(via Slashdot)
According to an article in APC, of the more than 2.8 million lines of code contributed to the Linux kernel over the last year or so, 75% were written by paid developers. Considering the business ecosystem that's grown up around Linux over the last 10 years, this should come as no surprise. But still, it's an interesting counterpoint to the notion that Linux is written by a community of dedicated volunteers. I think that characterization is probably still largely correct: volunteers write Linux. The kernel is a particular beast with a particular social system. What happens at the core of Linux matters so much to the IBMs of the world that it stands to reason they would get particularly involved there.

But I also think this is an interesting window into what happens to open-source systems as they grow, evolve, and become essential to the computing world. What percentage of Wikipedia is written by paid representatives? Nobody knows. Aside from some notable exceptions in which journalists, politicians, or Scientologists were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, we don't know where a lot of Wikipedia's content comes from. I think it's a fair assumption that some large percentage of it comes from paid representatives. It's probably not as high as 75%, though.

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John Tierney reviews Jaron Lanier's brand new book – You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto – in yesterday's New York Times. I ordered it today. I have to admit I'm pretty wary of any new book with the word "Manifesto" in the title. Seems awfully cocky to me. Reading Tierney's review, I suspect Lanier's book will be provocative, but I suspect I'll disagree with most of it. Why would Lanier want to throw in with folks like Andrew Keen and Jonathan Zittrain, seemingly trying to make a buck or a headline by pointing out the horrible things that the internet will lead us to? Let's fight the technological determinist tendency to argue that the internet is a great beast that has us in its grips and is marching us back to its lair.

I'm going to reserve judgment until I read the thing, although I admit it's hard. People do not seem very tolerant of this tumultuous (but exciting!) period in which we're trying to figure out the whole always-on, massive collaboration, cloud computing, social norm changing thing that's going on. I for one am content to give it time.

RIP Privacy.

Now back to reality. Privacy is not dead. Far from it. Privacy is a bigger issue than it has ever been.

So how should we read Zuckerberg's statement? On the one hand, we can default to the most general implication of what he's saying: notions of privacy are in flux. True. But that's always been true. Is the internet changing privacy more fundamentally than radio or television did? It's interesting to think… It couls be that the pace of evolving norms has been accelerated of late. Or, we could remember that Zuckerberg is the mouthpiece for the internet's most prominent and, arguably, egregious privacy violator. It is squarely in his company's interest to argue that the default reaction of the Facebook-going public is to share everything with everyone. It saves him the hassle of having to deal with the violations that are increasingly occurring.

So, what can we say about privacy in the age of Facebook and Twitter? First of all, I think we should resist the urge to make blanket pronouncements. There is certainly a group of young people who have grown up with Facebook in their lives. For these people, privacy means something different, just as "friend" means something different, than it does for many other people. But that's far from a common view. Yesterday's NYTimes Week in Review has a nice article on this subject. For many, arguably most folks, privacy is still very real. And it's something that many people hold important and nuanced attitudes about.

With Coye Cheshire and Elizabeth Churchill, I have been looking into these attitudes. We've been finding that discretion – the ability or desire to suss out the nature of a specific situation and act accordingly, rather than applying a blanket attitude – is key. I suspect that many people exercise a huge amount of discretion about their online information. They differentiate between contexts, audiences, and types of information. After all, why do we assume that the same privacy attitudes would apply to information about, say, our bank accounts, our present geographical location, and our breakfast?

I think privacy is going to be the banner issue of 2010 and beyond. But the banner isn't going to read "Privacy is Dead." The challenge for sites like Facebook is going to be to build socially smart tools that don't apply blanket rules about privacy. Facebook's new privacy rules are organized around functions on the site. But I don't want to decide who can read all my status updates. I want different people to have access depending on what I'm writing about, when I'm writing, where I am, etc.

Dealing with privacy effectively will mean first doing some tough research. What aspects of individuals, of contexts, and of interactions bear on specific privacy attitudes? We need to be thinking of privacy as a whole range of attitudes, not simply a single standard. Then we need to design easy-to-use technologies that can give people the privacy they want based on what they're doing and who they're doing it with.

Facebook can't solve the privacy issue by wishing it away or declaring it gone. If Zuckerberg's comment is indicative of their stance, I'm seeing the chink in Facebook's armor. Some wily start-up is going to come along with a beautiful and flexible technology that will allow people to share the way they want to and they're going to eat Facebook's lunch.

First, there's a paper by Mor Naaman, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai called "Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social
Awareness Streams" (PDF). Among a variety of interesting and nuanced findings, the authors show evidence that about 80% of Twitter users are "meformers" – people whose Tweets are mostly about themselves. Only 20% were in the "informer" category – people who share information about other topics.

Surprisingly, TechCrunch has lately been the source of seemingly high quality data about Twitter. In addition to Geoff Cook's great guest post on Why Teens Don't Tweet, back in October Robert Moore posted a huge amount of data and longitudinal analysis.

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And, just today, TechCrunch has news from Comscore that Twitter's growth has basically flattened out for both international and US users, this despite a recent push of new features and new languages. In September I predicted the demise of Twitter, and this seems to be the first stage. 2009 was definitely their year – arguably no technology was more popular, more widely talked about than Twitter was this year. 2010 will be the year of soul searching for Twitter, where the new-ness wears off, new features don't gain the expected traction, and the company continues to look for a reliable business model. If Twitter has a big future, it's going to be as a messaging platform that underlies more interesting services.

1. DARPA Made it Easy Take a look at the map of the balloon locations. Notice anything? Huge swathes of the country with no balloons? Yup.

   
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   Remember when I flippantly dismissed the Twitter-only strategy by pointing to the NY Times infographic showing how few Tweets there are in so much of the country? Well, apparently DARPA knew that too, and decided to make the challenge very, very easy. The balloons were in major parks in major cities, almost entirely on the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. I mean, for peets sake they put a balloon in Union Square, San Francisco!

2. How did MIT win? Well, first let me tell you how they did not win. MIT's victory had absolutely nothing to do with the ridiculous reverse pyramid scheme they were using to hand out money to tipsters. I am willing to stake a fortune on that one. Here's the graphic they use to try and explain it:

   
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   I'm hoping the folks over at MIT aren't patting themselves on the back for their brilliant use of monetary incentives.

   So how did MIT win? Well, you can find the answer to that question on Slashdot, Techcrunch, CNet News, the Washington Post, and… Get the picture? Shocking. Well known educational institution gets huge amount of publicity, attracts more tipsters, wins scavenger hunt.

3. Where was the Innovation? Unclear. I didn't see any interesting innovation in incentives. I didn't see many creative uses of technology. Most teams set up websites with simple web forms for submitting tips. Army of Eyes had an iPhone app. for that same purpose, and they did quite well I think. But it still boiled down to a simple form for submitting tips. I mean, the FBI has been doing the same thing with a phone number and a few operators for years. This is a nice reminder that, although the internet and social media provides some fascinating new contexts for interaction, what we do with it in social interaction, organizing is fundamentally the same as before.

   MIT's team says they were using some algorithm to verify balloon tips. I'm not sure what that means. I know that they were keeping track of all DARPA-related posts during the challenge. They may have been looking for posts such as these, which I found earlier on in the day…

   
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   Of course, none of those actually referred to a balloon in the challenge (as best as I can tell), but looking for those types of messages was more the sort of strategy I was expecting.

4. Fin I can't help but feel that the whole thing was a bit of a disappointment. The way DARPA decided to place the balloons meant that teams could win without any secret sauce. I was excited to see what people would do to find the balloons on a random stretch of I80 in Nebraska or whatever.

   I'm hoping that this is all part of DARPA's strategy, and the next thing they'll do give people a chance to really organize, make the challenge really hard. I think they've got the right idea that there's innovation to be done in this space. But Twitter is such a blip on the radar. To really tackle nationwide emergencies, and to effectively harness the power of networked media and the internet we need to learn to integrate new technologies with old organizational tools. We need to look at lessons from MoveOn and Obama – people who arguably did networked organizing, combined the power of new and old media better than anyone ever has – and we should see how we can use those lessons for a more directed goal.

   I'd love to work on that problem. DARPA – bring it!

Note sure how many people have voted. My vote was 'Never.' Although it occurs to me now that I don't quite know their definition of solved. If they mean when will someone find at least 5 balloons and get the prize, well, that should happen in less than 24 hours. Maybe even less than 6. But I'm betting no one will find all 10.

One of the issues the WSJ piece brings up is the question of whether the decline is the result of a lack of new material. In other words, some people argue that, with over 3 million articles in the English Wikipedia alone, it's hard to find new stuff to write about. Is this the case?

Guardian columnist Mark Graham thinks not. In a recent column, Wikipedia's Known Unknowns, he takes a look at geographical distribution of Wikipedia articles that have geotags:

Graham sees this as evidence that there's plenty left to write about. But I think he's missed the point. It's true, Wikipedia has not yet covered the entire domain of human knowledge. There are many places on the globe that aren't well documented yet. But that's exactly the point. The people who live in those places aren't well represented on Wikipedia (yet). And the people in heavy Wikipedia-using countries don't often go to those places.

Graham's map essentially shows that this is, in fact, a big challenge for Wikipedia. With 3 million articles, Wikipedia has largely covered the easy stuff. General knowledge and popular culture are comparatively well represented, and so is geographical knowledge in the parts of the world where Wikipedia is very popular. So the barrier is now much higher for someone who comes to Wikipedia looking for something to write about. Increasingly, that person needs to have some kind of relatively specialized knowledge, to have been somewhere relatively unique, and then has to feel able and willing to share that knowledge. Well, that's a high barrier to entry for a lot of casual users, and I think it's at least a part of the reason why Wikipedia's editor numbers have plateaued.

So, actually, the question isn't whether Wikipedia is running out of new material. It's not. The question is: who knows (and will write about) the material that isn't on Wikipedia yet?