Dialog International

Printing Wikipedia

Just as I signed on as a member of the WikiProject Germany team the German media giant Bertelsmann announced its plan to print a book with most popular German Wikipedia articles:

The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia published by Bertelsmann will contain summaries of the 25,000 most popular articles. It willl go on sale in September for 19.95 euros, or about $32.

Beate Varnhorn, the editor in charge of Bertelsmann’s reference works, told the Times that the book is intended to appeal to “new target groups, including young people.

Hmm, I wonder why Bertelsmann thinks there will be a market for this.  The great value of Wikipedia is the real time updating and editing of articles, as new information develops or surfaces. Also, the hyperlinks to other Wikipedia articles and other Web resources is invaluable.  All of that is lost in a print version. German Wikipedia has the best reputation among all Wikipedia sites in terms of its accuracy.

Paradoxically, this news comes at the same time that the venerable Brockhaus-Verlag has announced that its popular encyclopedia will henceforth be available only in an online format.

Meanwhile the New York TImes has a list of the 15 most popular German Wikipedia articles over the winter.  Not sure what this says about the user demographics, but Penis (# 5) beat out Vagina (#12) by a wide margin. Probably something for WikiProject Germany to investigate.

Disruptive Innovation from Germany

Like most people, I get most of my news on the Internet these days. This means I have to contend with with a plethora of pop-up ads, banner ads, video ads - every conceivable type of annoying advertising - just to get the content I want. This is the established business model for Web-based content: the online reader gets free content, but is forced to look at ads. 

Now a young programmer in Cologne by the name of Wladimir Palant has developed some software that puts this entire model in jeopardy. Adblock filters out ads on Web sites, and so acts almost like a TiVo for the Internet, execpt that Adblock is much better than TiVo, since the blocking is contemporaneous with viewing the Web page, and Adblock is a free download. For now, Adblock only works and extension of the Firefox browser, which is probably why Microsoft hasn't yet come after Wladimir Palant.  Still, there is a great deal of anxiety about Adblock, as the New York Times reports:

The larger importance of Adblock is its potential for extreme menace to the online-advertising business model. After an installation that takes but a minute or two, Adblock usually makes all commercial communication disappear. No flashing whack-a-mole banners. No Google ads based on the search terms you have entered.

From that perspective, the program is an unwelcome arrival after years of worry that there might never be an online advertising business model to support the expense of creating entertainment programming or journalism, or sophisticated search engines, for that matter.

Some Web sites have retaliated by blocking Mozilla, and some Web designers have equated using the ad-blocking software as tantamount to stealing content.  But Palant explains that the sites have only themselves to blame:

“There is only one reliable way to make sure your ads aren’t blocked — make sure the users don’t want to block them,” he wrote. “Don’t forget about the users. Use ads in a way that doesn’t degrade their experience.”