Society

Steve Rubel says the future is micropersuasion. At the same time, Rolling Stone recognizes Richard Linklater’s film version of Fast Food Nation as not just a call for regulations reform, but as commentary about the lack of activism in the country.

If we’re all only influencing the people next door with our new media — if we expect this to go further down into niches — then who is going to command the big messages and the big themes?

Our media may be getting smaller but our government sure isn’t.

Will our social network systems be scalable enough to unite people around issues when it needs to, or is this just another step down the path of breaking the people up so we can’t organize and effect political reform at the public level — and have we brought it on ourselves?

I don’t know, but I think there’s a “web 2.0” service in here that can be made to help prevent this from happening…

An interesting note on Wikipedia found via Daring Fireball about its particular angle on knowledge. Wikipedia is more interested in verifiability than truth — a point shown when a lead developer of Mac OS 9 tried to remove an false claim about the original plans of the operating system. His correction was redacted because the incorrect info had a source, whereas he did not — only first-hand experience.

Is this a bad thing? Well, not really. This is meant to keep any Joe from throwing up an opinion as fact, as the additions must be based in something published. Even a lead of a project might tinker with an entry in an opportunistic way. Adam Curry and Podcasting kerfuffle, anyone? No, the scary thing in all of this was that the published source of the Mac OS 9 info was AppleInsider — a self-declared rumor site.

To Wikipedia’s own rules, when faced with a published fact from a rumor site and an unverifiable fact from an first-hand participant that contradicts the other, the smart thing to do would be to omit both. That didn’t happen, and that’s the problem with Wikipedia. As long as users ignore or confuse the rule that sites must be reliable to be cited, Wikipedia will continue to simply persist inaccuracies rather that capture fact.

And as we pointed out at the beginning, fact-checking isn’t what Wikipedia is about.

[Edited 2006-09-01] However, Jimmy Wales’ speech at TED 2006 is essential to understanding what Wikipedia is about.

Ah, Wired 1997, how I loved you.

You gave me one of my favorite quotes about the information age:

The single most valuable commodity[…]is human attention.

Now that we have become an internet culture, this has become rather obvious, and lots of people are starting to seriously (ahem) pay attention to it.

Football is a mistake. It combines the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings.

Since the posts are slower on teradome.com now, it’s also turning into the Noah-RSS-farm thanks to Drupal’s aggregator feautres. I’ve already got my feeds from the OPML blog, my de.licio.us bookmarks, my voted digg.com stories and my audioscrobbler activity displayed here. My 43things.com stuff would be here too, but the feed keeps showing up empty for some reason.

It’s like that NYTimes story (I’m having a hard time finding a link for it) pointed out, the way to control your image online is for your site to be the authority on you. I believe that’s true. I can’t pretend that I’m not generating these footprints around the web, but what I can do is show some context to it and respond to the pieces as they come up—for example, as I’ve done about choosing my domain name. That’s similar to what I heard from the creator of Director at a Builder.com conference years ago, but that was about surveillance cameras.

Via Hacking Netflix, via Scripting News…:

Ultimately, though, the worst thing that ever happened to movies happened when audiences began treating theaters like their living rooms. Their chatter destroyed the essential thrill of sitting in the dark sampling the Zeitgeist with hundreds of other people.

So here’s a message to Hollywood: You want us back? Bring back the usher. Not clueless, giggling teenagers but real ones, scary ones, like the chap in the picture above. The meaner the better, too, with full powers to evict talkers and other noisemakers. With an army of ushers, who will need roadblocks?

—Wall Street Journal

When we saw Batman Begins? A sea of cell phones and babies. So yeah, I’m agreeing with the WSJ.

[Edited 2005-07-19] Gothamist’s got its own bit of movie-goer fun joy to share. Not to dig up the usual are-a-parent/aren’t-a-parent clashes, but it certainly seems like most parents don’t know how to handle their crying children in public spaces these days…