Posted on 09 August 2012
Tags: depiction, difficult-issue, excessive-legal, homes, jimmy-wales, motion-picture, perennial-worry, piracy-websites, Video
A professionally produced anti-entertainment lobby video has already garnered 10 million views for illustrating why movie pirates shouldn’t be treated like terrorists. Political Prostitution, a new website backed by anonymous donors, argues that the commando-style raids of piracy websites is driven by congressional corruption.
While the depiction is clearly over-the-top, and avoids discussing both sides of a difficult issue, it is notable for a YouTube campaign to use professionally paid actors and directing. The video opens up with a fake award ceremony for “Senator Chris Rodd”, an obvious reference to former senator and current Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) chairman, Chris Dodd, whose lobbying for SOPA and aggressive copyright laws sparked speculation of political corruption. Though the revolving door between industry lobbying and retired officials is quite common, it is nonetheless a perennial worry for congressional watchdogs.
The video then pans over to military raids of citizens in their homes, alluding to all-out use of force against uber-pirate, Kim Dotcom’s mansion (footage below). Internet activists, such as Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, have pushed for petitions protecting content distributors from what they see as excessive legal and military force, with little success.
Perhaps the most interesting lesson in all of this is that the popularity of the video is in large part due to hitting the front page of the Pirate Bay, a prominent website for downloading illegal copies of music and movies. It goes to show how popular websites can have the force of major media companies when they turn their front pages into billboards for political causes.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Posted on 12 July 2012
Tags: angel, city, considerable, europe, involvement, jimmy-wales, live, louise-mensch, media, News, realtime, startup, tacking-upwards
In between weighing in on Internet laws, as he is generally want to do, Jimmy Wales has rather taken to London, his new adopted home. He’s been pretty active, petitioning to stop a tech student being extradited to the U.S., and generally appearing on the London tech scene quite regularly. He’s even due to host an event with the Mayor of London on technology soon.
Indeed, Wales is fast becoming something of a London connoisseur. And his next phase seems to be championing startups from and coming to the city. Last year he ran a new startup conference in London which he’s poised to repeat this year. Now news reaches us that he is to bring his considerable publicity power to a UK startup, Menshn.
Next week at 2pm on Monday, he’ll host a live chat on the new service, which launched recently and resembles the realtime live chat of Twitter but sectioned off into defined topics.
Wales’ presence (he has 70,000 Twitter followers and is constantly covered by the media) is likely to boost the interest the startup created by Luke Bozier and MP Louise Mensch, although we’re assured that his involvement is just on the live chat session only so far, no Angel investment as yet.
Menshn tells me the site has been tacking upwards of late since its launch in terms of users and engagement and a mobile friendly version is planned soon.
Still, I wonder how long it will be before we see Mr. Wales turn Angel investor in the London startup scene. He’d be a welcome addition.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Posted on 21 June 2012
Tags: active, announcement, delivers-on-its, difficulty, editing-systems, editor, ernest-attempts, Facebook, jimmy-wales, modern, online, volunteers, wikimedia
“This is epically important,” tweeted Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, about a new simplified editing platform aimed at massively expanding the number of people who contribute to the online encyclopedia. A deceivingly tiny percentage of users actually contribute to Wikipedia, despite the foundation’s ernest attempts at making it an inclusive, democratic creation of mankind (estimates put the active contributer base at around 0.7%, who make up 50% of the entries).
Wikipedia blames the difficulty in learning its confusing text editor for the reason the active community of editors sits around a paltry 500 contributors. ”We identified the difficulty in learning wikitext as a key inhibitor to growing our editor community in the Wikimedia movement’s strategic plan,” the company writes in the announcement of the new simplified editor. “We want the process of learning how to edit to be trivial, so our volunteers, both new and experienced, can devote themselves to what they edit. That’s why we’re building the visual editor, so that contributing to a wiki is as easy and natural as other modern editing systems, and new editors are not dissuaded from making their changes.”
From what we can see, the new simplified editor delivers on its promise: editing an entry feels very much like writing an email or Google document, with a few simple font bottons up top. You can check it out for yourself here. Have you ever wanted to contribute to Wikipeida, but were turned off by the text editor? Share your stories below about why you do, or do not, contribute.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Posted on 16 January 2012
Tags: country, event, german, jimmy-wales, press, search-engines, senate-majority, sopa, wales, white, wikipedia, world
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales wanted to send a “big message” to the U.S. government regarding the two heinous internet censorship bills currently being considered, and after a brief period of debate the world’s encyclopedia will soon do just that.
The Wikipedia founder announced on Twitter today that starting at midnight on Wednesday, January 18, the English language version of the world’s encyclopedia will go dark for 24 hours in protest of SOPA and PIPA. With their commitment confirmed, Wikipedia will be joining a slew of websites and companies that will suspend their operations for one day in an effort raise awareness around the two bills.
Meant to curb IP theft and piracy, the (imaginatively named) Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act have raised eyebrows recently due to their decidedly scorched-earth approach to handling suspected offenders. Websites found to offer pirated content, along with the services that they use, could be hidden from US internet users by being delisted on search engines and potentially on DNS servers themselves.
Rather than let users access Wikipedia’s vast stores of English-language information on the 18th, Wales mentioned that the Wikipedia landing page will instead be populated with a letter of protest and a call to action that urges readers to get involved with the issue. It doesn’t appear as though the new landing page has been finalized, but one of the community’s prototypes can be seen above.
The news comes after a lengthy debate as to the particulars of such a grand gesture — whether or not the site should participate at all, which versions of the site would be affected, and how exactly the blackout would go down were all on the table for the community to discuss. Ultimately, the consensus pointed to a full blackout as a the proper way to make their collective displeasure unknown. There’s no official word on how other parts of the site will handle the event, although Wales has mentioned that the German language version of the site will be displaying a banner in support.
Meanwhile, some of SOPA’s supporters are already reacting to the very public backlash against the bill. Ars Technica reports that Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) would be pulling his DNS-blocking provisions from the bill after having consulted with “industry groups across the country.” What’s more, the White House has responded to two petitions about SOPA and PIPA on the official White House blog stating that they will not “support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”
Wales notes on Twitter that while SOPA has been “crippled,” buts its counterpart in the Senate is still very much alive and very dangerous. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently popped up on Meet The Press claiming his continued support for PIPA even though it “could create some problems.”
Though the event is meant to raise public awareness over two critical pieces of legislation, Wales still took a moment to offer a bit of sage advice for students heading back to school:
Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday! #sopa—
Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 16, 2012
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Posted on 28 November 2011
Tags: brandon-harris, diane-keaton, Facebook, figures-it-out, jesus, jimmy, jimmy-wales, News, screen-shot, until-wikipedia, wales, wikipedia, xianhang-zhang
The good news is that Wikipedia has finally switched up that image of Jimmy Wales begging for money on its homepage. The bad news is that they’ve replaced it with another unfortunately left-aligned image of some random guy (Wikipedia programmer Brandon Harris to be precise) who, according to my email inbox, looks like everything from Jesus, to Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger to a member of the Hell’s Angels.
And because Harris’ image is left aligned, the weird article title/image juxtaposition thing still stands; The last straw was when I was Wikipedia-ing actress Diane Keaton last night and up he came, inadvertently wearing the same outfit and in the same pose as the Annie Hall star.
Here is a particularly hilarious conversation I had about it with somebody on IM.
Person: damn some idiot biker is screaming at me to give me money today http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chakra
Person: refresh the page
Person: he should ride in on a harley
Person: and then jack me with a switchblade
Me: Snort
Person: cut my face if i don’t drop some funds on wikipedia
Me: Should I do another post?
Person: I’ve heard Jesus
Me: seems necessary
Person: Is wikipedia run by a biker gang?
Person: Will they slit your tires if you don’t donate?
Person: i like how he has two different pics
Person: there’s the soft outside guy silently judging you and the intimidating dude who will jack your ass
“I donated to get Brandon Harris’ picture off the top. I didn’t mind Jimmy Wales’ piercing gaze but Brandon was just disturbing,” notes interaction designer Xianhang Zhang on Quora. Until Wikipedia finally figures it out, Jimmy Wales himself offers an alternative to donating (and complaining) for those of you still creeped out,”You can also just click the little ‘x’.”
To donate money to Wikipedia, WHICH YOU TOTALLY SHOULD IN CASE IT’S NOT CLEAR, follow this link.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Posted on 21 November 2011
Tags: holiday, jimmy, jimmy-wales, kashmir-hill, screen-shot, traditional, tweeted-on-november, wales, wikiopticon, wikipedia
Dearest Jimmy Wales,
So we meet again Wales … Yes I know, another holiday season, another reason to poke fun at your silly, scopophobia-inducing banner ads belying the very noble cause of raising $29.5 million for an unlimited supply of constantly updated knowledge — FOR WHICH WE ARE ALL VERY THANKFUL JIMMY, I PROMISE.
But, for whatever reason Jimmy, this year you’ve chosen to left align your traditional banner ad portrait asking for Wikimedia Foundation donations, which means that your mug ends up being the accompanying image for whatever I end up looking up on Wikipedia.
And thus hilarity ensues (See above, and below and below and below and well you get the picture).
My — granted unsolicited — advice is that next year you take some of the donation money, especially the 20 bucks I’m about to throw at you out of guilt for writing this post, and hire a professional graphic designer so you’re not creeping people out or (worse) making them laugh unintentionally.
Best (and Happy Holidays!),
Alexia Tsotsis
@gretchenrubin
Gretchen Rubin
I find it very unsettling to see that photo of Jimmy Wales at the top of Wikipedia. I keep thinking I'm in the wrong entry.
Posted on 05 February 2011
Tags: Facebook, jimmy-wales, mind, News, skimlinks, user, Video, wales, wikipedia
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Hunter Walk who spends way too much time researching 1980s hair metal bands on Wikipedia. His obsession with Wikipedia is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube.
Wikipedia is the world’s 5th largest website, runs no ads and, depressingly, seems to be perpetually on the fringe of solvency. Google for “Jimmy Wales personal appeal” (Wales is Wikipedia’s founder) and you’ll see that there are 32,000+ results, which gives you a sense of the fundraising requirements for this user-generated encyclopedia. The question of whether they’ll ever run ads in order to break this cycle is an ongoing debate. In fact there’s a Wikipedia page devoted to this topic with discussion about ads, opt-in ads, search ads, etc.
At 400+ million users worldwide, any of these options could certainly raise considerable funds used to support the technical and philosophical mission of this non-profit. But to date, Wales has been reluctant to introduce any advertising. So where do we end up? After hitting its 10 year anniversary this January, the question is: can Wikipedia sustain itself for another 10 years without a significant change to its business model?
In my mind there’s a simple solution previously unexplored which would cover their fundraising goals of $16 million annually without any visible change to the site or behavior of its authors and users: simply insert affiliate codes into relevant links on Wikipedia. When I’m reading about the film Twilight, give me a link to buy the video at Amazon and Wikipedia will collect up to 8.5% of any transactions as an Amazon Associate. Or from the Hawaii page, a simple Orbitz affiliate link will produce $3 for each plane ticket sold, 3-5% for a hotel reservation, and so on.
How much money could Wikipedia make from this small change? How about $16,422,000 annually from just their US traffic, roughly 2.7 billion monthly pageviews (25 percent of Wikipedia’s total pageviews). Multiplying those pageviews by a .50 revenue per 1,000 page views yields a total which amazingly just exceeds the $16 million target. [note: the .50 eCPM is an estimate gathered from web experts in affiliate monetization. Oliver Roup, CEO of Viglink, a technology which helps web publishers monetize their site in the manner I suggest for Wikipedia, told me they see some eCPMs up to $5 within their network but suggests a more conservative estimate like mine
Posted on 18 January 2011
Tags: Facebook, image, jimmy-wales, News, occasion, press-release, the-occasion, Video, wales, wikimedia, wikipedia
Wikipedia just celebrated its tenth birthday. As a self-proclaimed fan of the site, I wanted to share with you this video, made for the occasion as Wikipedia enters its second decade.
The ‘State Of Wikipedia’ video is part of the ‘State Of’ series made by interactive agency from JESS3, and is narrated by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.
Today, the English Wikipedia now stands at 3.5+ million articles (up from roughly 500,000 in March 2005), and more than 17 million across all languages.
No matter what you think about Wales, the foundation or the site, that’s an impressive feat.
(Source: press release)
Click the image below for a larger infographic:
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
Posted on 25 November 2010
Tags: 4chan, appeal, Facebook, jimmy-wales, News, personal-appeal, step-further, thing-one, wales, wales-esque, wikipedia, wmfja010
Posted on 23 November 2010
Tags: christmas, effectiveness, extension, hilarious-image, jimmy-wales, News, take-the-wales, wales, wikipedia, wonderful-time
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Yes, Christmas has come early again this season with the launch of Jimmy Wales’ annual appeal for Wikimedia Foundation donations. Wales’ ubiquitous banner ad is now in its seventh year and the company is shooting for $16 million dollars to keep their impressive collaborative encyclopedia afloat ad free.
And while Wikipedia tested out different banners for the 2010 launch, none came close to the effectiveness (a 3% click through rate!) of the unintentionally hilarious image of Wikipedia founder Wales gazing at you intently. The image is so beloved that someone actually created a Google Chrome extension that allows you to take the Wales’ banner with you wherever you go online. And so we did.
You can download the extension here.
Thanks: Zorgloob
Article courtesy of TechCrunch
