Potato I have

I’m probably mentioning Wikipedia too often, but my previous post about the semantic web offers an interesting comparison. The Forbes article and the Wikipedia entry are both approximately 1200 words, and the former is perhaps a better non-technical introduction, but I’m vastly more satisfied with the latter.

Why? The Wikipedia entry:

• has had an awful lot of editing, by many people
• has an ongoing discussion to improve the entry; anyone who can read the entry can participate
• being hypertext, directly links all of its numerous internal and external references
• also links its ‘Knowledge representation’ category, which has another 37 now 44 topically-related entries

The one is a feature article, the other an encyclopedia entry, they’re not the same thing, but it seems to me a good illustration of the different authoring processes and results.

A friend just asked in jabber what I am up to, and I said “I’m reading a history of wikipedia.” The project started in 2001, and already

the nonprofit venture is the largest encyclopedia on the planet. Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica’s 80,000 and Encarta’s 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million.

(via robotwisdom; seeing Jorn Barger filtering links again after a year and a half away is the best thing that’s happened to me today)

(more…)

The Register reports the buy, and now we wait for positioning with sharepoint. MS’s Jeff Raikes and Groove’s Ray Ozzie (to be MS’s 3rd CTO) discuss a bit, in Q/A format press release. Groove is about decentralization:

PressPass: How will Groove complement Microsoft’s current collaboration offerings?
[…]
Ray Ozzie: Microsoft’s current collaboration products and Groove build on each other’s strengths. Distributed teams can use Groove to create ad-hoc workspaces that reside on team members’ PCs and later have the documents, plans and other workspace content published to a managed SharePoint Web Portal. Or an individual can bring content from a SharePoint site into a Groove workspace on his or her laptop — in order to work on that content with others, to automatically and securely synchronize it between home and work computers, or just to stay productive when temporarily disconnected from the network

Which is consistent with my personal usage of sharepoint as primarily a backing store.

Groove’s folder synchronization briefly caught my attention: I don’t yet have a good solution for multiple desktops and to this point I’m most interested in Fowler’s subversion approach. Groove brings “chat, presence, and notifications” to folder synch, and claims to do security and firewall in a transparent way, but the first bit is far from my synch needs and of course it is all MS only. The marketing materials are slick, of course.

As for my own collaboration, I’m currently running a wiki experiment (our org is very enamored with sharepoint), and couldn’t be happier so far. Otherwise, it’s just classic jabber, outlook mail and calendar, phone and netmeeting.