Just after I posted last time appealing for help on Wikipedia, I got an email from Mark Horridge, who had contributed an article on Computable general equilibrium, one of the items I was asking about. There are still almost unlimited opportunities to contribute though. Here’s a list of stubs (short articles needing expansion). And there are lots of topics that don’t have an article at all.

There’s a bit of a learning curve in editing Wikipedia, but if you’d like to make a contribution without going through this, send me a few paras of text on a relevant topic and I’ll post it for you.

Also, a renewed call for help with Folding @Home. It’s very worthwhile and doesn’t seem to slow the computer down at all.

One of my very first posts back in 2002 looked at whether blogging was a fad like CB radio and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t[1]. Four years and tens of millions of blogs later, Guy Rundle at Crikey asks the same question and reaches the opposite answer (reprinted at Mark Bahnisch). The main evidence he offers is the proliferation of dead and still-born blogs. Rundle draws an analogy with 17th century pamphlets, which he presents as a transitional technology, paving the way for newspapers.

A much better analogy, and one that’s obviously in Rundle’s mind as an editor of Arena is the “little magazine”. If you go through the stacks of any good library, you’ll find huge numbers of dead magazines, with lifespans running from decades to a single optimistic issue. There are almost certainly far more dead magazines than live ones. But the little magazine form has persisted up to the present, and is now migrating to the Internet.

Reading between the lines, it seems clear that Rundle hopes and expects that the future of online publishing will belong to magazine-style publications “well-edited moderate circulation outlets [that] can charge and get subscriptions” rather than to blogs. There are a few examples, including Crikey itself, New Matilda and Gawker and Salon in the US (also Opinion Online, but that’s free). Still, there’s very little evidence that such publications are displacing blogs, and serious doubts about whether the model as a whole is viable. The biggest attempt to organise a bunch of blogs into a media empire has been, as far as anyone can see, an expensive disaster.

It would be a pity for the little magazine format to disappear, but it seems likely that some fairly radical changes are needed if it is to survive the shift to the Internet, which renders many of the traditional gatekeeping functions of editors obsolete. Rather than bagging blogs, Guy Rundle would be better off thinking about questions like this.

Update While I was thinking about this, I looked about for a bit of evidence and found this survey on people’s familiarity with Internet terms. Unfortunately blogs weren’t included, but 9 per cent of respondents claimed to have a good idea what an RSS feed is (compared to 13 per cent for podcasting, which is new, but also much more directly accessible to anyone with an iPod). Blog reading isn’t the only use for an RSS feed, but it was the first big one, and still probably the most important, and using an RSS feed is still a sign of a hardcore reader. Of course, some people may have answered incorrectly, but I was still favorably surprised by this.

fn1. Mind you, I thought, and still think SMS is like CB radio, so all opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.

I’ve been very slack about linking interesting posts lately, so here’s a quick roundup, mainly on military topics, reflecting the week’s news. Jeremy Bray at Catallaxy has a fairly pessimistic update on Iran’s nuclear program, while Andrew Norton discusses the death of Private Kovco. On the latter topic Democracy and Justice looks at the role of contracting out (a policy first implemented under Keating, as several commenters have observed) and Tim Dunlop dissects a typical Greg Sheridan rant.

Apart from the individual tragedy of Private Kovco, and continuing statistical disputes over how many tens of thousands have died, there’s nothing much on Iraq where we seem to have run out of things to say.

The Oz attack on John Curtin seems to have halted for the weekend, but you can read another response from Mark Bahnisch and more on Anzac Day from Gummo Trotsky, David Tiley and Ken Parish.

Finally, JF Beck complains that I don’t link to his posts and it’s true. Let me try to compensate by observing that his site slogan Nothing’s fact until it’s history, and then it’s debatable is the most perfect statement of the rightwing postmodernist outlook that I’ve ever read or am ever likely to. Also, and unequivocally positively, Beck’s participation in the DDT debate has led him to run an appeal for donations to Swim for Malaria, which has raised nearly $US 1000. If right and left could compete more on this basis, we might actually get somewhere.

The English language version of Wikipedia had its one-millionth article on 8 March, and has just passed 1.1 million, 50 days later. That gives an implied doubling time of about a year. The doubling time seems to be fairly stable, since the 500 000 mark was reached in March 2005, and 250 000 in April 2004.

A straightforward extrapolation gives a billion articles in 2016. I’ll open this up for comments now, then give my own thoughts (taking advantage of yours, naturally).

Update over the fold
Read More »