The Collaborative User Experience research group of IBM has done some analysis on Wikipedia pages, visualizing change to pages in terms of a History Flow.

history flow provides answers at a glance to questions like, Has a community contributed to the text or has it been mostly written by a single author? How much has a particular contributor influenced the current version of the document? Is the text‘s evolution marked by spurts of intense revision activity or does it reflect a smooth transition from its beginning to the present?

Makes pretty impressive and informative graphics and is an interesting approach to tackle the problem of mass data visualization in a social space. Handling of typical problem domains like Vandalism, the origin of content in terms of registered and unregistered users, growth, evolution and age of content are all becoming much clearer.

Have a look at some of the results of the analysis for a description on color and brightness are used to emphasize certain characteristics . The gallery provides even bigger and much detailed pictures. These graphs tell a lot about the rushed public interest in certain topics like „Islam“ or „Iraq“ and demonstrate the slow, evolutionary growth of mostly undisputed topics like „Love„.

I am going to give a talk on Blinkenlights at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, that‘s about to open it‘s doors today to the public. The talk takes place on Friday at 12:00 h, if you like to join. It‘s going to focus a lot on the Arcade installation done in 2002.

And argh! The web site uses frames. In 2004. Still! Why don‘t these media guys ever learn?

Tonight the english Wikipedia has passed the 250.000 article mark. Growth of the Wikipedia project has been enormous and is continuously rising. This is true for the variants in other languages as well: the german Wikipedia just welcomed it‘s 80.000th article.

Have a look at the growth statistics. At this pace, the project will deliver its high goals probably sooner than expected.

Have you contributed lately? No? So go ahead and tell us about what you know.

Fans are always a special kind of people. You notice it once you discover your are one yourself. And on the net, fandom has found its home in the early days already. Kate Bush – renowned artist and singer – always had a strong following and I admit to have been among the crowd for a long time. I have been touched and inspired by her work since the Eighties and I wasn‘t surprised to see that there were people around the world sharing my affection.

What was surprising was that Kate Bush‘s fans have initiated a mailing list in 1985 (!) that was followed by the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.gaffa soon after. Later, the Gaffaweb adopted the upcoming web technology similarly early (by the way: Gaffa relates to the song Suspended In Gaffa, while Love Hounds – the name of the mailing list – relates to Hounds Of Love respectively. Getting all these international postings on my small computer at home back then was a special brainwash to me as I was still busy explaning my friends the need for things like computers in general.

So what‘s the news? It‘s what made it‘s way into my inbox today: a collection of Kate‘s early works in MP3. Some of them haven‘t been published, some of them are just other recordings of well-known songs from her Albums.

Back in the times of the Cold War, the US Army had it‘s main radar field station on top of Berlin‘s artificial „mountain“ known as Teufelsberg (devil‘s mountain). It has been closed for a while now, but since the follow-up real-estate projects have all failed, the area has been opened to the public two weeks ago.

So the area has been invaded by the hackers and a lot of interesting information on this is coming up. Until then, you might want to enjoy some nice QuickTime VR panorama pictures of the site that Fiedel has put up on his web server. Be warned, access will be slow as the server is behind a private DSL line.

Newseum – The Interactive Museum of News provides the front pages of (currently) 303 international newspapers, updated daily on their Today‘s Front Pages page.

„Today‘s Front Pages“ is an online version of one of the Newseum‘s most popular exhibits. Every morning, more than 250 newspapers from around the world submit their front pages to the Newseum via the Internet.

Interesting to see, that the publisher‘s are actively coopoerating and that the PDFs (!) are not just scanned images but include all the text for cut and paste operation as well.

There is going to be a demonstration against software patents in Brussels tomorrow. Whoever can be there, please join. Software patents are the biggest threat against open source technology and smaller companies on this planet. Don‘t let them win.

Tons of Flash (sigh), but worth a look: Genotyp is a demonstration on how to breed fonts by crossing them and/or manipulating them in a gene laboratory. Very well done.

MediaWiki is the code behind Wikipedia and despite the fact that I am not the biggest fan of its MySQL/PHP underpinnings I do like the concepts that are behind it.

First and foremost, MediaWiki does not support the concept implicitly linking all CamelCase words that are introduced into the text. In contrast, all linking is explicit which is a very welcome thing as it prevents overlinked texts that provide no contextual meaning to the reader. You might argue that a text might be underlinked then, but as it is a Wiki still, it attracts changes as long as the content is considered „not complete“ by the readers. So missing links will go away as missing information (and typos) do.

Another interesting concept is the introduction of namespaces that makes „relative“ pages possible and allows for some interesting solutions for „internal“ pages, automatically generated pages and so on without poisoning the default namespace. Pictures are managed in their own namespace and each picture is treated like a separate page but can be included by reference in other pages. This makes maintenance easy and concise.

The upcoming version 1.3 of MediaWiki is about to introduce RSS feeds and XHTML/CSS based skins so more good news is ahead. I would be happy though if somebody would port the system to PostgresQL but I don‘t see this happen anytime soon.

Installation of MediaWiki is a bit confusing however. Once you know your way with MySQL you can concentrate on setting up the Wiki itself. The INSTALL document talks about an „experimental web-based“ installation which in fact is the only viable solution. It doesn‘t offer all the options, but you can dive into the LocalSettings file and tweak it to your needs. Just don‘t try the „classic“ way described in the INSTALL files: the developers admit that it is just broken and destroys you initial setup right away. Strange.

I would have no success hiding my ongoing admiration for the Dylan Programming Language. It‘s just so fucking powerful, flexible and sexy that once you‘ve read either the Dylan Reference Manual you‘ll wonder why everybody would just think about using something else.

The Dylan Programming book is also a very helpful introduction, as it describes Dylan‘s langauge features to C, C++ and Java as you move along. Yesterday, Chris Double has summarized 50 Specific Ways Dylan is Easier to Use Than C++ in response to Scott Myer‘s book Effective C++: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Design. The comparison is a blood bath for C++. What was to be expected as Dylan was invented to free the world from C++ (Andrew Shalit).

If you are interested in Dylan you might want to check out the Gwydion Dylan project home page, Dylan Wiki or the #dylan IRC channel on freenode.net.