Cookie jar

I remember as a small child that, when you had taken some cookies from the cookie jar you were not supposed to take, your mother somehow always knew. I suppose this must feel the same for the people that got caught by the Wikiscanner.
This is an application that relates the IP adresses from the people who did edits on the Wiki pages. Surpringly (or maybe not so surprising really) a lot of edits come from organisations that are involved in the wiki-article and their intentions are not always without self interest. The page of George W. Bush was edited from the home security office (removal of the fact that he had a drinking problem) and the best of all about the edit from the queen’s home address where information from her daughter-in-law Mabel was edited to make her look a little better.
This all is of course not surprising. When information can be edited there is no reason to think companies and people will not do so in order to make them look better. The interesting part is that it turns out that many of the un-truthful edits had been discovered very quickly and have been repaired withing hours and sometimes even minutes.
Also, the wikiscanner is a new step that “the crowd” can and will use to make the information more trustworthy. More transparency will lead to better information. Not perfect but still a little bit better and better to judge.
These are for example the edits from the Telematica Instituut (looks like we have a lot of mathematicians in the company or are these the edits of one person?). Interesting…

La Dolce vita

It has been a long time since last post due to vacation and various other activities. But even in vacation time you can still enjoy the possibilities of all the new channels of communication and communities.
There is a (closed) discussion group I am member of that deals with various political subjects. Many of the members are educated as philosophers and the discussions are on a very interesting level. One of the people in this group is an American living in the Bourgogne in France. During the vacation I sent him an e-mail to suggest to meet for drinks when I would be traveling through France on the way back home. He was so nice to invite us to his house and stay the night there. Imagine: in the middle of the beautiful country side in the Bourgogne in a water mill dating back to the year 1300. Great company, great place, great food, great wine (probably the best red wine I ever tasted) and great conversation. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
One of the other surprises was how my son of 11 years was able to converse in English. Due to his playing games on Internet and chatting with other children all over the world he could really hold a conversation.
This to me shows that it is the combination of real and digital life that makes the current development on communities so interesting. It is not either the one or the other but the possibilities of intertwining those two to create new surprises.
Thanks Bill and Nala for a rememberable evening.