Saturday, December 27th, 2008
Ever wondered where technology – and by extension society – is headed?
An observation: read wikipedia. Example given, landlines are on their way out entirely; they will be ubiquitously replaced by mobile phones within 10 years. A fair number of people will say “duh” but where’s the proof? Evidence: read the wikipedia landline article then glance at the wikipedia mobile phone article. You can actually read the landline article in a couple minutes – but the mobile phone article has as many links and citations as the landline article has words!
It’s not to say that landlines aren’t or won’t continue to be extremely useful, merely that their purpose or even consideration is being increasingly replaced and usurped. Imagine if you had a fire in your building, would you think first to reach for the landline where you would be stuck as the fire approached, or reach into your pocket for your mobile where you can keep moving, escape the fire, and still talk with emergency workers at the same time?
Mobility makes sense.
But the argument here is that if you’re curious where society is headed, Wikipedia can be used as an observation tool. As the trend of a tool or resource becomes increasingly popular so its Wikipedia article becomes more complex in citations and increases in length; it’s competition does not necessarily dwindle proportionately, but merely becomes stagnate, confined to historical reference.
Saturday, October 4th, 2008
great little nifty new feature I just noticed in Google Maps: when you type in the location of the place you’re looking for, roll over the ‘More…’ link in the top-right of the map and you’ll get a tick box option for ‘Wikipedia’. click that and you’ll get a Wikipedia W-logo overlay for all entries in that area. Amazing!
Google you’re so smart!
Friday, March 23rd, 2007
well you know you’re on to something when you’ve been linked in Wikipedia!
And I’m not talking about an ‘article’ about me or you or anything like that. en dot wikipedia dot org forward-slash wiki forward-slash ‘insert_article_name_here’. All that stuff is pretty straightforward. Nope nope nope, I’m talking about something which to me is much more intriguing.
Nearly five months ago I wrote a post mentioning the current dilapidated state of a piece of Moscow architecture, the Narkomfin building, designed in the Constructivist style by Moisei Ginzburg.
Then recently, while partaking in my newest hobby of trolling through my web stats (something I’ve never really done before up until a couple of months ago), I noticed that one of my top referral links was being sent from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moisei_Ginzburg. No shit! Well I mean I wrote that post some time ago about the Narkomfin, but otherwise why would anything be coming in from Wikipedia, I thought.
So I revisit the page and read through the article again. Sure, some things appear updated or amended. That’s the nature of the wiki. Keep scrolling. ‘See also’, there are familiar names: El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Vesnin, and others. Then I notice:
Hooooly smokes. That’s awesome! Total excitement.
I wrote the original post back in November, the Ginzburg Wikipedia entry says it was last modified 16:38, 19 February 2007. So sometime between those months someone modified the entry with a link to my blog.
So nothing special to report really, just a sort of excitement-post about another post, now with ties to Wikipedia! And even though its merely an external site reference link, to be listed on the same page as people such as Tatlin, Vesnin and Mayakovsky, that really brings a smile to my face.
