User:Jukeboksi/Blog/March2004
5.3.2004
Now there is serious unclarity of which Wikis we are planning to implement. I hope that 142.177.X.X who introduced this competing Research Wiki+Signal Wiki scheme will clarify what is gained in this venture into further internal incoherence in this wiki.
- See Talk:Wikis and values. Calling things "Content" or "Opinion" is to make a choice to assign certain values to certain processes applied in each. This is just not right. Processes don't have values. Nor do the institutions built on them. People have values, and people use our wikis for research, and signalling to others, and development. Calling what they do or say "R&D" or "content" or "opinion" is an overlay of YOUR values on THEM. A good system does as little of this as possible. We KNOW we are doing some Development, we KNOW we are doing some Research, we KNOW we are sending a Signal. NO one would dispute those terms. So they do not ask for trouble.
Anyways I've noticed lately that internal incoherence seems to be an universal phenomenon in wikis due to that it's so easy to misplace information by making overlapping and competing articles instead of seeking consensus on one article. Naturally trolls will insist that the ability to express dissensus is a great feature of wiki in general
- Absolutely. Without this you never get to a two-party system and factions that agree to debate civilly instead of always forking and fighting, which is exactly what is happening at Wikipedia. Trolls insist on dissensus and will even sometimes make some visible where it is hidden, to drive this evolution. See m:troll for a detailed hierarchy of roles based on this.
As to Consumerium:Retrospection that requires much more concentration on my behalf since I'm the one with the earliest plans in my head to retrospect on.
- Probably Greenpeace and Adbusters also had early plans, but they did not work out. Why not? What is preventing this service from coming into being? What is the basic error we are all making? Perhaps it is assuming that consumers will drive this, as opposed to institutional buying criteria. Perhaps it is failure to see the healthy signal infrastructure as one thing that requires great global cooperation and a mind-set shift even into hardware. Perhaps it is bad wiki code, refusal to see price premium or factional logic, or tying ourselves to a permission-based model, or not being troll-friendly enough. Who knows? We must explore all of these... and be our own worst critics (thus threats and worst cases analysis).
One thing I've noticed that I should make a note of into Consumerium:Retrospection once the competing wiki-schemes issue becomes more clear is the shift from formally correct markup into associatively correct markup this is naturally due to the shift from using XML to Wiki code
"this is a product under a brand by the company of same name. The company in question is a Multinational Corporation that has an wholly owned subsidiary somecompanyname LTD in this country. The Multinational Corporation is based in country, subregion village and it is enlisted in somestockexchage as somestocksymbol etc..."
- ? They aren't opposites. GetWiki uses XML properly, as an exchange. ConsuML will be easy to suck into GetWiki and turn into the Research Wiki and Signal Wiki default pages. But then trolls must get to work before these can be accepted as the Consumerium buying signal.
- What is "formally correct" and "associatively correct"? You refer to links? That is more a wikitext standard than a wiki code problem.
I have a feeling this will go deeper into our instructional capital needed to run the wikis or deliever The Features planned or Consumerium Services whatever the underlying technology used to markup and store information in the sense that maybe we shouldn't be wasting time and effort into modelling business structures as was mentioned in the original concept plans
- It may be futile, as they shift so fast and it's so hard to say what goes into a company. Much easier to say what goes into a product probably until you get to the commodity level where the commodity markets fuzz it up - deliberately! Those markets are all for stolen goods, really.
and shift more into modelling consumer experience that is to say that the distinction between a product, a brand and a company is often superficial in the sense of consumer perception and though there are ambitious plans written about how Consumerium Services will affect institutional buying criteria etc. the main goal is still to affect consumer perception
- Any marketer will tell you his brand is where the value is. That is, if a brand is trusted, it generates free money. If not, it generates just liability and must eventually be discarded. Like any repute. So work done on companies and products and commodities is probably there ultimately just to build up or tear down a brand. Our users will be friends of some brands, enemies of others, so "Praise/Criticism" is appropriate for Consumerium:intermediate brand page <-- brand can be to product or service or experience or whatever, it's more generic.
2.3.2004
I like the distinction between product and commodity. This makes for a more clearly defined scope on all things material, though currently commodity is a redirect page and I think that things that are sold in commodity markets globally should be their own category ie. coffee, sugar, cocoa etc.
- The distinction between a product and a commodity is basically only that of pricing on w:commodity markets. Even if something is not purchased through these markets, the price quoted on them affects all pricing on that commodity anywhere in the world - with transport costs being the only real price differential. There's a gradation here, and the idea of an industrial ecology where the waste disposal method of one process is the resource extraction method of another (!) is directly opposed to the idea of any kind of commodity market. We should think in terms of the service economy and imagine a world of high transport costs where commodity is more and more a fiction.
Also reversing the linkage relation of campaigns that came to me inspired by Connelly Barnes's idea of an incredibly simple Consumerium standard wiki format seems like a good way to go.
- Yup. Though we do have a fairly complex service cycle to model to get to any kind of idea of the comprehensive outcome of any process whatsoever.
I'd also like to thank 142.177.X.X for some great work s/he's done around here the last days. It was starting to get irritating when s/he was constantly just on a AWR-rage
- Just don't want us to go down any wrong paths. Reading the Wikipedia mailing list lately, it's a war zone over there, and when even Wales starts to use terms like sysop vigilantiism you know there's no due process at all. It won't be long now before they have to put some real governance in place, or just give up. Maybe they have enough interest and recognition to recruit that m:board now. But whatever they do it should not be our problem here.
1.3.2004
Yesterday I installed Debian on an old box that's been lying around for ages and now I'm playing around with it to get more aquinted with Linux naively hoping to some day accumulate enough *NIX skills to make a living out of it. I am getting into Python also and learning Dutch and German by reading the Wikibooks on them
One thing I need right now is a job.
Give Juxo a job, please.