In a pithy post-Wikimania post, Dave Winer notes the “disconnect” between Wikipedia’s “promoters and the people who do the work.” The disconnect, he points out, complicates assessments of the motley encyclopedia’s attempts to enhance its quality. What’s the definition of quality, and who’s defining it? “It’s a very slippery subject, but an important one,” says Winer, “because Wikipedia pages rank so high on the web. If they didn’t, there would hardly be a reason to discuss. In the web before Wikipedia, every point of view had a chance, but Wikipedia tends toward centralization, toward one or two views prevailing …”

Much has been made about the upward creep of Wikipedia entries in search engine results, but there hasn’t yet been much discussion about what this “centralization” means. Just to double-check the phenomenon, I wrote a list, off the top of my head, of ten important and various topics to see how highly Wikipedia’s entries would rank on Google. Here are the results:

World War II: #1

Israel: #1

George Washington: #4

Genome: #9

Agriculture: #6

Herman Melville: #3

Internet: #5

Magna Carta: #2

Evolution: #3

Epilepsy: #6

That’s pretty striking, and I bet that most Wikipedia entries are continuing to move upward – and many will, like “World War II,” come to reach the top spot. In the not too distant future, we may be living in a world where the default source of information about, well, pretty much everything will be a single and not altogether reliable amateur reference work.

When critics point out the flaws in Wikipedia, its defenders are quick to respond, “It’s only an encyclopedia; you don’t use an encyclopedia as your only source.” And that used to be true. In fact, after high school few people used encyclopedias at all, at least not regularly. But now, I’m not so sure. I’d wager that a heck of a lot of people searching the web do in fact use Wikipedia as their first and sole source, or at least their major source. (Just because you think people should consult a lot of different information sources doesn’t mean that they’re actually going to.) As Winer suggests, Wikipedia’s dominance over search results may be subtly shifting the nature of the web as an information source, moving it from heterogeneity toward homogeneity. He’s right: It is an important, and slippery, subject.

UPDATE: Tom Lord continues the discussion.

UPDATE: More here.

A hundred years or so ago, our foremothers seemed on the verge of a great emancipation. Homes were beginning to be connected to the new electrical grid, which would in short order deliver unimaginably cheap and plentiful power into kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms. The availability of cheap electricity would in turn, and in equally short order, bring into homes an amazing array of newfangled labor-saving appliances, from electric irons to toasters to vacuum cleaners to washing machines to clothes dryers to dishwashers, and on and on and on. It seemed obvious that this technological revolution would lift the yoke of housework from women’s shoulders. They would be freed from the unpaid manual labor that blighted their days. Their leisure hours would multiply. Instead of being “producers,” they would become “consumers,” a far more enjoyable occupation.

But as obvious as that future seemed, it did not materialize. The time that women were forced to spend on unpaid housework did not go down. According to some estimates, in fact, it went up. What happened? The new technologies had consequences that were completely unexpected. They not only changed the form of labor but also altered social norms and behavior and reconfigured economic tradeoffs in exceedingly complicated ways. It became expected that houses would be cleaner, that clothes would be sweeter smelling and more meticulously pressed, that children would be more thoroughly scrubbed behind the ears. Instead of a family working together to give a home a thorough cleaning a couple of times a year, women were suddenly expected to clean their homes daily, to keep a dust rag permanently in their pocket. Instead of husbands or older sons carrying rugs outside and beating them every few months, women were expected to vacuum them once or twice a week. The labor-saving devices ended up creating as much labor as they saved, and the higher expectations for cleanliness added a new anxiety to women’s lives. Everything changed, and nothing changed. Utopia arrived, on schedule, but it didn’t turn out to be utopia.

I bring this up for purposes of self-justification. Tim Bray, in trying to “figure me out” yesterday, offered this succinct assessment: “I think I see a theme: Carr seems to be arguing that there’s nothing new in the world.” That seems fair to me, particularly given my recent postings here, yet it also seems reductionist, as all attempts to “figure out” other people (or even ourselves) are doomed to be. Bray also says: “The steady migration of knowledge onto the Net is a new thing, qualitatively. And, in the last few years, the phenomenon of millions of people becoming contributors, not just consumers, is a big deal and I don’t think anyone really understands it.” While I might quibble with some of his phrasing – I wish, in particular, that people wouldn’t rush to use the word “knowledge” when “information” would do or to claim that in the past people were just consumers – I agree with him here, too. I don’t think anyone really understands it, either. I do think, though, that the best way to try to understand it is to look not at the current technological trends but at the history of technology and the way it has influenced economics and society. There are many new things in the world, but there’s nothing new in the world.

Before taking on my current role as an itinerant cogitatrix, I spent a few years editing articles at the Harvard Business Review. It was a strange sort of job, but what came as the biggest surprise was the realization of how completely cut off from history business thinking and writing have become. Except for a few endlessly recycled anecdotes from the recent past – Digital’s failure to respond to personal computers is a good example – there is an almost complete lack of any historical perspective in mainstream business theory and analysis. The same seems to be true in business schools, where the discipline of business history, if it exists at all, is shunted off into a backwater. How strange and how sad. There’s little doubt in my mind that a student would learn a good deal more about business and the practice of management from reading a few good volumes by great business historians like Alfred Chandler and Richard Tedlow than by reading every management book published over the last twenty years. But that’s just pissing in the wind.

It’s even worse, if more understandable, in the technology sphere, where newness is all. If you spend a lot of time following contemporary discussions of computer technology and its consequences – in the blogosphere, say – you may find yourself convinced that the universe came into being in 1990, fashioned by the almighty hand of Tim Berners-Lee. There’s no past at all, just the illusion that what we’re experiencing has never happened before and, in some odd way, counters everything that’s happened before. Even the search engines we use to organize all the so-called knowledge that has migrated onto the Net are designed to discount the past, to assign a positive value to newness and a negative value to oldness. The hegemony of the recent is inscribed in the very algorithms through which we, increasingly and perhaps tragically, make sense of the world. Given how overbalanced our discourse is toward the new, I feel it’s the least I can do to place my thumb on the other side of the scale.

The claims of technological transformation we hear today are the same as the claims of technological transformation we heard a hundred years ago, though some of the more meaningless terms have been reversed. Then, technology was going to free us from the nightmare of “production” and release us into the more perfect world of “consumption.” Now, technology is going to free us from the nightmare of “consumption” and release us into the more perfect world of “production.” It didn’t pan out yesterday, and it’s not going to pan out tomorrow. The future will escape whatever big abstractions we try to confine it to. It will surprise us, and disappoint us, and in retrospect we’ll see in its unfolding the repetition of patterns from the past.

So, no, Tim Bray, there’s nothing new in the world. The most you can say is that it’s ongoing.

The title of this post will bring a smile to fans of the greatest rock band to have ever come out of Ireland (and, no, I certainly do not mean U2). I wish I could claim it as my own, but in fact I stole it from the Financial Times, where it appeared today as the headline of an editorial. The editorial itself wasn’t bad, either. It looked at the new Google-MySpace partnership through the lens of the eyeball-grabbing that characterized the dot-com bubble.

“As a business,” write the editors, “there are reasons for caution. The youth market is a fickle and ever-changing niche. Seventeen-year-olds need to tell the world that they love Coldplay and will never get married. Ten years on they know the depressing truth and have no time to share it on MySpace.” Ain’t it the truth. “The next generation of teenagers, meanwhile, may see MySpace as the boring site their big sister used, and share their angst via a new competitor.”

But the media business has never been much interested in separating the fads from the future, any more than it’s been interested in mulling over yesterday’s papers:

Big media likes eyeballs, however, and the money splashing around is reminiscent of earlier deals based on user content and networking. In 1999 Yahoo bought GeoCities, the homepage community, for $3.5bn in stock. In 1998 AOL bought instant messaging company Mirabilis for $287m. In both cases the huge user base and network effects were cited as reasons for the deal. But all the buyers got was a room full of servers, some intellectual property and a handful of creative staff. GeoCities was eclipsed by, among others, MySpace. AOL Messenger fell prey to competition from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

All of which shows the speed of change on the internet. Google, the coolest internet company of all, has had to spend $900m just to bolster its search business. News Corporation has done well, for now, but imitators will find search engine cash harder to come by. As all fashionable teenagers know: today’s essential is tomorrow’s embarrassment.

Take it away, Fergal:

A teenage dream so hard to beat

Wish she was mine, she looks so good

Despite much-publicized fears, the explosion in the use of web hangouts like MySpace does not seem to have brought any increase in sexual predation online. In fact, the percentage of kids who report being solicited by perverts on the Internet has actually gone down over the past five years, from 19% to 13%, according to a major study released today by the University of New Hampshire (and covered by USA Today). Exposure to porn has gone up sharply, however, despite the spread of filtering technologies.

To have 13% of kids having to handle unwanted sexual advances online is nothing to celebrate, but at least the number’s going in the right direction. And MySpace, whatever its faults, appears to be something less than a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

Duane Merrill provides a nice little introduction to mashups at IBM’s site for developers. He looks at the origins of the concept in “bastard pop” songs, the common types of mashups that have popped up on the web and the technologies that underpin them. Most valuable, for those thinking about deploying mashups in a business context, is his overview of the technical and social challenges involved in constructing and using them.

One of the technical challenges (which will be exceedingly familiar to corporate IT types) is data integration: Even in a Web 2.0 world, pulling together disparate data sources into a coherent whole is not a cinch. Another is what Merrill calls “data pollution” (which I’ve referred to as Web 2.0’s truthiness problem): the fact that the data you’re mashing up may not be altogether reliable. Explains Merrill: “As part of their application design, many mashups solicit public user input. As evidenced in the wiki application domain, this is a double-edged blade: it can be quite powerful because it enables open contribution and best-of-breed data evolution, yet it can be subject to inconsistent, incorrect, or intentionally misleading data entry.” Data reliability issues are not, I would add, limited to the information that users provide. A lot of public data sources, such as real estate records, have outdated, incomplete or otherwise flawed data. Merrill also briefly mentions the security issues inherent in mashups, which I wrote about yesterday.

In short, the mixed and often uncertain parentage of these new “bastard apps” (my term, not his) is both their strength and their weakness.

“Mashups are certainly an exciting new genre of Web applications,” Merrill concludes, but “before mashups can make the transition from cool toys to sophisticated applications, much work will have to go into distilling robust standards, protocols, models, and toolkits. For this to happen, major software development industry leaders, content providers, and entrepreneurs will have to find value in mashups, which means viable business models. API providers will need to determine whether or not to charge for their content, and if so, how (for example, by subscription or by per-use). Perhaps they will provide varying levels of quality-of-service.” Damn. I thought mashups were supposed to be easy.

UPDATE: Gartner takes a sunny view of corporate mashups. It says today that mashups will “have a high impact on businesses and reach maturity in under two years.” However, the company also warns “that because they combine data and logic from multiple sources, they’re vulnerable to failures in any one of those sources.”

The LA Times reports on how a couple of big U.S. newspapers, the Dallas Morning News and the New York Daily News, are experimenting with including multimedia CD-ROMs with their Sunday editions. The CDs allow the papers to extend their content, and their advertising, onto the computers of their readers – and to provide a bridge between their paper and online editions. According to the Times, Dallas Morning News executives are “pleased with initial results since they began in April to pack [the] discs into the Sunday paper once a month. ‘It was a gamble for us to do this,’ said Bernie Heller, vice president of advertising for the Morning News. ‘I’m not ready to say it will definitely pay off in the long run or that my advertisers will embrace it. But so far it looks really good.'”

The tech-forward crowd finds the idea of distributing CD-ROMs silly. Snarks Techdirt: “A bunch of newspapers have decided that if one bit of old media (newspapers) isn’t enough, why not two? That’s right, they’re going to start shipping CDs with the morning newspaper, sort of like computer magazines from a decade or so ago … If this content is so valuable, and is going to be viewed on a computer anyway, why not just put it online?” The skepticism is warranted, but it’s also worth remembering that most people aren’t tech-forward. There can be big rewards for using “old media” as a bridge to “new media,” as NetFlix discovered when it used the drab old U.S. Mail as a bridge between its online DVD rental site and the homes of customers – at a time when a lot of Web 1.0 entrepreneurs were losing their shirts (or their investors’ shirts) by trying to deliver video over the Net.

There’s another thing to keep in mind: People love freebies, particularly ones that take physical form. Last year, British newspapers began distributing DVDs of old movies in some editions. Though the films “were not the freshest offerings,” Variety reports, “buyers don’t seem to care. On a single Saturday in October, the Times added 220,000 sales with ‘The Last Emperor,’ the Daily Telegraph got a 170,000 spike from ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ and the Independent sold an extra 85,000 copies with ‘Wings of Desire.'” I’m doubtful that CD-ROMs will have the same pull as DVDs, but I don’t begrudge the papers the experiment. “Old media” often has more appeal than new media types realize.

So much for “anonymized” search data. In a story in its Wednesday edition, the New York Times explains how it was able to quickly trace the identity of one of the 657,000 AOL customers whose search histories were released over the weekend. AOL customer #4417749, who searched on such terms as “numb fingers,” “60 single men,” and ““landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” is none other than 62-year-old widow Thelma Arnold. Figuring out her identity “did not take much investigating,” write the Times reporters. Says Mrs. Arnold, “My goodness, it’s my whole personal life. I had no idea somebody was looking over my shoulder.” She’s not the only one.

UPDATE: Commenting today on the AOL fiasco, Google’s Eric Schmidt said, “We are reasonably satisfied … that this sort of thing would not happen at Google, although you can never say never.” That’s not altogether comforting, but at least it’s honest.