Socially Speaking

The April 5th Waxxi cast with Jimmy Wales is up, and available for your streaming (or downloading) pleasure, here.

At just 32 minutes, this was the shortest cast we’ve done so far, and the first one we haven’t had to cut in two parts. Although the reason for the shortened cast had to do more with Jimmy’s schedule than anything else, it’s a refreshingly nice length.

It’s a fascinating conversation, and while it’s (again, for the first time) just mine and Jimmy’s voices you’ll hear, the interactivity and participation was awesome.
One question, for those of you who prefer text, came from the live chat:

Steve asks: What are the pros and cons of a transparent search algorithm? Are the advantages of having an open book approach to how search is performed worth the risks of some who will use the information to “game” the system?

JW:

Yeah, so that is a really core question. And, in a certain sense, the success or failure of this entire concept hinges on that question: which actually will work better in the long run?

So, there are a couple things that I think are pretty clear. When you have an transparent, open search engine with freely licensed software, when people find that there’s a problem, there’s a potential for people to actually correct it – and actually have oversight into what’s gone wrong and how to fix it – that you really don’t get in a proprietary search engine, unless you hire lots and lots of people.

The political implications are, well, they’re important to me. And I mean political with a small ‘p’, not really talking about government, but talking about the organization of society, and the organization of information in society. I think as citizens and consumers and producers in the world, we should be concerned about secrecy around such a core piece of the infrastructure of the Internet. So that’s one of the major pros.

Now, if you talk to security people – so, people who work in computer security – they’ll always tell you that “security through obscurity is a bad idea.” In other words, if the way you’re keeping something secure is by keeping it secret so people can’t game it, well you’re always subject to people to figuring it out and gaming it without you noticing. You’re subject to that kind of attack all the time.

One of the reasons we trust the encryption algorithms that we use is that they’re published. They’re public, and they’ve been tested by many, many mathematicians and computer programmers. Everybody can throw what they want at it, and try to find a flaw. If you’ve got a secret encryption algorithm, well…you just don’t know: I mean, has it really been tested thoroughly? And so forth.

So, I think the same idea applies to search algorithms. If the only reason it’s good is because it’s secret, well, that never lasts. What you really want is to truly begin to solve the problem in a more systematic way. For that I think the open approach is the best.

In a report from Tokyo yesterday, Reuters declared, “the online collaboration responsible for Wikipedia plans to build a search engine to rival those of Google Inc. and Yahoo, Inc.”

Well, we could’ve told you that.

Jimmy Wales came out, fully loaded, with some fighting words — or about as peaceful as fighting words can get:

The idea that Google has some edge because they’ve got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now.

He went on to describe Google and Yahoo! as “black boxes” that won’t reveal how they rank search results. And, that collaborative search technology could transform the structure of the Internet.

What this translates to is Wikia, the for-profit sister site to Wikipedia, will take great lessons from the non-profit’s core. Wikia Search, then, is a place where:

…users could work together to improve search engines, just as Wikipedia users had tweaked and rewritten articles on the sprawling encyclopedia.

Wikia as a whole hosts collaborative community publishing sites, and is supported by advertising. Examples of some of these communities include 24, the Muppet Wiki (one of Jimmy’s favorites), and the currently featured collaboration, Gears of War.