confidence on some level -- ordinary users cough up $4 million in five months. (Granted that only 125,000 users bellied up to the bar as it were, the average contribution was $32). The balance of the $6.2 million came from major gifts and foundations. Obviously somebody has confidence in the contents of Wikipedia, at least enough not to want to see it go away.

Ars Technica points out that Apple has released a second major upgrade to its mobile Web platform, me.com, in as many weeks. Changes were distributed across all the services Apple offers in the online application.

For my money, Apple is still in the doghouse with this one. Its old .Mac platform just worked. And it worked well. And it included features that are completely missing from the "new and improved" me.com (such as eGreetings). But my big gripe is that there is a lot of stuff -- some of it pretty simple and basic -- that just doesn't work in me.com that always worked in .mac. Case in point: shift-selecting multiple emails often selects all of the visible emails instead of the subset you intend. Another case in point: its functionality is often completely broken in Firefox. (Right now, e.g., I cannot compose a new email in me.com on Firefox though it works just fine on Safari).

I've mentioned before my problems with calendar syncing and Apple's most-unhelpful response: "Don't automate sync across multiple calendars. Only sync manually."

In his article today, ArsTechnica's Dave Chartier said, "Naturally, we still have a laundry list of major requests and tweaks that we would like to see applied across MobileMe, but these baby steps of reliability, small new features, and polish are probably best for now to help the service stay on its feet." Very generous, Dave. It feels to me like MobileMe isn't on its feet. It is at best on its knees begging for mercy.

Ars Technica had an intriguing piece about a peer-reviewed scientific journal that is requiring authors to submit a simultaneous page to Wikipedia when they send an article to the journal.

What I find fascinating is that we often associate Wikipedia information with un-reviewed and therefore suspect material. The argument is that with no single editor responsible for the accuracy of the data on the site, there's just no real way to know if the information is accurate or complete.

Apparently there's at least some thought that this might not be the case.

I, for one, figure opening up this kind of information to broad public comment and review will, over time, result in an improvement in the reliability of the information rather than a reduction in its utility. This may be a scrap of evidence that there are others who agree.

I'm looking for a good whiteboard technology for use by my team. It should bge Web-based, work on both Windows and OS X browsers, support the upload of images from the user's system, and be affordble. I've looked at two that were recommended -- skrbl and Thinkature -- and neither of them works at all as far as I can tell, at least on OS X.

UPDATE: Someone on LinkedIn (BTW, an increasingly valuable social network for me) pointed me at Dabbleboard, which turns out to be a nicely designed and fairly functional Flash application. My colleague and I used it for our online meeting yesterday and while the going was a little rough around the edges and some stuff didn't appear to work at least as we had expected, it was overall a positive experience. I'll undoubtedly write more about this as time goes on.

For the past few weeks, I've been using iGoogle as my home base on the Web. It seemed only logical. I use Google Docs for storing and sharing my documents, gMail for mail, Google as my primary search engine Google Reader for RSS feeds. Consolidating all of that -- and other daily-use stuff -- into one tab in my browser seemed like a great idea.

I still think it is. It's just as well executed as I'd like.

iGoogle is pretty buggy from my experience. Not crashing-bug bad but really, really annoying bug bad. Like gMail suddenly being unavailable from iGoogle even though it works fine outside the UI. Same for Google Docs, which seems to be fairly flaky multiple times per day. Just a while ago, e.g., my Google Docs panel said I had to log in to see my docs. When I clicked on the login link, it took me to Google's regular search page. When I hit the Back button, I was back at iGoogle, this time with one of my docs visible.

Just a lot of UI fragility in the iGoogle app. They need to do a lot more debugging of the user experience. I'll keep putting up with this for a while, but if it doesn't get better soon, I'll have to find some other solution.

Check out Addictomatic, a very cool Web site to which my buddy Clay Cotton pointed me tonight. This is a site with a simple idea: plug in a search term and it looks up that term, not on search engines but on Web sites that are known as "keepers of the buzz."

You can expand or contract the list of sites your searches will use and you can bookmark or share a page you create with an easy click or two.

For example, I typed in "Rachel Maddow" (MSNBC news commentator) and the site created a new page with content blocks from sites such as Topix, Twitter, Live.com, Technorati, Wordpress.com, Google blog search, and a bunch of others. The site is fast, simply laid out and easy to use. A really marvelous idea that should generate a lot of page views and Google bucks for its owners.

Another battle in the war over citizen journalism is being fought in courthouses in Florida and, presumably, other states as well. A story from the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel appearing in this morning's edition of the Monterey Herald reports that at least two people who wrote reviews of services and posted those reviews on the Web are being sued for the unfavorable nature of their commentary.

One traveler described a specific resort as "the most disgusting, bug infested, rundown hotel" and another, a patient unhappy with cosmetic surgery she received from a clinic, advised readers of a Web site in her review to "avoid this place like the plague."

Interestingly, in both cases, the establishments reviewed claim to have suffered lost business as a result of the reviews. Most businesses, of course, don't appreciate the potential impact of a negative review on the Web, presumably believing it will get little if any notice.

University of Florida Law School Professor Lyrissa Lidsky is quoted in the piece as saying that "These suits are extremely common and starting to make their way through the courts." (Emphasis added)

But the real issue here is whether reviews like these are legitimate journalism that should enjoy the same freedom of press and speech protections as those afforded "real" journalistic outlets like the newspapers reporting the suits. if a New York Times critic blasts a play, and the play subsequently closes, the producers don't sue the critic or the paper because they know they have zero chance of succeeding. In part, at least, that's because the paper and the reporter in this case would have substantial legal resources to fight the case in court.

Why should a citizen journalist be treated differently because he or she has no deep pocket protection against litigation? I know a little about libel law and it strikes me that these two examples have fundamental problems. Urging people to "avoid this place like the plague" is clearly opinion and probably not actionable but of course I don't know if the reporter covering the suit picked up other parts of the review that might be or seem actionable. The hotel review, on the other hand, probably is libelous assuming it's not true. But I wonder if the lawsuits would have been filed if the reviewers had had the resources of a news outlet behind them. Probably not.

It seems to me it's important to preserve the right of Web content providers to publish reviews by actual users of public facilities. Opinions expressed in such reviews ought not to be subject to litigation. False reviews might best be dealt with by the offended institution posting its own position or defense.

Interoperability between the dozens of information silos known as social networks is either going to happen or there will be a severe shake-out among social networking sites leading to a significant reduction in their numbers. The fact that I have to belong to a number of social networks in order to accommodate requests from the relatively small number of people I know online who are members of such institutions is a growing problem. Today, ReadWrite Web takes on this issue in a fairly decent analytical piece. The embedded movie about two in-process solutions to the problem -- DiSo and Noserub -- is particularly good and worth the 15 minutes it will take you to watch it and get the basic contextual ideas.

There are quite a few standards available in the space. The problem is getting the proprietary owners of networks (MySpace, Fadebook, LinkedIn, etc.) to be willing to open tunnels between their users and those users' friends on other social networks. I can understand their reluctance; if we level the playing field too much, we end up with a homogenized mess. But I think data interoperability at the building block level the video talks about has some merit that all of the players can and should come to recognize.

Interesting topic well worth keeping an eye on.

CNET Blog Network member Chris Soghoian, who at least seems to know what he's talking about, points out that the recent jury ruling in a criminal case involving the suicide of a teenager who was goaded by a classmate's mother on MySpace, has a dangerous and frightening side effect. It effectively turns Web site Terms of Service (TOS) into a criminal bludgeon, the violation of which can land you in jail.

Given the way TOS policies are generally formed, this is a major concern. In his post, Soghoian points out, by way of possibly extreme examples, dating sites where lying about one's age or weight could be criminal offenses.

The operating theory under which the jury reached its dubious conclusion follows this chain of reasoning laid out by the prosecutor:

1. The Web site's TOS constitute the site's "terms of admission".
2. By using the site, you agree to those admission rules.
3. By violating those terms, you define yourself as ineligible for use of the site.
4. By using the site thereafter, you are making unauthorized use of the site, which constitutes hacking.

How ludicrous is that? It takes a civil agreement between a Web site and a user and makes the contract violation into a criminal charge that can carry a penalty of one year in federal prison and a $100,000 fine per incident.

Soghoian says that Google's TOS bar anyone under 18 from using their sites and services at all. Thus any high school student using Google to do homework research is now officially a "hacker" and subject to criminal prosecution. This is what happens when there is no proper legal remedy for a specific offense and a zealous prosecutor under public pressure makes up something. Juries are uneducated in the finer details of such matters and in an emotional case like this one will tend to want to find some way to punish someone they perceive as an offender even if there's no logical legal way to do so.

It will be interesting to see if any Web sites and their attorneys now try to modify their TOS to remove this frightening possibility by explicit language until a court gets a chance to overrule this idiotic decision.

Yesterday's post about Web development and MVC was triggered by an article on Advogato by a guy who turns out to be the technical force behind an intriguing new Web app framework called Pyjamas. After I'd written the article, I spent a couple of hours with Pyjamas and was somewhat impressed with the work that's been done on it. Not only is the framework quite interesting (it's essentially Google Web Toolkit ported from Java to Python) but there's even a passable introductory book and some decent documentation.

Today, ReadWriteWebhas a very brief piece on Pyjamas. That will get the new Python framework a good bit of notice since ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular in the blogosphere. Probably not as much as Friday's Slashdot story and discussion did, however.

It seems to me that Python has been getting more and more visibility in the Web developer community over the past several months. I'm not even looking for a new framework, having settled at least for now on the PHP framework NOLOH. But the old language junkie dies hard and my attraction to Smalltalk and Python occasionally resurfaces.

A few years back, I was working with Kevin Altis on his Pythoncard project when he decided that for his idea to gain some traction, Python itself needed better promotion and set out to help with that effort. I see Pythoncard has recently seen a resurgence of activity and with all of the online mentions of Python that I keep stumbling across, maybe the efforts of Altis and others are starting to pay off.