So I have a five hour drive in front of my tomorrow to get to Boston and iLaw and five hours back on Friday. That’s a potential 10-hour time-shifted, on demand, learning never stops, read/write Web techfest opportunity that I want to make the most of. (What’s a radio, anyway?) I’m saving up the latest Gillmor Gang, and I’ve got the latest from IT Conversations and the usual edsuspects. But I’m open to suggestions…what’s REALLY good that you’ve been listening to?

Alan uses a Blogger blog to present “More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs” at a conference in Hawaii. (Lucky cogdogblog.) I love the notes/no notes option…and now I know how to do it even. (Now if only I had the time to play…)
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Last week I noted that the LA Times “Wikitorial” experiment would probably be chaos and guess what? It was.

Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material.

Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit.

Well, that ought to help the wiki movement, don’tcha think? But they should have seen this from the beginning. I mean first of all, the idea of a wiki is to filter out opinion, not create it. A wiki just isn’t space built for competing ideas, even if there are two or three of them set up for the same general topic. (Even 20 or 30 might not make it.) A wiki is the place to collaborate on some semblence of unbiased truth about whatever the topic is. When you’re dealing with topics that have a minimum of right/left or right/wrong, wikis will work. But the idea that people in this country could collectively agree upon a statement about the Iraq war is idiocy. And so, the experiment failed.

Having said that, however, take a look at the discussions taking place at Wikipedia over such controversial topics as abortion and George W. Bush. It’s pretty interesting to watch the process. I had heard at one point that Wikipedia editors were “approving” changes to those pages though I’m not sure if that’s still the case.

Growing pains…