Brooders

Rough Type’s article Is Wikipedia a blackhole? first allerted me to the “no follow” link strategy to deal with spam. This “no follow” links is an attempt to not pass on good Google ranking (e.g. High Ranking Wikipedia site to no name spam site).

I see three issues with that:

1. Spammers don’t care if the links are no follow or not – All that wordpress spam has no follow, but still it continues – Akismet helps this
2. Is it really addressing the problem ? or treating a symptom – Is the unauthorised entry really about getting more links? This solution doesn’t address information quality
3. Need to display credit where it’s due, this removes that respect to good information on other websites

Solutions? .. I have some ideas

• Perhaps an aging of the links .. e.g. A link that have been there unmoderated for 3 months are ok so make them followable by search engines
• If it exists somewhere else in Wikipedia as a safe link (or close to a safe link) there is should be ok

Also at Rough Type, he talks about The link of least resistance and the perils of the positive feedback loop and single point of failure when many people use wikipedia by default.

It’s an interesting problem Wikipedia have, I don’t think just changing to “no follow” will change the mind set of spammers to game other sites for link karma instead. And clever spammers who can write might game a wikipedia article anyway .. a favourable piece of prose to persuade people to visit anyway.

We’ll see how this unfolds I guess as Wikipedia implement and re-adjust.

La Jetee according to many is an essential Sci Fi pre-cyberpunk film. Thanks to the joys of Google Video, La Jetee, it is now archived for you viewing pleasure.

According to Cyberpunk review, 12 Monkeys is a remake of La Jetee.. SFAM over at Cyberpunk review has done a brilliant job of documenting and reviewing cyberpunk movies, good and bad. He also, compared the similarities of the two in his review The Acorn and the Oak Tree.

For more notes, and related information check out La Jetee post at Infocult. There are more pointers to different versions, scripts etc. Infocult has mentioned in the past that Google Video, Youtube et al act as a video archive for old material, which I totally agree with. Especially when great shows like Max Headroom from 20 years ago are made available.

“How to go to M.I.T. for free“

Catchy headline, nearly true.

It’s actually MIT OpenCourseWare

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is being philanthropic with it’s knowledge Information resources.

I say information, because there are many who believe that Knowledge is the experience, context and information utilised within the brain. All we pass between other humans and computers is datum and information.

This is really interesting though. Having just finished my Masters of Business and Information Technology, I can appreciate that a course is more than lecture notes and books. A lecturer may have 30 slides but talk for 2.5 hours. That conversation wasn’t recorded and added to our class materials, it’s just processed by your hearing and the brain.

Having a quick stroll through the MIT material though, looks like I can grab materials for Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Mathematics and Philiosophy.

This is excellent !