WikiLeaks is a Wikipedia-style wiki for people to place leaked documents, untraceably. According to the FAQ, “It combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies with the transparency and simplicity of a wiki interface.” “Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide: the scrutiny of a worldwide community of informed wiki editors.”

It’s ambitious. The FAQ says:

Wikileaks may become the most powerful “intelligence agency” on earth — an intelligence agency of the people. It will be an open source, democratic intelligence agency. But it will be far more principled, and far less parochial than any governmental intelligence agency; consequently, it will be more accurate, and more relevant. It will have no commercial or national interests at heart; its only interests will be truth and freedom of information. Unlike the covert activities of state intelligence agencies, Wikileaks will rely upon the power of overt fact to inform citizens about the truths of their world.

It’s got a million leaked docs already and expects to surpass Wikipedia in number of entries. But it’s hard to see how it becomes anything like an intelligence agency if it only consists of leaks; if a citizen wants information about a topic, seeing only the leaked material is going to give quite a skewed and incomplete view. On the other hand, if you’re researching a topic, I can see the value of checking in with Wikileaks to see if there’s anything you’re not supposed to know about it.

Here’s another bit from the FAQ:

Couldn’t leaking involve invasions of privacy? Couldn’t mass leaking of documents be irresponsible? Aren’t some leaks deliberately false and misleading?

Providing a forum for freely posting information involves the potential for abuse, but measures can be taken to minimize any potential harm. The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents.

It’ll be fascinating to see how this works out in the edge cases. Does posting the names of covert agents count as a leak? [Tags: wikileaks wikis wikipedia intelligence politics media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Kevin Gamble asks a really interesting question: Can anyone come up with an example of a taxonomy that has scaled sufficiently to keep up with the insane in-rush of information we now take for granted? [Tags: kevin_gamble taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous folksonomy ]

When I posted yesterday about my problem with Thunderbird and its possible solution, I did so in part because I wanted to make it findable by others with the same problem. So, I did the most basic search-engine optimization stuff of making sure I used some words and tags people are likely to search for. Then, yesterday afternoon I was part of a brief conversation with Andy Oram in which he talked about his interest in the phenomenon of bottom-up tech support. Googling for solutions to problems works but only sort of, says Andy. And that got me thinking that it’d be useful if we started tagging such posts with some standard tags, such as (perhaps): troubleshooting, operating system, application name, error message, problem area, solved/unsolved. So, my post on Thunderbird would be tagged: troubleshooting, xp, thunderbird, “rebuilding index”, folders, solved. Something like that.

In fact, perhaps we could use a microformat for technical problems and solutions. [Tags: microformats troubleshooting andy_oram everything_is_miscellaneous]

Kevin Killian’s 1,525 reviews have earned him a ranking of 119th as an Amazon reviewer. He reviews books, movies, cookware, clothing…just about anything. But Killian is also a poet. Hooke Press has published a small edition—200 copies—of his Selected Amazon Reviews, edited by Brent Cunningham. The blurb for the book describes it as “Subversive and delightful modifiations to a pervasive online art form.” (Killian is prone to typos.)

The delightful meta-trail ends here, though: The book is not listed in Amazon.

(Thanks to Trebor Scholz for the link.) [Tags: kevin_killian amazon genre meta reviews everything_is_miscellaneous -berkman]

The Wall Street Journal reports on NewsAtSeven.com, a beta site from Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Lab, that automatically aggregates a news broadcast, hosted by an avatar named “Alex.” (Actually, it’s Alix from Half-Life 2. In fact, the the whole presentation seems based around Half-Life machinima.)

As it stands, it’s hard to tell how impressive the results are. The voice is clearly doing text-to-speech conversion, but I have no idea idea where the text is coming from. The editions I sampled are short and coherent, but for all I know, the system just picked a topic—e.g., Will Ferrell’s new movie—located a news report on the Web, and read it. The graphics are appropriate, but, again, I don’t know that they’re any better than what you’d get if you took the top results from a search for “Will Ferrell” at YouTube, Google Images, etc. So, I don’t know what’s supposed to impress me. I’m not saying it’s not impressive. I just don’t know how.

(Yes, the project could use a good marketer.) [Tags: newsatseven news everything_is_miscellaneous ]

BuzzMetric‘s Matthew Hurst’s excellent blog, “Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media,” has run some great examples of why sentiment analysis—figuring out the attitudes expressed about a topic—is so damn hard. Here‘s someone posting about Steve Rubel and Wal-Mart: “Certainly, if you don’t post about it, I’m personally not going to not respect you for not doing so, however others may.” Let’s see a computer make sense of that!

Of course, that’s just overly-complex writing that even humans have trouble parsing. But how about this example, drawn from a review of the Su Hong restaurant: “When we moved from the area, my wife’s most frequent complaint was that no one made orange peel beef like Su Hong.” As Matthew points out, it’s a positive review in the form of a complaint.

Sentiment analysis remains real hard. For judging overall market trends, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but I’d love to see some analysis of how good it actually is right now. [Tags: sentiment marketing matthew_hurst everything_is_miscellaneous]

DayLife looks like a very interesting new site for assembling news sliced the way you want it.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch rips into it (even though he’s an investor) because, among other things, it has no RSS feeds. (It does have an API). I suspect that that’s because it’s conceived as a contextualized destination. Arrington thinks it won’t succeed because it won’t draw “news junkies,” which seems right. But maybe it’s not aiming at news junkies. Maybe it’s aiming at people looking for an online way of reading news that makes it easier to browse clusters of what they’re interested in. I think the slick, human-friendly look is a plus, although I haven’t played with it enough to know whether it’s going to become a permanent destination for me. My main hesitation: While I like it’s presentation of multiple sources and opinions, and i love it’s focus on clustering, I would like it to learn what are my interests. I’m also suprised that it doesn’t let readers leave comments.

Jeff Jarvis, another investor, gives a more enthusiastic write-up than TechCrunch’s. Craig Newmark is another investor. I have a lot of respect for Jeff and Craig’s understanding of, and commitment to, the news revolution. [Tags: daylife news everything_is_miscellaneous media techcrunch jeff_jarvis craig_newmark]

Sean Coon has a terrific post reverse engineering the metadata at work at Musicovery, a Web radio site that has a Flashy UI that displays cuts by mood as well as genre, etc. [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous sean_coon music metadata taxonomy ]

danah notes:

Many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts in most places. Forgot your IM password? Sign up again. Forgot your email address? Create a new one. Forgot your login? Time for a change.

This is so fascinating. Us middle-aging bloggers who think blogs are about building selves in the new public are apparently not speaking for anyone other than us middle-aging bloggers. Maybe Web presence for the young’uns has little to do with building selves or maybe the nature of that public self is so different from the corporeal one the middle-agers have imported from the real world, or maybe something else entirely is going on. And maybe—although I think this is less likely—when the young’uns age to the middle, they’ll feel about their Web selves the way us current middle-agers do.

Damn, this is an interesting world. [Tags: danah_boyd self web everything_is_miscellaneous ]

I’ve added the FastForward blog to my blogroll because it’s got an excellent list of contributors and has been posting some very interesting stuff if you care about folksonomies, KM, “enterprise 2.0” (oy), etc. (Also, I get to use the little auto-blogroll creator I wrote over the weekend to make it easier to update Dan Bricklin’s blogrolling javascript.) But, I owe some disclosure on it: The blog is produced to support the FastForward event, a conference sponsored by Fast Search. I spoke at an executive seminar Fast put on a few months ago, and I may be doing some form of work at the FastForward conference, so I am in a basic conflict, not to mention that bunches of the contributors are friends of mine. So, now that the disclaimer has gone on longer than the recommendation… [Tags: blogs fast_search fastforward everything_is_miscellaneous km]