Development

Project Zero is now on Wikipedia, and we’ve created a Zero application to commemorate the event. In fact, it’s running right now on this blog post!

I have been enamored with Wikipedia.org since I found out about it a few years ago. It is quite the phenomenon and is one of the real poster children of the social networking movement on the web today. Growing up as a catholic in NYC, there were two sacred books in my house; the Bible, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Who could have imagined that in only a few short years, Wikipedia – a free on-line encyclopedia whose sole contributors are members of its community, could have replaced Britannica as the most used and quoted source of information from school children, to business folks around the world. When you study the mechanics behind Wikipedia you find that it is truly a social phenomenon and is a perfect example of how the web can be used to harvest the collective intelligence of a large community of users. It also exploits interesting social and psychological aspects of people. Specifically, as a contributor to Wikipedia, you know there will be 1000s of eyeballs looking at your entry, and the peer pressure that comes from that will ensure either you (or they) will quickly whip the information in to ship shape.

Well… Last week, I ventured out to create the Project Zero entry in Wikipedia. It’s kind of addictive; that is, once I figured out how to post an entry without ticking off the intelligent bots that run within Wikipedia.org. I guess my original entry sounded too much like a marketing pitch, so it was deleted as being a “self promotion”. They also threatened to delete my second pass because it had no sources or references. All that is fixed now… I hope. Anyway…I’ve been fiddling with it for a few days and I finding it hard to put down. I’m sure it’s the peer pressure at work. But, eventually, you need to get back to your day job, knowing you’ve done well enough and that the power of 1000 eyeballs will take effect and fix up any mistakes you’ve made.

Not being able to leave well enough alone, I felt a need to do a little more… Something that has some sort of Zero connection. So, with a little help from my friends, I pulled together a Zero application that does a funky form of semantic tagging. In fact, the application is running within this blog entry – you are using it as we speak. The application allows you to tag words in your blog. The words are highlighted and when you hover your mouse over the word, we look the word up on Wikipedia, showing a summary of it in a pop-up window. We also count the number of times the community of viewers hover over each word and adjust the size of the font of the word as more people hover. This forms a tag cloud of sorts within your blog entry, giving you visual feedback of which of your keywords are the more popular.

Like playing with Wikipedia.org, playing with this Zero application has been addictive, but it’s time to get back to my day job (or maybe not) 

- GAC