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'집단지성'에 해당되는 글 4건
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Knol: Google Takes on Wikipedia
Written by Frederic Lardinois / July 23, 2008 12:50 PM / 4 Comments
Google just opened up Knol, its Wikipedia competitor, to the public after announcing a private beta of the service last December. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol puts a stronger emphasis on authorship and even encourages users to start different 'knols' for the same subject. Google is also serving up AdSense advertising on the site, whereas Wikipedia stays away from any advertising on its site.
In many respects, Knol is similar to Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, though its scope seems even more ambitious and its tools a bit more refined. It does, however, validate the Mahalo model.
Authorship/Identity
Knol puts a lot of emphasis on authorship and, somewhat akin to Amazon's "Real Name" scheme, authors can validate their identity on Knol through either a credit card or phone number.
The default setting for every Knol is "moderated collaboration." In this mode, anybody with a Google account can suggest changes to an knol, but the author has to accept these changes before they go live.
Authors can also invite others to contribute to their articles and given them the same rights as the original author.
There is also an option for authors to write a short bio of themselves in Knol. While this is interesting here, it will be even more interesting to see if Google might start sharing these Knol identities (and maybe even the users' reputation) among more of its properties.
Usage
Setting up a Knol is as easy as clicking the "Write a Knol" button. The text editor, too, is pretty straightforward, especially in the face of the often cryptic mark-up language most wikis use.
Knol uses a rich text editor, which presents users with all the typical editing functions, including basic formatting options, links (all set to 'nonfollow'), and the ability to add references.
As of now, you can not embed any videos or other content, except for the New Yorker Cartoons that Google incensed for this project for reasons only Google knows.
Users who don't want to write their own articles can review and rate knols. There is also an option to leave comments on every knol.
Creative Commons
Users can choose between three licenses for their articles, the Creative Commons Attribution License, the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and an "All Rights Reserved" license. The Attribution license is the default setting. Users can chose a different license for every knol.
Advertising
Authors on Knol can enter their AdSense data into Knol. Besides the cut Google already takes from the advertising through AdSense anyway, authors will get the regular AdSense payout for every click on an ad. This seems like a smart way to reward users who write the best (or most popular) content, while still making money for Google.
In the competition with Wikipedia, this might mean that some authors could divert their attention from editing Wikipedia articles to Knol. However, the question will also be if spammers can find a way of abusing this.
New Yorker Cartoons?
While there is no option to embed any videos or other content into the site, authors can embed cartoons from the New Yorker. This is done through a rather cumbersome process where users have to first search for a cartoon in the New Yorker store and then enter the ID number of the cartoon into Knol. Why Google chose the New Yorker's cartoon archive for this is anybody's guess, but chances are that Google will announce more content partnerships in the near future.
Is Google Going After Wikipedia?
Given how often Wikipedia results appear as Google's top results, it would make sense for Google to look at this and decide to start its own competitor. By incentivizing authors through AdSense and by giving its users simple, but powerful tools to start their articles, Google might just be on the right track. While Google keeps reiterating that Knol is not meant to compete with Wikipedia, it's hard to see how that wouldn't be the case.
Knol, of course, has far fewer articles now than Wikipedia, but as it grows, it will be interesting to watch if Google is going to give preference to its own pages over the Wikipedia results. After all, Knol carries Google advertising and Wikipedia doesn't, so Google would clearly have an incentive in doing so, though the potential public outcry if Google would try to do this might prevent them from even attempting it.
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Lessons From the Center of Collective Intelligence
by msaleem on December 10, 2006 - 3:49pm.
Why has collective intelligence become such a big deal? With the rise of social media (wikis, social bookmarking sites and socially driven news and content aggregation sites), it seems that everyone wants to get on the bandwagon.
The principle behind collective intelligence is that a conclusion reached in collaboration with and from competition among multiple individuals will be more intelligent than any conclusion reached by an individual, no matter how smart.
Before we can harness the power of collective intelligence, we have to understand a few things.
1. What is collective intelligence?
2. Why do we need collective intelligence?
3. How do we harness collective intelligence?
4. How do we make sure we don’t get collective stupidity?
I recently interviewed Stephen Buckley from MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence. He used the example of global climate change to explain the necessity of collaboration:
“One of the problems that we have identified, and want to help people study, is global climate change. This is a problem that really spans a whole lot of disciplines. There is the scientific aspect to it, and then there are the economic and political aspects of it. Now that we have classified the existence of the problem, how do we navigate the scientific challenges, the organizational, economic and political challenges, still has to work itself out.”
As Buckley points out, some believe collective intelligence is a magical concept that can be applied to any problem, no matter how simple or complex. And then others believe collective intelligence efforts (like Wikipedia) will fail because the collective ultimately becomes a mob and leads to collective stupidity.
“There are some instances of entries in Wikipedia that aren’t perfect, and those tend to be the entries around which there are controversies. For example there was an article recently, about campaign organizations for two opposing politicians in Connecticut, running for the Senate, were manipulating each other and in fact sometimes deleting them completely, in order to gain advantage.”
Buckley stressed that in order to make collective intelligence work, we need to understand the circumstances that naturally lend themselves to collaboration and collective intelligence. Then we need a set of incentives that can motivate people to participate.
The incentives, of course, will vary but so far it seems incentives don’t even have to be monetary. Most people that participate on Wikipedia do so because they feel the need to make that information freely available to others. The motivation in computer programming (Linux development) is slightly different. Most people contribute to the open source operating system because they have a sense of purpose and as mentioned by Buckley, under the engineering culture, the strongest motivational tool is to design something that will be the object of adulation for one’s fellow engineers.
Incentives can even be built into systems through rewards for positive contributions as well as punishing negative ones. There are several examples of this already in practice: Amazon and eBay feedback systems, Digg and Reddit ranking systems, and so on.
Abuse is one of the biggest problems open source sites face. If someone can interact with a site and be completely anonymous, there is a higher chance that people will be destructive, than in a case where one’s identity is public knowledge.
“Just from experience, when people can be anonymous, and unaccountable for their actions, they tend to be more disruptive then they are when they have to establish their identity. A prime example of this is: Driving to work today, there’s a guy in his car, I don’t know who he is, he gives me the finger and cuts me off. If I bumped into the guy in the street he wouldn’t stand in front of me and give me the finger. Just because he can simply drive away, he behaves badly.”
Wikipedia, for example, is a project that by in large provides good information, but has its limitations because of annonymous abuse.
“There are some instances of entries in Wikipedia that aren’t perfect, and those tend to be the entries around which there are controversies. For example there was an article recently, about campaign organizations for two opposing politicians in Connecticut, running for the senate, were manipulating each other’s and in fact sometimes deleting them completely, in order to gain advantage.”
This does not mean that Wikipedia is a failure, rather that Wikipedia is not perfect, and more specifically, it is not a good tool for conflict management — where there is subjectivity with regards to the content, Wikipedia fails as a tool for content management to harness the wisdom of the crowd.
MIT deals with the problem of abuse by making people request to participate in their project which officially launched a only a month ago. Although they haven’t denied access, the requirement works as a filter to weed out people who have completely malicious intentions.
Understanding the questions helps us to harness this collective intelligence while keeping in mind its limitations.
Muhammad Saleem is a Netscape Navigator and writes on his own blog The Mu Life where he studies the social bookmarking phenomenon.
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Wikipedia’s Success Story of an Individualistic Community
Wikipedia has revolutionized the world by decentralizing information. For individualists, wikipedia embodies the inherent success of individualism. For those whom fear decentralization, wikipedia embodies the growing lawlessness. This is truly a matter of perspective and interpretation. Yet I still believe that the fears of wikipedia are inflated. Allow me to elaborate.
Central Charges Against Wikipedia
The central charge against the open-source editing of wikipedia is the potential of inaccurate information. While it is true that there is potential, having potential does not inherently mean Wikipedia is full of inaccuracies. Any vandalism that occurs is quickly removed and pointed out.
In 2006 for example, staffers for Rep. Martin Meehan (D-Mass.) and officials from the National Institute on Drug Abuse were removing criticism from their respective wikipedia articles. When the articles were fixed, more criticism was included, this time pointing out their attempts at removal of criticism.
In another case of vandalism, someone continually replaces George W. Bush’s photograph with a picture of a giant penis; however, it is continually corrected in less than five minutes. Meanwhile, more subtle vandalism is repaired in a few hours (still remarkably quick compared to a normal encyclopedia that has to issue a correction in another book, often never obtained by owners of the encyclopedia).
If you still have doubts, consider than in 2005 the journal Nature compared scientific articles in wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica for accuracy. Each article was sent to panels of experts in the appropriate field. The average number of errors for each wikipedia article was four parts per entry, only one behind Encyclopedia Britannica’s average of three parts per entry. Then consider the amount of articles each contains. Wikipedia boasts 1.7 million English articles, with 6 million total; Encyclopedia Britannica does not even approach 100,000. That is quite good accuracy for the volume of articles produced.
Wikipedia's Secret to Success
What is wikipedia’s secret to success? They have formed an individualistic community where anyone can edit any article.
What prevents the majority of people from intentionally sabotaging the project to promote their ideological views? A market-based system of reputation. When you post quality information, the community praises you; when you post inaccurate information, you are shamed. As a result, wikipedians strive to produce quality articles.
Wales, the founder, has a laissez faire philosophy on regulation. The community works out its own issues. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers have found a compromise on the wording of the abortion article; mainland Chinese and Taiwanese have done the same.
In fact, when the Chinese government censored wikipedia and demanded censorship, Wales let the Chinese contributors handle it. After all, it was against wikipedia’s philosophy (besides being impractical) to censor information when it could be easy re-added. Eventually, China uneasily unblocked wikipedia. Another case of the individuals solving the problem themselves instead of using regulation.
Wikipedia continues striving to form an individualistic community where diverse viewpoints are respected as each side works toward mutual compromise in creating a neutral article.
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'조직없는 조직력' 디지털 집단지성의 힘!
■끌리고 쏠리고 들끓다(클레이 서키 지음, 갤리온 펴냄)
■파워풀 타임스(이몬 켈리 지음, 럭스미디어 펴냄)
인터넷·휴대폰 등으로 무장 조직 결성·유지비용 최소화
단순 정보 수용자서 벗어나 직접 생산·유통까지도 맡아
최근 뉴욕에서는 택시에 놓고 내린 고가의 핸드폰을 찾기위해 인터넷을 이용한 사례가 사회적인 이슈가 됐다. 핸드폰을 잃어버린 사람은 핸드폰을 갖고 있는 사람이 10대 히스패닉 미혼모라는 것을 알게 됐다. 그녀가 핸드폰을 순순히 되돌려주지 않자 핸드폰 주인은 인터넷에 그 미혼모의 신상정보와 주변인물에 관련된 정보를 추적해 조직적으로 인터넷에 올렸다. 이 문제는 인종갈등이라는 미국 사회의 뇌관을 건드리면서 일파만파로 커져 뉴욕 타임스 등 주요 언론 60여개가 취재할 정도로 관심을 불러일으켰다. 100만명이 넘는 네티즌이 다녀간 인터넷 사이트로 인해 급기야 그 미혼모는 체포됐고, 그는 핸드폰을 찾았다. 이 과정에서 개인정보의 무단 공개, 핸드폰을 돌려주지 않은 미혼모의 비양심적인 행동 등을 놓고 벌어진 토론이 인터넷을 뜨겁게 달궜다.
특정 언론사 몇몇에 의해 여론이 형성되던 시대는 이미 역사가 됐다. 정보의 수용자였던 개인이 이제는 직접 정보의 생산과 유통까지 맡고 있으며, 기업이 제작한 상품을 얌전히 쓰기만 했던 소비자는 불만사항을 조직적으로 대응하며 기업에 맞서고 있다.
세상은 바뀌었으나, 아날로그 세대와 디지털 세대가 공존하는 오늘의 사회를 주제로 다루고 있는 책이 잇달아 번역, 출간됐다.
클레이 서키 뉴욕대 인터액티브 커뮤니케이션 프로그램 교수는 ‘코즈의 정리(Coase Theorem)’ 즉, 사회적 행동이 집단성을 띨 경우 조직 결성과 유지 비용이 목표와 성과보다 경제적이어야 한다는 개념을 근거로 들며 새로운 사회적인 도구의 등장으로 조직결성과 유지 비용을 최소화 할 수 있는 사회로 진입하고 있다고 설명한다. 인터넷ㆍ휴대폰ㆍ메신저ㆍ블로그ㆍ메일링 등이 새로운 사회적 도구의 좋은 사례다.
저자는 최근 인터넷에서 벌어지고 있는 대중의 움직임을 ‘조직없는 조직력(the power of organizing without orginazation)’이라고 정의를 내린다. 기업의 횡포에 적극적으로 대응하는 소비자들, 브리태니커보다 더 강력한 백과사전 위키피디아를 자발적으로 만드는 성과를 도출해 내는 대중이 오늘의 사회를 이끌어가고 있다는 것. 특히 저자는 조직 혹은 배후가 없으면 불가능했던 일이 이제는 조직 없이도 더 강력한 조직력을 발휘하는 변화에 예의주시한다. 저자는 그 특성을 ‘끌리고 쏠리고 들끓다’로 정의내리고 있다.
‘파워풀 타임스’는 컨설팅 회사 ‘모니터그룹’ 내 글로벌비즈니스네트워크(GBN)의 최고경영자(CEO)인 저자가 향후 10년을 예측한 로드맵을 담고 있다.
저자들은 과학기술이 발전하면서 탄생한 무형의 경제로 유형의 물리적 인프라에 의존하는 선진국 경제는 큰 변화를 맞게 될 것이라고 예측한다. 또 인터넷 활용으로 사회적 투명성이 요구돼 이를 유지하기 위해 위성 등 다양한 도구가 등장해 사회적 비용이 지나치게 늘어날 것이라고 추측하고 있다. 그 밖에도 세계 군사력, 종교, 지구 등 다양한 분야의 미래를 전망하고 이를 바탕으로 세가지 시나리오를 도출한다. 하나는 미국이 지금보다 더 강력한 나라로 성장해 세계를 다시 한번 손아귀에 넣는다는 것, 두번째는 미국의 파워가 패치워크식으로 조각조각 흩어질 것이다. 그리고 미국 등 기존 권력이 아니라 새로운 질서의 등장 등이다.
어떤 사회로 바뀌든 저자는 시장기반 경영과 윤리경영이라는 큰 테두리는 변하지 않을 것이라고 보고 이를 바탕으로 윈-윈할 수 있는 전략을 제시한다.
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We can see where this wouldn't quite go head to head competition wise with Wikipedia. It seems it has a different objective in terms of authorship which pretty much makes the site much differant than wikipedia.
Posted by: Nick Stamoulis | July 23, 2008 12:59 PM
...man, these guys are greedy.
Posted by: chris | July 23, 2008 2:16 PM
I work for HubPages.com, a prominent user-generated content site with an AdSense revenue share program that is probably more similar to Knol than Wikipedia is. Spam and inappropriate content are always a problem for sites like ours, and we're extremely interested in how Google will handle the moderation issue. They're probably also going to have to find a way to make content easier to find (we use keyword tags to help visitors locate what they're looking for more easily), and ensure that good content bubbles to the top in searches.
Over at HubPages we have HubScore and an efficient flagging system to this effect, but at least on Blogger, Google hasn't shown a great track record for eliminating splogs and bad content.
We'll be watching with interest.
Posted by: Maddie Ruud | July 23, 2008 3:07 PM
If anyone is interested in purchasing www.oondi.com which is a website similar to Google Knol, send an e-mail to info [AT] oondi [DOT] com. The time is now for these types of websites; the business model has just been validated. oondi.com also focuses towards other languages such as Dutch and French, which is unique in comparison to Squidoo, HubPages, Google Knol, etc...
Posted by: Ken | July 23, 2008 3:28 PM