Mike Linksvayer

On a recent road trip I listened to four audiobooks. One is overrated, another poorly written and ignorant (conflation of mathematical proof and statistical confidence was most galling to me, but there’s plenty to go around), another well written and wrongheaded. The fourth isn’t exactly any of those things (apart from overrated), but then it didn’t feel much like a book. More like a book adaptation of an infomercial, read aloud.

That would be Rich Dad, Poor Dad, a garrulous stream of self-help cliches, financial pep talks, tall tales, and pitches for other books and products. (I may have listened to another book in the series–I gather they’re all pretty similar, and I heard tiresome stories of “Rich Dad” in any case.) Author Robert Kiyosaki has the annoying habit of presenting the obvious as deep wisdom (e.g., “everything has a price”, now that was new to me) along with obvious lies (I completely lost respect for the enterprise when Kiyosaki quoted “Rich Dad” as saying that one can consistently obtain 20% to 50% returns at low risk).

It turns out that “Rich Dad” is probably made up. Apparently the most specific answer (and telling) answer Kiyosaki has given regarding the identity of Rich Dad is “Is Harry Potter real? Why don’t you let Rich Dad be a myth, like Harry Potter?”

So that covers myth, what about pyramid? Apparently Kiyosaki got his start with pyramid organization Amway. He seems to have learned well, for Kiyosaki’s franchise of selling products that offer little more than selling Kiyosaki and his products would (do?) make perfect fodder for network sales.

It is possible a liar and network marketer could have valuable and unique insights, but Kiyosaki doesn’t seem to present any. I don’t hold being an excellent salesperson against him, indeed I think selling is undersold, but then he doesn’t advise people to learn or earn by selling, as far as I can tell.

I wasn’t going to write about Kiyosaki, but was inspired to by reading links posted by Jim Lippard on Kiyosaki today (I did not previously know that “Rich Dad” is a fabrication).

My theory is that Kiyosaki is an excellent salesperson and many who read his books and perhaps have never thought about money before or have, and are dense or frustrated, take his cliches as amazing insight. Take this from a commenter on one of the posts Lippard links to:

As mentioned, defining wealth as how long you can live without working was a new way of thinking of things for me. In 10 years of Money Magazine subscriptions, I’ve read a billion different mutual funds articles, but nothing about generating or even measuring passive income.

Think of things in terms of assets vs. liabilities was a new concept to me.

Helloooo!

I don’t have a theory explaining why anyone smarter than me would find anything valuable in Kiyosaki.

I wrote a distantly related post on real restate returns in September, 2005.

Lucas Gonze writes the musician industry has never been better, citing a LA Times story:

While the U.S. recording industry continues to slide [...], the other side of the music world businesses catering to those who create the music has nearly doubled over the last decade to become a $7.5-billion industry.

My emphasis. Read Gonze’s explanation of the ellipsis.

This highlights how backwards it is to cripple technology and law, ostensibly to ensure creators can get paid — creators eagerly pay to create.

Another quote from the article:

“We are looking at the first creative generation,” Henry Juszkiewicz, co-owner of Gibson Guitars, said last week as he was surrounded by instruments in his firm’s display room at the convention, which ended Sunday. “The cost of creative tools has gone down. And now you have the ability to share with other people your creation. These two fundamental, solid changes are allowing the younger generation to be actively creative.”
…
The NAMM musical industry group, which sponsored the convention, contracts with the Gallup Organization for a poll every three years. The most recent found that the number of instrument players ages 18 to 34 grew from 24% in 1997 to 32% in 2006.

It also found that last year about half of American households had at least one person who owned a musical instrument, up from 43% in 1997.

Note what the Gibson Guitars guy did not say — that people are buying more instruments in hopes of making money.

I’ve mentioned Semantic MediaWiki several times as having the potential to tremendously increase the value of Wikipedia by unlocking (in the sense of making queryable) all of the data in the encyclopedia.

dbpedia.org has taken a different approach to “Querying Wikipedia like a Database” (their excellent tagline) — extract datasets from Wikipedia, presumably with a manual mapping of relevant categories and data populating infoboxes to triples (described in What have Innsbruck and Leipzig in common? Extracting Semantic from Wiki Content).

I suspect Wikipedia implementation of Semantic MediaWiki would only help dbpedia.org, but the latter is already impressive, requiring no changes at Wikipedia. In addition to making some of the data in Wikipedia queryable they’re exposing non-Wikipedia datasets.

The Semantic Web is so here, now. Doubters repent! ;-) Like I said before:

Once people get hooked on access to a semantic encyclopedia, perhaps they’ll want similar access to the entire web.

I usually do not mention race when framing immigration controls as the international equivalent of (former) South African Apartheid — race lies on the South African side of the analogy. But the case of those opposing unfettered ability of all to move, live and work anywhere on earth without respect to nationality is not helped by the fact that race and racism is part and parcel of controls on movement, residency and work, as explained by The Guardian’s Gary Younge in The west persists in using race to decide who can cross its borders:

[W]hen translated into sterling, the mean income of a black Canadian is almost double that of a white South African. Yet a black Canadian is four times more likely to be stopped than a white South African.

Via Mark Brady.

Tim Bray has reasons for linking to a Wikipedia article about an organization rather than the organization’s site:

[A] lot of institutional sites are pathetic self-serving fluff served up in anodyne marketing-speak with horrible URIs that are apt to vanish.

Linking to the Wikipedia instead is tempting, and I’ve succumbed a lot recently. In fact, that’s what I did for the Canada Line. After all, the train is still under construction and there’s no real reason to expect today’s links to last; on top of which, the Line’s own site is mostly about selling the project to the residents and businesses who (like me) are getting disrupted by it, and the taxpayers who (like me) are paying for it.

Wikipedia entries, on the other hand, are typically in stable locations, have a decent track record for outliving transient events, are pretty good at presenting the essential facts in a clear, no-nonsense way, and tend to be richly linked to relevant information, including whatever the “official” Web site might currently happen to be.

I wrote something similar about a year ago:

I consider a Wikipedia link more usable than a link to an organization home page. An organization article will link directly to an organization home page, if the latter exists. The reverse is almost never true (though doing so is a great idea). An organization article at Wikipedia is more likely to be objective, succinct, and informational than an organizational home page (not to mention there is no chance of encountering Flash, window resizing, or other annoying distractions — less charitably, attempts to control my browser — at Wikipedia). When I hear about something new these days, I nearly always check for a Wikipedia article before looking for an actual website. Finally, I have more confidence that the content of a Wikipedia article will be relevant to the content of my post many years from now.

Why not preferntially link to Wikipedia? Bray feels bad about not linking directly to original content and says Wikipedia could go off the rails, though later provides a reason to not worry about the latter:

I’d be willing to bet that if Wikipedia goes off the rails and some new online reference resource comes along to compete, there’ll be an automated mapping between Wikipedia links and the new thing; so the actual URIs may retain some value.

Indeed; and the first argument explains why linking to Wikipedia is superior to linking to an institution. But what about “original content”? If the content isn’t simply a home page (of an organization, person, or product significant enough to be in Wikipedia), Wikipedia doesn’t help. For example, I linked to Bray’s post “On Linking”; only providing a link to his Wikipedia article would have been unhelpful. The Wikipedia article link in this case is merely supplementary.

So what to do to help with broken and crappy links to items not described in Wikipedia? Bray suggests “multi-ended links”. I think he’s on the right track, but this is not something a web content creator should need to worry about — robust linking need not involve choosing several typed (e.g., official, reference, search) links. The content creator’s CMS and the user’s browser ought to be able to figure this stuff out; the content creator should just use the best link available, as always.

Last year I wrote:

I predict that in the forseeable future your browser will be able to convert a Wikipedia article link into a home page link if that is your preference, aided by Semantic Mediawiki annotations or similar.

In the case of non-Wikipedia links (and those too), combatting linkrot and providing alternate and related (e.g., reference, reply, archival) links is an obvious feature add for social bookmarking services and can be made available to a CMS or browser via the usual web API/feed/scraping mechanisms.

Modern research on “brain drain” indicates it is mostly beneficial, which comports with my intuition, repeated here:

Over the long term I’d bet brains are not zero sum — a brain drain really just means increased returns to education. Mobility means more people in the developing world will pursue higher education. Add to that increased flow of knowledge and capital to the developing world from migrants and concern over “brain drain” sounds very much like yet another disingenuous excuse for keeping the current system of inter-jurisdiction apartheid in place.

The International Migration of Knowledge Workers: When Is Brain Drain Beneficial? highlights another way brain drain benefits all. Abstract (emphasis added):

We consider the welfare effects of the emigration of workers who produce a public good (knowledge). We distinguish between the knowledge diversion and knowledge creation effects of such emigration, and show that the remaining residents of a country can gain from emigration, even when tastes for knowledge goods exhibit a kind of ‘home bias’. In contrast to existing models of beneficial brain drain (BBD), our results do not require agglomeration economies, education-related externalities, remittances, return migration, or an emigration “lottery”. Instead, they are driven purely by the public nature of knowledge goods, combined with differences in market size that induce greater knowledge creation by emigrants abroad than at home. BBD is even more likely in the presence of weak sending-country intellectual property rights (IPRs), or when source country IPR policy is endogenized.

Very cool.

Via Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Via a comment from author Philippe Legrain, a positive Financial Times review (copy) of his book Immigratns: Your Country Needs Them. I want to comment on two short excerpts:

Workers raise their own - and the world’s - income levels by moving from a low-productivity job in a poor country to more productive employment in a rich one.

Which should be enough to win over any modern human (non-neanderthal) to open borders. The ethical argument for open borders is even better.

Policymakers must take account of the many voters who disagree with Legrain, even if this is based on ignorance and prejudice. It is surely better to admit 500,000 immigrants annually and have social peace than 1m and riots.

The reviewer would deny 500,000 people opportunity every year in order to maintain “social peace”. I say let the skinheads and fellow travellers riot — and bring them to justice for any crimes committed. Neanderthalic potential rioters must not be allowed to stall the elimination of apartheid.

Wikiseek has launched. It’s a reasonable idea, searching Wikipedia and sites Wikipedia links to (recalling search engines that have used Dmoz to seed crawls). It’s much faster than Wikipedia’s built in search, but doesn’t satisfy me, as its Wikipedia results are out of date and imcomplete (indicators of the former include turning up deleted articles and finding nothing for ‘wikiseek’).

I find it interesting that Wikiseek’s footer says:

The majority of the revenue generated by Wikiseek advertising is donated to the Wikimedia Foundation.

That’s nice — apparently Searchme, Inc., intends to use Wikisearch to demonstrate its vertical search prowess — and it inspires a potential non-intrusive revenue model for Wikipedia that precisely copies Mozilla’s: sell inclusion in the search box/search page.

This wouldn’t be worth the hundreds of millions annually that tasteful text ads on articles could be (and the ability to fully fund^* the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission), but it would surely obviate the need for begging to cover the costs of running Wikipedia.

^* If politicians can use that vacuous phrase to indicate they “support education” I can use it in support of funding free knowledge projects.

Jamendo is one of the most interesting music sites on the net (in terms business, community, and technology — there’s no competition yet for the vastness and bizarreness to be found on archive.org, yet). They’re trying every Web 2.0 trick and have somehow managed to avoid becoming overwhelmed with crap. I’ve listened to dozens of the 2,100 albums on Jamendo. While only a small fraction of these have strongly agreed with my taste, just about everything (weighted toward electronica and French rock) sounds professional.

Now Jamendo has introduced an advertising revenue sharing program with participating artists.

Several video sites are attempting variations on this theme (among them Revver, Lulu.tv, and Metacafe), but as far as I know Jamendo’s is the first attempt in the audio space. One might think an audio site would have a harder time making web advertising work than a video site (videos are usually watched within a web page and can have clickable ad areas or bumpers even if not), but I gather that listening via (usually Flash-based) audio players embedded in web pages is increasingly common (and Jamendo upgraded theirs recently), as will be media players that “play” a web page in a browser interface.

One data point: although Jamendo heavily promotes download of high quality copies, primarily via BitTorrent, their statistics indicate that low quality http “streaming” has accounted for more bandwidth. There are many obvious caveats here, but I think all points above indicate that advertising-supported web audio should not be ruled out, even if it is granted that web video has more potential.

Digg Jamendo’s revenue share page.

Roderick Long:

A wall that can be used to keep people out can also be used to keep people in.

Do we really want to trust the U.S. government – meaning not only the present regime but all future U.S. regimes – with a tool of that nature?

Similar arguments have been made many times regarding handing over power to the security state, but this is the first I’ve heard it specifically applied to building jurisdiction border walls.

Meanwhile the proposed U.S.-Mexico border fence could cost $49 billion, 25 times forecasts last year (zero surprise). Perhaps waiving environmental rules for the fence will save a pittance while continuing the security state’s best tradition of degradation.

Tom Palmer points out new laws cracking down on immigrant employment in Russia with a post title comment “Lou Dobbsian Economics Put into Practice in Russia”.

Palmer’s post is accompanied with a picture of marching Russian neo-nazis — neo-communists? — skinheads in any case, with armbands that would be unambiguously nazi if not for a hammer and sickle where a swastika would be expected.

It’s probable that Russian politicians are balder in their anti-immigrant pronouncements and Russian police more brutal in their enforcement, but the laws don’t sound all that foreign.

BBC:

President Vladimir Putin spoke of the need to defend the interests of the native population.

Markets - often a source of employment for Russia’s army of immigrant workers - were singled out.

“Markets” means open air retail, I gather, but delicious nonetheless. Longer BBC article here.

Reuters:

Russia introduced new laws on Monday that experts say are intended to plug a hole in the country’s labor market while discouraging foreigners from settling there permanently.

The laws, passed by parliament last year, are designed to streamline the red tape foreigners have to go through to live and work in Russia legally but will also reduce their numbers.

One change will implement a gradual ban on foreigners working as traders in outdoor markets where immigrants dominate, causing friction with ethnic Russians.

‘We want to get rid of illegal immigration,’ said Denis Soldatikov, a spokesman for the Federal Migration Service.
…
Television pictures on Monday showed rows of locked shops at a market in the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok heavily dependant on traders from neighbouring China.

‘The move was harmful because it will undermine trade,’ Vitkovskaya said. ‘I only hope no one is going to abide by it.’

But deputy Federal Migration Service head Vyacheslav Postavnin disagreed, saying the markets will adjust.

‘There are Russians to be hired,’ he told Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily. ‘Market owners will make sure that their business continues.’

Whenever you hear similar from those closer to home think of the skinheads and look in the mirror.

The January 13-19 Economist has a review of (and my first encounter with) Philippe Legrain’s book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. The title and the review make the book sound a bit wishy-washy, but a review in the Guardian, reprinted on Legrain’s site makes it sound much better.

The central thrust is that immigration is economically beneficial. Fluid migration is as dynamic as every other form of free trade. “If you believe that the world is an unequal place and that the rich should do more to help the poor,” he writes, “then freer international migration should be the next front in the battle for global economic justice.”

Ironically, the book appears to not yet be available in the U.S. Amazon Canada will have it January 30.

I have never visited Bogotá, this is not a commentary on a city I do not know. I want to point out that Tyler Cowen’s thoughts on Bogota serve as a (presumably unintentional) metaphorical description of the entire world (sure, what you’re thinking, I just happened to notice this time).

How can such a nice place be in the midst of a civil war and guerrilla uprising? Why do leaders in the highest reaches of government secretly work with the paramilitaries? Does every radio station in the country play Juanes, and how long will their Tower branches last?

That excerpt is gratuitous, some of the rest requires just a bit more imagination.

Last post I went along with a NYT article (and apparently recent court case) in describing Digital Restrictions Management as crippleware. Bad call on my part.

Traditionally crippleware is free and its aim is to get you to buy a non-crippled version. With DRM you pay for crippled media and its aim to ensure the media stays crippled. Is there any widely deployed DRM that offers to turn itself off completely for the right price?

Perhaps a better term, if not from the customer’s perspective then that of certain businesses, is suicideware. Case in point, Windows Vista. I was reminded of this when Boing Boing just pointed (again) to A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, the “executive executive summary” of which is “The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.”

From the aforementioned customer’s perspective, traditional suicideware is just temporally crippled-ware. For a software business, perhaps suicideware (I’m making this up) is that which forgets who the customers are, tempting the gods of randomness. Rouletteware? Deathwishware?

Via Luis Villa, tomorrow’s New York Times has a decent article headlined Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs. The article title is right (Villa’s summary is a better description, if not a better headline: “iTunes and DRM hurts perfectly innocent customers, fails to stop piracy, and reduces competition”), but it leads off wrong:

like its slimmer iPod siblings, the iPhone’s music-playing function will be limited by factory-installed “crippleware.”

Wrong, the objects of iZombie lust can play any MP3 file that is not itself crippled. The crippleware (the handcuffs to avoid) is not factory-installed, but purchased from the iTunes Store — tracks crippled by DRM.

Perhaps iTunes (the media player and ITunes Store browser), some version of which I assume is factory-installed on the iPhone, is perhaps more akin to malware. Not the type that takes over your computer without your knowledge, but the type that presents you with many opportunities to download and perhaps pay for software and porn that will cripple your computer. It’s a fine line.

The NYT article has a great closing:

IN the long view, Mr. Goldberg said he believes that today’s copy-protection battles will prove short-lived. Eventually, perhaps in 5 or 10 years, he predicts, all portable players will have wireless broadband capability and will provide direct access, anytime, anywhere, to every song ever released for a low monthly subscription fee.

It’s a prediction that has a high probability of realization because such a system is already found in South Korea, where three million subscribers enjoy direct, wireless access to a virtually limitless music catalog for only $5 a month. He noted, however, that music companies in South Korea did not agree to such a radically different business model until sales of physical CDs had collapsed.

Pointing to South Korea, where copy protection has disappeared, Mr. Goldberg invoked the pithy aphorism attributed to the author William Gibson: “The future is here; it’s just not widely distributed yet.”

I’m skeptical that the emphasized (by me) portion above is not exaggerated, though I’ll grant that South Korea is probably some years ahead of music businesses in the U.S. and other places similarly primitive in this respect, which may undergo a transition similar to South Korea’s. But we can also look to markets that started from a very different place, e.g., China.

We could beneficially spend more time looking for examples that may be ahead of the pack or simply different, and not just in the music business.

Tom Evslin says Apple Fails to Reinvent Telecommunications Industry:

Steve Jobs claims that iPhone will “reinvent” the telecommunications sector. Wish it were so but it ain’t!

The design of the phone – no hard buttons, all touch on screen, sounds like everything we expect from Steve and from Apple: it’s all about the GUI and that part’ll be fun. But the business relationship is as old school as it can get: exclusive US distributorship through Cingular
…
Short term this is a good tactic for Apple because it protects the iPod franchise for a while. Long term I think it’s terrible strategy. It invites an endrun from someone who IS willing to reinvent the industry or simply allies themselves with a Cingular competitor.
…
Remember how wonderful the Mac GUI was? But it only ran on machines from Apple. Remember how crappy Windows was at first? But it ran on machines from everyone and their brother. And now there’s Linux – even less restricted – running on anything that moves. Tell me again why it makes sense to have a phone that runs only on a service from at&t (in the US).

Like other Apple products, the iPhone is eye candy (ugly to me), but not revolutionary.

It looks like the FIC Neo1973, showing at CES, due to ship this quarter for US$350, running the OpenMoko platform (presentation), will be more in the right direction — unlocked and open for developers. Andy on the openmoko list has a very early comparison.

The Neo1973’s big missing feature, at least initially, is apparently Wi-Fi, due to a lack of open drivers. As a late adopter of gadgets, I can wait. I acquired my first and only mobile phone in 2003, and it’s easy on the eyes.

That said, I’d really like Portable online by 2010 to be true:

This claim is judged YES if and only if, by January 1, 2010, in any state with more than 5 million inhabitants, at least 25% of the adult population are “portably online”. A “state” can be a country or a member state in a federation.

Read more for how “portably online” is defined (the contract was written in 1995). My current guess (and the market’s; last trade at 30) is that without a more significant smartphone revolution than we’re seeing the criteria won’t be met before 2010, but not terribly long after.

OpenMoko via Jon Phillips. Second word in post title refers to a silly slide found at Engadget.

Many good comments regarding supporting advertising on Wikipedia (or not) here and also on Slashdot and other blogs. I may further characterize and respond to these in aggregate (see the update to my first post for some of this). For now I want to call out or respond to a few particularly worthy comments and criticisms.

Evan Prodromou’s comment:

One thing I wanted to respond to was that a couple of people seemed to think it incorrect on my part to refer to Wikipedia’s Web traffic as a “resource”. I’m not sure what else to call a potential source of tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars annually in income. But if people know a better word for it, please substitute that in.

Let me also point out that wikipedia.org’s current huge Web traffic is not a long-term sure thing. As Open Content, the encyclopedia can be copied onto any other Web site on the Internet, and sites like answers.com show that this can be lucrative. Anyone familiar with the Open Directory (http://dmoz.org/) knows that it’s copied to Google Categories, Yahoo Directory, and dozens of other high-profile sites. In 5 years, will there be thousands of mirrors of Wikipedia on the Web? Will wikipedia.org become more like editors.dmoz.org — an editorial interface for a data set served from many other servers?

If that’s the case, will we look back on the high-traffic days of 2005-2008 as the time when we wasted somewhere around half a billion dollars in potential revenue? Will the WMF really be glad at that point that it did so?

I hadn’t thought of this scenario and don’t consider it likely, but do think it is an important consideration. I think the canonical dmoz.org was seriously disadvantaged in two ways Wikipedia is not — a fairly closed editorial process (e.g., I’ve applied a few times over the years and don’t recall getting any feedback, not even rejection) and probably a horrible editor interface (e.g., I was accepted as an editor at Chef Moz, a sister site of dmoz.org — and ran away screaming).

How could Wikimedia sites lose traffic to copies? Presumably much of Wikipedia traffic comes from Google. If Google published a branded copy (with ads of course) and promoted it in (or above) search results, Wikipedia would presumably lose lots of traffic (and many people would call Google evil for it, at least for awhile). I’m sure there are more creative scenarios in which Wikimedia sites lose traffic.

Peter McCluskey:

Mike Linksvayer has a fairly good argument that raising X dollars by running ads on Wikipedia won’t create more conflict of interest than raising X dollars some other way.

Almost. The second X is Y and an order of magnitude or so smaller than X. McCluskey:

But the amount of money an organization handles has important effects on its behavior that are somewhat independent of the source of the money, and the purpose of ads seems to be to drastically increase the money that they raise.

I can’t provide a single example that provides compelling evidence in isolation, but I think that looking at a broad range of organizations with $100 million revenues versus a broad range of organizations that are run by volunteers who only raise enough money to pay for hardware costs, I see signs of big differences in the attitudes of the people in charge.

Wealthy organizations tend to attract people who want (or corrupt people into wanting) job security or revenue maximization, whereas low-budget volunteer organizations tend to be run by people motivated by reputation. If reputational motivations have worked rather well for an organization (as I suspect the have for Wikipedia), we should be cautious about replacing those with financial incentives.

It’s possible that the Wikimedia Foundation could spend hundreds of millions of dollars wisely on charity, but the track record of large foundations does not suggest that should be the default expectation.

Yes, this could be a major problem. As I said last year, “[advertising] could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects.” The possibility that new funds will not be used effectively lowers the expected benefit of running ads. Two items give me some confidence that the Wikimedia Foundation would be less susceptible to waste than the average foundation:

• Wikimedia Foundation’s history of transparency sets the tone for what would become a much larger organization
• An incomparable set of watchdogs (Wikipedians)

Regarding subversion of current volunteer motivations and ethics (which is really the point of McCluskey’s post), I would not advocate financial incentives for functions currently carried out by volunteers, certainly not any content-related function. Of course given large amounts of money there would be pressure to convert an ever larger group of volunteers into employees, regardless of what advocates of advertising on Wikipedia might have wanted. The possibility that this would occur and go badly should also weigh against advertising.

Addressing this possibility, I concur with Per Abrahamsen’s recommendation segregating Wikimedia projects and foundation funding of compatible projects:

Wikipedia is clearly able to earn its own money, begging for donations on the front (and every other) page is an insult to both visitors, and to the many worthy cases that are not in that lucky position.

So I support advertising on Wikipedia.

The adds should be non-intrusive, textual, clearly separated from content, and selected algorithmically, similar to the adds known from Google.

However, if the money are really that big (more than the current need), additional precautions would have to be taken. The most important would be to split the foundation into two, with watertight boundaries between. One that ran the current Wikimedia projects, and another solely responsible for distribution the ad-money between causes that promote the goals of the foundation, but had no say in the running of any of the projects. Money do corrupt, hence the separation.

Slashdot commenter FooAtWFU (and others) suggested that the real problem with advertising is that large numbers of contributors would leave in protest, seriously damaging Wikipedia. I doubt it. A very vocal minority would raise hell and some of them would leave, at least temporarily. I suspect most contributors would not even notice the presence of ads. I conjecture that Wikipedia contributors, however superior some may feel, are not that different from MySpace “contributors” (who seem not to be deterred by gratutous advertising). In a relatively short time (a year is my wild guess) a majority of contributors would have become contributors after advertising had begun. Such is the nature of a rapidly growing site.

A 2002 fork of Spanish Wikipedia (Enciclopedia Libre) could be interpreted as evidence in either direction. The fork apparently occurred in part due to “our rejection of censorship, of an editorial line, and of including advertising.” Whatever the merits of these claims, article counts show the fork growing more quickly for about a year and a half. From 2004 on Spanish Wikipedia grew much more quickly and currently is over five times the size of Enciclopedia Libre. So the loss of those ideologically motivated against advertising and perhaps with other complaints could be seen as a terrible blow to Spanish Wikipedia (a year or more delayed progress) or no big deal, considering current relative sizes. Is there any reason to think the proportion of Spanish Wikipedians disgusted by advertising is significantly different than that of any other language?

Of course it is possible if Wikipedia had taken ads in 2002, many more may have left, and perhaps the fork would now be five times the size of the parent instead of vice versa. This would not necessarily be a horrible thing. After all, the two sites (and any potential Wikipedia fork) use the same license, so work done on one is not entirely lost to the other.

This does suggest an experiment however — run ads on Spanish Wikipedia and see how many contributors move to Enciclopedia Libre. The existence of the latter would make it both easier for ad objectors to move and easier to determine who had moved, indicating a probable maximum negative impact on contributions to other Wikipedias, should they run ads, as no other language has an alternative as viable as Enciclopedia Libre — at least not viable for those who hate ads! The largest encyclopedic wikis outside Wikimedia run Google AdSense, e.g., WikiZnanie (Russian) and Susning.nu (Swedish).

Yesterday I attended a talk by Aubrey de Grey, the purpose of which seemed to be to get feedback on messaging to potential donors. The feedback was good, but perhaps hard to hear. I hope de Grey uses some of it. Much of the feedback could apply to anyone selling a radical program.

Don’t dwell on your critics. Debunking detractors is too easy, comfortable, and personal. Every second you’re telling me why your detractors are wrong you’re not telling me how your idea will work. Suspicious. Reason puts it well:

[E]very new idea, every plan, arrives associated with a raft of dumb objections, but you won’t convince a smart, educated audience of the merits of your idea by taking time to dispel the dumb objections. The world is full of dumb ideas - many more of them than good ideas. Dumb ideas also arrive accompanied by dumb objections (just look at any average day in politics…), and one of the chores of being involved in a funding organization is to listen to people trying to demonstrate that a dumb idea has merit by demolishing dumb objections to that dumb idea. This is a form of rhetorical alchemy - often performed quite innocently by those sold on a plan that just won’t work - that raises red flags for folk in funding organizations.

Don’t dwell on the more radical implcations of your program (unless they’re short term money makers). De Grey claimed that repairing each of the seven causes of aging (with the possible exception of mutant mitochondria) individually would cure a raft of diseases. If true, this should be more than adequate to fund fixes for each of the seven causes individually without ever mentioning any potential for life extension. De Grey claimed this is a hard argument to make, as curing individual diseases through other means will be less expensive than the relevant cause of aging fix. If true, de Grey is either extremely optimistic about conventional medical research or is lying about the level of funding needed for his program, considering the $US billions spent on individual disease research annually. I suspect de Grey is wrong on this point and hope other researchers and organizations take an engineering-fixes-for-causes approach via funding for individual disease research.

Since my last (peevish) post mainly about de Grey’s work slightly over a year ago, Methuselah Mouse Prize total ($1.6m received plus $2.5m committed) funding has risen by nearly $1m. More importantly $4m has been raised for the research program, with LysoSENS and MitoSENS work having begun. De Grey also had a more concrete plan for ramping up the research program as funding becomes available than I recall having seen before; unfortunately I couldn’t find it quickly at sens.org.

I still highly recommend giving to the Methuselah Mouse Prize/Foundation. Highly recommend would be an understatement. I don’t know of a more important cause.

Somewhat relatedly, I want to reiterate that even without repair technologies, increased lifespan over the past century was concomitant with decreased absolute time spent in a diseased state and that on an individual level, a healthy life expectancy increase is available now, no technology required.

Update 20070109: Reason argues that if the focus is not on fighting aging, progress will only be incidental and inefficient. Perhaps, but if nearly everyone is in a “pro-aging trance” as de Grey is fond of saying, should your marketing really depend on breaking that trance? Let’s face it, in all probability that trance will not be broken and relative to the medical innovations required is not even a major obstacle. Individuals will nearly always choose to prolong health and life (when self-control is not involved anyway), regardless of their emotional or religious attachments to death. In my view de Grey has done a great service by identifying a set of targets for repair and recommending an engineering approach. If there’s value in his approach it will be used by others with smaller goals resulting in faster and more efficient incidental progress against aging. The indefinite lifespan part of his pitch is just Macho Flash:

Macho Flash WORKS internally — at raising the most money from a small group of people (which then also KEEPS us small and insignificant).

Wikileaks, currently vapor, may be a joke. If Wikileaks is not a joke and if it successfully exposes a large number of secrets, I’d find it hilarious to see this happening on a public website and without financial incentives. P2P, digital cash, information markets, and crypto anarchy? Nope, just a wiki and a communinty.

Wikileaks FAQ:

WikiLeaks will be the outlet for every government official, every bureaucrat, every corporate worker, who becomes privy to embarrassing information which the institution wants to hide but the public needs to know. What conscience cannot contain, and institutional secrecy unjustly conceals, WikiLeaks can broadcast to the world.

Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet (1997, but these ideas spread widely in the early 1990s):

One of the most interesting applications is that of “information markets,” where information of various kinds is bought and sold. Anonymity offers major protections for both buyers and sellers, in terms of sales which may be illegal or regulated. Some examples: corporate secrets, military secrets, credit data, medical data, banned religious or other material, pornography, etc.

Why is more information not leaked on the net already? The technology exists to do so anonymously and has for a long time. Why is there not (or to what extent is there) a market for secrets? Again, the technology exists.

Perhaps lack of the relevant institutions in each case. One could email secrets or post to a blog anonymously, but what then? Will anyone notice? One could want to sell secrets, but how to find a buyer?

If Wikileaks succeeds it will be because it will provide, or rather its community will be, the relevant institution. Again from the Wikileaks FAQ:

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.

Instead of a couple of academic specialists, WikiLeaks will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document relentlessly for credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability. They will be able to interpret documents and explain their relevance to the public. If a document is leaked from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document is leaked from Somalia, the entire Somali refugee community can analyze it and put it in context.

I have not read the Wikileaks email archived at cryptome.

If a jurisdiction invades another, the invading jurisdiction must:

• Grant full invader citizenship to citizens of the invaded jurisdiction upon demand, with all rights of previous citizens the invader;
• If a supermajority in the invaded jurisdiciton desires annexation to the invader, the indvaded becomes a subjurisdiciton of the invader and all citizens of the invaded become citizens of the invader, equal to previous subjurisdictions and citizens of the invader.

A high standard? Disruptive of the politics of the invader jurisdiction? Justly so, considering the invader’s disruption of lives in the invaded jurisdiction.

A particularly savvy would-be invader may decide to skip the invasion step. Regarding Iraq, the U.S. jurisdiction is neither savvy nor responsible.