A Tennessee man has admitted to posting a spurious biography of veteran editor John Siegenthaler, Sr. on Wikipedia.org. I described the incident in a post about a week ago. There’s a story about the admission here. Apparently, there was no harm intended. The story said the prankster changed the entry to play a trick on a co-worker, although why he chose Mr. Siegenthaler to be the victim isn’t explained. Wikipedia got a lot of grief over the incident and event went so far as to tighten its submission rules to prevent a recurrence.

In the hours after a series of explosions rocked an oil storage facility north or London this morning, the place to turn for the most comprehensive coverage of the incident was not CNN, not NYTimes.com, not even the venerable Times of London.

It was Wikinews, a free news source written by hundreds of volunteers from around the globe.

Wikinews carried the first news of the explosions at 6:21 a.m. GMT, about 20 minutes after the incident occurred. In the eight hours following the blasts, the website’s account was updated more than 150 times by more than 15 contributors, most from the U.K. By 2 p.m. GMT, the site had posted detailed information about the intensity of the explosions, their location, injury reports, likely causes and contact information for people who were affected.

Equally significant, the site linked to eight stories from other news sources, several photos of the explosion and more than 20 other sources of information on the region, the British petroleum industry and oil pipelines.

Wikinews is a new project by Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to supporting the dissemination of free information, principally through Wikis. The group is essentially replicating the reference section of a library through community publishing. It has about 10 reference projects in the works.

As a news wonk, I’m fascinated by Wikinews and what it does and doesn’t do better than traditional media. Comparing the Wikinews account to others by CNN and the Associated Press, I was struck by Wikinews’ focus on report the facts of the incident rather than providing context. For example, both the Times and CNN noted near the top of their stories that Great Britain has been on alert for terrorist attacks since the recent subway bombings in London while Wikinews made no mention of terrorism fears at all. The mainstream news organization also took pains to quote eyewitnesses and government and industry officials in their stories. Wikinews provided no such information, although it’s fair to say that many of the contributors to Wikinews were eyewitnesses themselves. In general, I thought the mainstream media did a better job on reporting the context and the human tragedy of the event while Wikinews was more effective at reporting the facts and linking to other sources of information.

A lot of the discussion around Wikinews has focused on whether community journalism could come to replace traditional media. At this point, it appears that both have their place. Wikinews “reporters” don’t have access to the official information channels that the mainstream media do. Community journalism also doesn’t lend itself to contextual reporting because there’s no professional editor overseeing the coverage. There is value to having that one person at the top who can package and prioritize information coming in from multiple sources.

However, Wikinews did an outstanding job in this case of serving as a nexis point for coverage of the event. No other coverage that I saw even came close to linking to the variety of information sources that could fill out a reader’s understanding of the story. This is where community journalism excels. It is news as a collection of facts, supplemented by exhaustive references. In many ways, it’s the essence of journalism as the “first draft of history.”

Dan Gillmor, by the way, has done a lot of thinking about this topic as he works to launch a company around the citizen journalism idea. You can read about it on his blog.

Yahoo’s got an interesting new service called Yahoo Answers that just launched this week. It’s a very simple but potentially powerful community concept. Members post questions and answer questions. That’s all there is to it. There’s a points system but the points aren’t redeemable for anything. It’s more a bragging rights thing.

Browsing the categories, there’s a chaotic mix of stuff, ranging from questions that can’t be answered (“Is there a God?”) to very specific topics like the best hotels in Milan. I tried posting a question about cameras and got two useful responses within a couple of hours.

It takes someone with the throw weight of Yahoo to make this work. I wish them luck.

Check out this article, Who Profits from Security Holes?, by Benjamin Edelman, a Harvard Ph.D. candidate who specializes in practices and economics of spyware. As a test, he used a fresh copy of Windows XP to visit a single web page (he didn’t say which) and logged what spyware was installed on his computer. At least 16 programs were installed that he could identify and probably more than his spyware detector didn’t find. There’s a link to a screen-shot video of the experiment. It’s a pretty alarming scene.

Edelman takes aim in particular at 180 Solutions, a spyware maker that’s been openly lobbying lately to improve the image of so called “search marketing” vendors (that’s one of many euphemisms this group uses). 180 Solutions drapes itself in the cloak of legitimacy by claiming that distributes only permission-based programs. However, Edelman finds that 180 is as bad as anyone at installing spyware without the user’s permission. This guy has done his homework.

Wired has an interesting story on Neopets, the online fantasy world that kids can’t get enough of. My daughter was seriously into this community for a long time, though she’s since graduated to more mature things. What always impressed me about Neopets is that it’s a pure grass-roots phenomenon. Without benefit of a TV show, comic book or any “traditional” media support, Neopets has grown to 2.2 billion page views a month and more than 20 million users. Neopets-branded merchandise sells in Target stores. This is a complete Web phenomenon, Web 2.0 before there was a term for Web 2.0.

What’s particularly amazing is that the average user spends 6.5 hours per month on Neopets. It is the ultimate sticky site.

The Wired piece does find controversy in a concept the Neopets makers call “immersive advertising.” Activity areas on the site are increasingly designed by sponsors who pepper the scenery with product placements. There’s debate over whether kids who are already coping with obesity should earn points by watching cereal commercials but I suspect this is no different than the infomercials kids watch on TV these days.

Microsoft is releasing the beta of Windows Live Local on Thursday at noon EST. Located at https://local.live.com, the service offers a supposedly higher quality service than Google Maps by integrating photos taken from low-flying airplanes of major US metro areas. In theory, you should be able to pinpoint locations much more accurately with Live Local than with Google Maps. You can then get detailed driving instructions without having the exact address.

This is an exciting time for search. I’m looking forward to Microsoft and Google facing off for supremacy in this area. We users are bound to be the big winners.

Network World has a story today about a phishing exploit that was so realistic that even Ebay’s anti-spoofing team believed it was authentic. The blogger who first reported the incident says that he reported the suspicous e-mail to Ebay but was brushed off, even though there were several characteristics of the message that just didn’t make sense. That’s a pretty depressing commentary on the state of phishing, considering that Ebay is probably the most exploited domain the phishing world. I’m sure just about everyone has seen a convincing come-hither message purportedly from Ebay that really referenced a server in Eastern Europe somewhere.

I think 2006 will be the year that phishing takes center stage in the media coverage of computer security. It was all about spyware this year, but spyware is a slippery and often hard-to-define concept. Phishing, at least, you can understand. Unfortunately, phishing is also one of the most effective identity theft tactics there is. I was personally taken in by a phishing attack several years ago before I realized my mistake and had to scramble to change my Ebay password. And I’m presumably a lot more savvy about this stuff than the average user.

If phishers are good enough to fool even the trained investigators at Ebay, I think we’re in for a long year of creative and effective attacks.

Editors at the New Oxford American Dictionary have selected “podcast” as their word of the year. Runners up were “bird flu,” “persistent vegetative state” and “trans fat.” Not exactly great company :-).

It seems an appopriate choice, though. This has been the year the MP3 player transitioned from gadget to necessity, at least for tech-savvy commuters. Podcasts are proliferating like rabbits right now and, while I don’t expect most of them to live very long, the trend has clearly taken hold. The MP3 player is a legitimate new communications platform, perhaps the first one in 10 years (I’d say the cell phone was the last new platform). That’s something to celebrate because new platforms invariably create create a launchpad for innovation. For example, there’s a new company that will specialize in transcribing podcasts and selling ads against the transcriptions. It’s just the beginning, folks.

Leave it to Playboy to put its own brand on podcasting. The company has announced “bodcasts,” promising to deliver “free audio programs every weekday, including ‘Ask Hef Anything,’ ‘Joke of the Day,’ delivered by a Playboy model, as well as video advice from sexy Cyber Girls.

All in good taste, of course. 🙂

Judging by the traffic statistics, a lot of recent visitors to this blog are interested in open source software adoption and why it isn’t proceeding faster in the corporate mainstream. For them, I’ll point to John Terpstra’s excellent three-part series on SearchOpenSource.com about his frustration in trying to buy a Linux-ready laptop at a major computer retailer. It’s one of the best-read stories ever on the three-year-old SearchOpenSource.com site.

Terpstra documents how his efforts were frustrated by salespeople’s unfamiliarity with Linux, the lack of commercial software and device drivers for Linux and the fact that the salespeople tended to be trained to sell only a Windows solution to buyers. He expresses frustration at a retailer’s lack of awareness of open-source options and compares the process of buying a Windows PC to that of buying a Linux box. If you’re an open-source fan, this column will make you see red. But it should also reveal some essential truths.

I’m not a big advocate of conspiracy theories in technology, so I don’t think Microsoft has engaged in some kind of coordinated campaign to shut Linux out. I do think, however, that Microsoft has done an exceptional job of educating its channel to sell the Microsoft solution. This is one area in which the vendor has consistently excelled. And Microsoft has continued to invest in channel education even as it has solidified its monopoly on the desktop. Give the company credit: it has effectively shut out any option to Windows at the street level.

The lack of a dominant Linux advocate in the retail channel hurts the open-source cause in this case. Microsoft has the hearts and minds of retailers and there is no one with comparable throw weight in the open-source market to balance Redmond’s efforts. If Linux is to be successful on the desktop, it must be because consumers demand it and because software makers write the applications and device drivers to support it. The latter is a chicken-and-egg problem. Software makers won’t write the apps until the demand is there. And the demand won’t materialize unti the apps are in place. In the meantime, we have an uneasy standoff.

BTW, the OSDL working group has just released a survey on Linux adoption on the desktop. The results reveal that desktop Linux users want the same thing as desktop Windows users: office productivity applications and device drivers. There is no particular bias for one platform over another as long as the platform delivers superior value for the dollar. Linux’s challenge continues to be to convince application developers that it is a reasonable alternative to Windows without being able to deploy the massive marketing dollars that Microsoft brings to the task. Score one for Microsoft. It is exceptionally good at exploring Windows’ advantage at the street level.