Links for 2006-09-07

Posted September 7, 2006 1:17 AM.

• Marvel Comics will have no gay characters in its mainstream books Only books labelled 'Max' or which indicate that they are for older people will contain any gay characters. I understand why they're doing it, but it's basically selling out one culture to bow to the Christian right
• Aaron Swartz writes about 'Wikimedia at the Crossroads' and announces that he's going to run for a position on the board He'd get my vote - he's evidenced a particular level of passion, enthusiasm, intelligence and commitment over the last few years.
• Aaron's second essay on Wikipedia - "Who Writes Wikipedia" - is a bloody important read if you're interested in social software If his contention is true - and it seems entirely plausible - then there are a lot of things we can learn from the existence of editors and the massively distributed content generation that's going on with Wikipedia
• An interesting post on 'Why You Tube works' I actually pretty much buy this - I've never understood why advertisers (for example) so infrequently put their ads online for people to talk about and link to. You Tube has solved this, and I suspect is busily making a lot of advertiser's lives a lot eas
• 3-2-1 Countdown Widget for Mac OS X Every Travian player's dream come true - an easy way to set countdowns so you know when you can do the next bit of building in your village...
• Stowe Boyd discusses 'Efficiency v Belonging' in social tools There's a bunch of research on why people participate in online communities, but very little on why they contribute to projects like Wikipedia (as far as I know). If anyone knows of some, could they tell me?
• Stanford University have a 'Persuasive Technology Lab' They call their field 'captology' and use it to mean how you can use computing technologies to influence and change behaviour, which sounds kind of creepy but they seem to be mainly using for good. Weird / interesting stuff...
• Wikipedia's (slighty) artile on Captology Confession: My first reaction is to be horrified by the neologism. Apparently it derives from 'Computers As Persuasive Technologies' (CAPT-ology). If you went back to the Greek you'd discover that the word for persuasion is 'Peitho' and that there's a Goddess associated with it. There's even a discipline called 'peithology' that studies the nature of belief. You could do great compounds with that.
• Wikipedia's article on Peitho, goddess of persuasion Funny goddess. Not enormously popular. Didn't get out much. Occasionally confused with Aphrodite.
• Wikipedia's entry on Mark Shuttleworth It seems slightly weird and stalkery to mention this, but I met a man who went into space at FOO and he had a weblog and he was really nice and quite good at werewolf and I promise I won't mention it any more.