New Media Med Blog

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia spoke at Trinity College Dublin last night. I went there to find out about wikinomics. The word wasn’t mentioned once but there were enough clues to how Wikipedia economics works from the philosophy of Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia is a non-profit organisation and is one of the top five Internet sites – enough said on the discussion about whether Wikipedia is a success or not.

He delivered his talk in a very matter of fact unassuming way – not like the big testosterone driven speeches that you get from some of the leader of commercial software companies who either prance around the stage or talk about having the biggest yacht in the world. In fact, it was more like reading s wikipedia article.

Here are some of the things I took away from the talk:

Wikipedia is free – free as in free speech not as in free beer. That’s a key message of the open source movement.

Wales didn’t like using the word crowd-sourcing. When Mark Little asked him about crowd sourcing, Jimmy explained why it wasn’t a good word for what Wikipedia volunteers do because of the connotations with out-sourcing. They don’t do it for the money.

Even though Jimmy Wales is strongly espousing the non-profit, philanthropic message now, he didn’t exactly start out that way in 2000. He wanted to build an online encyclopaedia, Nupedia and he paid people to write articles. In 2001 he decided to switch to the open source model and everything changed.

In the early days he got a lot of encouragement from a lot of the people in Slashdot.org – that’s where the essence of the community came from.

Wales firmly believes in is that generally people will act in good faith – the community usually trumps the very small minority which wants to create mischief. It’s interesting that every discussion that I’ve heard on radio or newspaper about Wikipedia always focuses on the few mischief makers. We in New Media Med have seen the same positive community spirit in an online epilepsy community which we started for James’s Hospital. People are helpful and no-one has uttered anything remotely destructive – even though they could – it’s a free open forum.

There is a commercial side to his business. It’s called Wikia but I didn’t get much enlightenment on how that’s going to work out – although he did say it was growing very fast. That development is pretty much the same as Linux and Apache being used in mainstream commercial enterprises.

Just went to a really interesting lunchtime talk in DIT entitled “research internet tools – benefits and pitfalls”. Interesting discussion on wikipedia, especially since Jimmy (Wikipedia) Wales is in Dublin at the moment. There was a general agreement that wikipedia could be a great place to start and also had many topics (such as Jedward) that academics would never cover. But Wikipedia wouldn’t be something which could be cited in research papers.

What I found interesting is that the universities are coming out in the open now also. So you can find a huge amount of published research online. Various colleges have open access repositories. DIT’s is arrow.dit.ie.

Another example is Open Doar – a directory of open access repositories. So now researchers can find each others research much more easily.

Another big takeaway for me was the advice that we should think outside the Google box when searching. While it’s important commercially to know where things sit in Google, we have to remember that they make their money from advertising rather than through the search engine. Google has an excellent set of tools for analysing search rankings and for buying adwords but there are other search engines out there which are worth googling with.

Here are a few:

http://www.hakia.com/

http://www.chacha.com/

http://clusty.com/

http://www.kartoo.com/

http://www.mahalo.com/

Their approach is more semantic webby than being at the mercy of the keywords you happen to choose. I’m looking forward to using them for my research on Market Research Online Communities (MROC). – Maybe I don’t have the right keywords for that – but I’ll soon find out.

I went to see Tim Draper, 3rd generation VC from Silicon Valley speak in Trinity College, Dublin last night. He took a 10 million foot view of the world (from Mars actually) and told us that anything is possible. Everything will probably happen eventually but the question is when. It’s easy enough to predict that all horses which start a race will finish but if you knew the finishing order beforehand that’s where the money is. Those who get the timing right make the money and that’s the VC’s job. They want as many entrepreneurs as possible to participate and they will pick the winners. It’s no mean feat to pick the winner and Tim didn’t really tell us how he can predict the finishing order except to say that he has a very good team to do that for him. Overall it was an inspiring talk and great encouragement on a Friday night – something entrepreneurs need at the end of the week.

Collecting data on a human population has become more expensive per head in the past 10 years. Studies have suffered from low response rates and a higher drop-out rates in longer term studies. The reason is that there are many more media of communication thus raising the distraction noise and lowering attention spans.

A study from Sweden in 2008 by Christin Bexelius showed a much improved response from web based research when compatred to Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Sweden has today among the highest Internet and cell phone penetration in the world, making the population suitable for introducing new technologies in data collection (11). The Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB) at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has since 2001 designed and evaluated several studies using e-epidemiology. In 2003, the first large scale web-based study including 47,859 women in the age group 41-60 was conducted (12). Today, the department has used the Internet for several large scale population-based studies, including an Internet based-hearing test and a surveillance system utilizing IVR and a web-based application. .

Social Media can now be adapted specifically to the needs of the researcher and web-based questionnaires can either be delivered to PC’s or to mobile phones. So could social networks play a role in data collection on a population?