Intelligent Designs - Erik Moeller's Blog

The web 2.0 hype is beginning to make an impact in the political and activist sphere. Two examples are dotherightthing.com and change.org.

Dotherightthing.com is the capitalist’s approach to changing the world, relying on markets and information to make all the difference. Here, people gather to rate the impact of a company’s actions on the world. It’s an interesting approach and may work well in some cases. Then you have examples like Philip Morris getting a positive impact rating for a $50K charity project in Vietnam. Given that their core business is to kill people by selling addictive substances, I wonder whether the “let’s reward them when they do good and punish them when they do evil” approach is really applicable to all companies. Market forces also make little difference when we’re not talking about domestically mass-marketed products but, say, the international trade in land mines. At some point, the discussion needs to go to another level, political regulation and control.

With dotherightthing.com itself being a for-profit, we also have to wonder how they will behave if they do become successful, and how susceptible the whole thing is to PR. That said, it’s certainly an innovative platform, and I wish them well. The market principle is complemented nicely by change.org, a navigation tool for finding ways to make a difference — and connecting people with NGOs which are already working to do so. In true web 2.0 style, the page opens with a tagcloud, but one which is actually useful, showing the issues most people care about. For each issue, there’s a page which allows people to post blogs, videos, images — and importantly, links to relevant organizations and networks. I’m not seeing any meetup.com style features, which could make things even more exciting.

The whole thing seems pretty well thought out, with a clean UI that makes the gimmicks unobtrusive. The software itself does not appear to be open source, nor do I find any information about the organization that runs the project. But they support donations through JustGive.org and get their NGO list from GuideStar, so they seem to know what they’re doing.

These are some very important first experiments, and I think things will get very interesting soon. Once we have a good idea what works and what doesn’t, open source components to replicate the success models won’t be far off, no matter what the originators do. There are two areas where similar experimentation has yet to happen on a large scale: direct democracy, and distributed fundraising.

The Swedes have come up with a neat tool that can be used to generate fake screenshots showing the use of file sharing software to distribute illegal files from a particular IP address. What’s the point? Screenshots like this have been used in court as evidence of illegal file sharing. This kind of tool can help to throw out such as “evidence” as inadmissible.

This one is unexpected. Oh No Robot is a search engine where users transcribe web comics, and you can then search the transcribed text. Surprise: It actually works. In less than 7 days, they have managed to add over 7000 transcriptions. This once again shows that users are willing to add value to a free service if they are provided with easy to use tools to do so.

For comics which have joined the program, you will occasionally see little buttons like this at the bottom:

If you click the button, you can enter a transcription:

The artist can moderate the incoming transcriptions. Oh No Robot then indexes these transcriptions and makes them searchable. A very cool idea; sadly, the added transcriptions are not available under a free license. What is it good for? Finding comics you vaguely remember is the most obvious application. But I think if this scales, it’s quite likely that commercial services for licensing comics on certain topics will be built on it; finding editorial cartoons on certain topics is one example.

Alas, it’s unlikely that Google Print will add anything similar to its scanned pages soon ;-). (Actually, Google Print is vulnerable to distributed transcription or OCR attacks, which is why Google does not index all pages of copyrighted books — a subset always remains unavailable to all users.)

I think these kinds of ideas could be collected on a new page called “[[edit:Distributed work|distributed work]]” in the wiki.

Wikipedia user Lupin has created a very cool JavaScript-based tool for MediaWiki called Navigation popups. It should work on any MediaWiki installation which allows users to configure their own JavaScripts (this, in itself, is a fairly cool feature that few other wiki engines have). Lupin’s navigation popups show you the first sentences of any Wikipedia article when you hover the mouse over links for a while. The script can operate without causing too much server strain because it only has to get the raw, unparsed wiki text of the pages it previews from the database. All rendering is done on the client side.

Besides giving a nice preview of articles, it gives immediate access to certain functions (such as edit, move, search, discuss, delete ..). It also has some built-in helpers for fixing links that point to disambiguation pages or redirects (these are Wikipedia-typical problems and not necessarily of interest for other wikis).

You can configure it in various ways; for example, you can define after how many seconds the little “popup” (not really a popup since it does not create an actual browser window) appears. Possible future coolness include support for getting pages from other wikis and cascading popups.

I think similar navigation popup functionality should be added to other wiki engines. That’s why this post is in the “Mindshare” category, a new category for cool implementations that are not widely known. Why not help identify and collect cool [[edit:Wikis|wiki ideas]] in the ID wiki itself?