Cautious web criticism

Search engines now answer with Wikipedia's text and keep the reader. Fewer clicks mean fewer people who check the history, fix an error or donate.

The open-plan office was sold the way Web 2.0 was: knock down the walls and collaboration will follow. What followed, mostly, was other people’s phone calls.

The large majority of Wikipedia’s biographies of living people are being put on the watchlists of fewer than four registered editors.

Actor Ron Livingston enters the all-too-common nightmare of protecting his reputation from anonymous defamatory attacks.

Digging through a few conference notes from the CTAM Research Conference of February 2007, I uncovered a few things I had jotted down while listening to Shari Swan, founder of Streative Branding and former global marketing executive at Reebok. Swan simply presented a timeline of human economic history, but I found it provocative enough [...]

Can you draw a crude sketch on the back of an envelope or napkin? Then PhotoSketch can (purportedly) render that concept into a seamless “photo” that looks quite realistic. Is this a good thing?

An interesting audit (or post-mortem) of ten brand-new Wikipedia articles. How many are useful to more than a handful of daily readers? How many even survive the first day or the first month of publication? The answers may surprise you.

Google meets Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced comments. Is this a good thing?

Are we giving away more personal detail about ourselves than we realize on Social media sites? A Boston Globe article discusses “Project Gaydar” in which two students were able to predict men’s sexual orientation through their Facebook friends list.

If you publicly announce (on the same day) a $2 million grant and the award of a board of trustees seat, people will assume that the seat was “bought” by the money-granting organization. No matter how well (or how poorly) you communicate the transaction, there will be skeptics. Gregory Kohs examines how the Omidyar Network obtained a seat on the Wikimedia Foundation board.

A list of simple tips for getting the most from your Wikipedia reading

When Paul Wehage initially posted on Akahele about Wikipedia and Art, it was something he thought would be only a minor curiosity which would perhaps interest a few performance artists and other specialists. However, Wikipedia Art proves to be much more explosive than one would have thought…

If we can’t trust Honest Abe Lincoln’s whereabouts in 1854, then what *can* we trust? The Internet seems to coax more people to believe more misinformation than ever before.