In the interests of experimenting with a variety of online, collaborative technologies, I installed a very simple wiki. Play around with it, if you like. It’s the simplest one I could find: PhpWiki.
I’m not sure, yet, what use I/we might have for a wiki, but it’s worth experimenting. If you’re unfamiliar with wikis, check out the relevant entry in the Wikipedia. I think I would install MediaWiki if I had a specific project in mind because it seems to provide more controls over editing.
Via Liz, Michael Froomkin, Norman Geras, and Jewschool: here’s the Wikipedia entry on the word “jew” and the Judaism 101 answer to the question, “Who is a jew?”
Via The New York Times: Two economists have released the draft of a study concluding that illegal music “[d]ownloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates.” Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have conducted what the Times is calling “the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying.”
[T]hey analyzed the direct data of music downloaders over a 17-week period in the fall of 2002, and compared that activity with actual music purchases during that time. Using complex mathematical formulas, they determined that spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales. Even under their worst-case example, “it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy,” they wrote. “After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error” given that 803 million records were sold in 2002. Sales dropped by 139 million albums from 2000 to 2002.
So why have sales been dropping? Here’s my take, and keep in mind it’s only a theory unsupported by any rigorous analysis: because most music being produced by the music
industry
sucks. And the level of suckitude (or suckage, if you’re a speaker of French) appears to be following an upward trajectory.
…I wanted to mention, again, “Listening Post,” by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin at the Liszt Visual Arts Center. The work is beautiful, eerie, and captivating; a brief piece appeared in the NY Times when the work was at the Whitney. What the Times does not make clear, however, is that the language processed by the piece is pulled live from the Internet. (See this write-up, too.) The wall plaque explains that “[‘Listening Post’] continuously samples texts from thousands of chat rooms and other online public discussion forums.” So you, dear reader, could be part of this exhibit and not even know it.
I felt this info deserved an entry all its own, having been previously embedded in the middle of a rather long entry.
Via Slashdot: “By feeding PieSpy with the entire texts of Shakespeare plays, it became possible to produce drawings of the social networks present in his plays – it is now possible to visualize the relationships between the characters in his works.” I don’t have time to investigate this tool fully right now, but one thing I like is that it maps these networks through the course of the play using an animation. Texts are not static objects; they change over time as the reader or viewer experiences them. Our visualizations of elements of texts should therefore be dynamic.