Facebook announced yesterday that it is taking a number of dramatic steps that would all add up to serving 1 billion "like" clicks from visitors to sites around the web, within 24 hours. Many people are concerned about Facebook's growing dominance around the web . One group of high-profile New Yorkers has launched OpenLike , a "very alpha alternative to Facebook Like." Working on the project so far is much-watched blogging investor and startup guy Chris Dixon , Huffington Post co-founder and MIT Media Lab guy Jonah Peretti , Jonathan Glick of Dixon, Conway , Ehrenberg and other VC-blessed TLists , Tom Pinckney who with Dixon both sold SiteAdvisor and founded Hunch.com and MIT grad and Hunch engineer Peter Coles . Dixon said this afternoon that the project is "looking for an authoritative open source person to govern it." Sponsor So the establishment is in Palo Alto and the rock-star insurgents are from the East Coast? Let no one say the Internet is boring. The lightweight technology at OpenLike is right now just a way for site owners to provide buttons for sharing content on a wide variety of social networks. One line of javascript adds a series of sharing buttons to a site, which the site owner can edit. Given that there are any number of ways to do more or less this same thing, and that these are very smart people working on this, we're sure there's a lot more in the works. The project describes itself on its site as "an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications." We'll share more details if and when this project develops. Related: See also developer Jesse Stay's blog post How Do You Compete With This Beast: Here's How , about long-time open standards community member Phil Windley's new product Kynext . The battle over control or absence of control over the internet is far, far from over. There are lots of people getting ready to step up and challenge Facebook's powerful, seductive, expanding control. Discuss
Who knew the Peace Corps were web developers? Certain African farmers did anyway. Now, with their AfricaRuralConnect project the recipient of an Interactive Media Council Outstanding Achievement Award , a lot more people know it too. ARC is a product of the National Peace Corps Association and provides a platform for Africans in the business of agriculture and those interested in African agricultural issues to present, hear and remix each others' ideas. Sponsor The site is built on Wegora , "a collaborative writing platform with an integrated semantic analytics engine." The site solicits ideas, community members remix them, improving them, commenting or questioning them, endorsing them. These remixes are portable and follow both the original idea and the remixer's profile through the site. The conversations that ensue resemble nothing so much as a bunch of entrepreneurs networking and workshopping their ideas. Those who suggest the ideas that win a given round, based on the number of endorsements they get, receive prizes. The grand prize is $12,000. This year's ARC contest goes through the month of November. "Prizes will be awarded to ideas considered the most original, creative, practical, scalable, and likely to succeed and offer the greatest improvements in the lives of small-scale farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa," said Molly Mattessich, manager of online initiatives for the NPCA, a group and herself a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali. "We hope this recognition will draw even more people to the site to submit their ideas and engage in a discussion on how to help rural Africa." Current ideas include "Fusing Sports (Football) with Rabbit and Bee Commercial Farming for Youth Development and Wealth Creation in Murang'a South," "Using Biogas to Change Rural Lives" and "Fuel Energy from Agricultural Waste." Discuss
Google Analytics offers site owners an easy and free way to gather highly detailed analytics about their websites' visitors. A lot of people, however, don't feel comfortable with the idea that Google can track their every move on the Internet. After all, even if you don't use any Google product yourself, you will still send personal data about yourself to Google through programs like Google Analytics. According to an announcement the Google Analytics team just posted on its blog, you will soon have the option to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Sponsor How Will This Work? It still remains to be seen how this opt out feature will actually work. According to Google, the Google Analytics team wants to offer a "global browser based plugin." This is a very vague statement and given that there is no standard for browser plugins, it remains to be seen how Google will implement this. It is also worth noting that a lot of users probably don't know how to install a plugin. Those users who care about being tracked by Google Analytics will likely know how to do this, but it is probably in Google's best interest to explain this opt out procedure in great detail. Google plans to make these plugins available globally in the coming weeks. Will this Make Stats Useless? If opting out of Google Analytics becomes a widespread phenomenon, this could have wide-reaching consequences for site owners. After all, having detailed analytics about your visitors allows site owners and publishers to tweak their marketing efforts . What About Other Analytics Tools? It will also be interesting to see how other analytics firms will react to this. While Google Analytics is probably one of the most often used analytics services, other companies like Clicktale , Sitemeter and Woopra also collect large amounts of data from Internet users. Those users who want to opt out of Google Analytics will surely also want to opt out of other programs as well. Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village Discuss
This morning, the Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign to bring video to Wikipedia . The project encourages Wikipedia users to add videos using the "100% free and open source video stack powered by HTML5 and Theora" that is the standard for the site. Our contention, however, is that while technical issues in adding media have certainly had a limiting role, is this all that has kept multimedia from dotting the pages of our favorite collaborative encyclopedia? Can video be collaborative? Sponsor While we wonder about the collaborative nature of the site versus the more fixed nature of video, others have already been hard at work making collaborative video a (potential) reality. We spoke today with Michael Dale, a self-professed "open-video evangelist" for Kaltura , who said that "we haven't really seen yet the collaborative sequencing aspects of the software," but that these tools are currently in development. Kaltura is the online video editing company that is working with Wikimedia to enable video on Wikipedia. Through meta data and other tools, the company is trying to make video a more collaborative media. The " Let's Get Video on Wikipedia " page offers a simple five-step how-to on how to add video to the site, but the only thing we're thinking it's missing is the "wash, rinse, repeat" aspect of adding any content to Wikipedia. While it is rather simple to go in and edit a sentence here and a paragraph there in a text format, editing a video is not nearly as simple. Now videos can be easily uploaded, how will Wikipedia's users contend with the medium? If a three-minute long video is added to an article, but 30 seconds of it contain somewhat disputed ideas, interspersed through out, will these parts simply be cut? Will the whole video be scrapped or will another user take the video, slice those parts out and insert their own? And in the end, if this is the case, what sort of mish-mash multimedia will we end up with in the end? This is the next step, it would seem. "Once there are more tools available," said Dale, "I think we'll see more experimentation." It's not as if these questions are new to the Wikipedia community, as you can read in its proposed guidelines , which suggest that videos will should likely be limited to "snapshot-type", "performance-type" and "tour-type" videos. Even with these limitations, if you've ever looked through the history of changes on Wikipedia articles, then you know how even the finest points of an idea can be discussed and dissected. According to a video interview with Kaltura co-founder Michal Tsur on Beet.TV , "users should be able to use video just the same way they're using text", but a word is a word is a word. A video, even a tiny bit of video, can differ in lighting, sound, angle and any number of other variables. "The actual fact is that we're just getting started," Dale pointed out. "There's not a clear idea of how video will work and be used." In the end, we think video sounds like a great idea, but wonder how widespread it can really become on a platform that holds collaboration in such high esteem. Whether or not video collaboration takes off on Wikipedia, we would love to see what could be created within other contexts (i.e. not encyclopedic) with the collaborative video tools that Dale says are currently in development. Discuss
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