On 10/9/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I think the basic motivation is to turn SEO's and publicists' boundless energy to something resembling *good* use. Because you know, while Wikipedia's both mainstream-popular and easily user-contributable, it's not like they'll ever stop.
[snip]
If people push the promotional thing too far, that will piss the public off. If they do it right, they can in fact do well by doing good.
I don't disagree. Which is why I said it makes me feel uncomfortable rather than saying "we must stop this!".
I believe the people this is directed to already think of it in those terms; if we can get them to see how to do well by doing good, at least they're not attempting to do well by doing bad.
Good/bad is too simple a characterization. Marketers provide a service that some people value, and not just on the sending side. If we judge it we risk misjudging it. I'd rather try not to fall into that trap.
There is some overlap between their mission and ours. In some cases there is an agreeable overlap (give us images of your product), in some cases there is opposing overlap (promotion can be the enemy of neutrality, private interest are often the enemy of the common good in the absence of the right controls).
Durova's work is mostly to encourage the agreeable overlap, which I agree with strongly, and a little bit to convert the opposing overlap into a more subtle form which is less objectionable (i.e. you can put links on image pages!), which I feel less comfortable with. .. but what makes me feel more uneasy is knowing that you can't take the good without the bad.
You counter that they would be here anyways... and you're right. But in the same numbers and with as much finesse? I suppose it's pointless to discuss it because I have no solutions.
Furthermore, I think it's of immense value to encourage an environment where releasing commercial content under a proper free license is *normal* and the obvious thing for a publicist to do. I think that would do a tremendous amount to further our mission in the wider world. Much as open source software makes proprietary software largely obsolete (per your analogy in [[:en:Wikipedia:Keyspam]]).
It's true.. oh it's so true.. but gah.. there are just .. better groups out there. Who are we befrending? .. online marketers. Who else? ...?... It's a start but gah. I can't shake this bitter taste.
If we eventually have the problem of *too much* freely licensed high-quality popular commercial content ... then we've won.
You forgot the words "useful", but perhaps considered them implied in high-quality.
I know en:wp is outpacing Moore's law - how's Commons doing compared to Moore's law for bandwidth and disk space?
Wikimedia is reaching a point where increases in bandwidth usage *may* actually result in reductions the total bandwidth costs. I'm not too concerned there. Certainly, Commons itself isn't a major bandwidth user.
Disk size growth is somewhat faster than moore's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png). Disk speed isn't... but disk speed isn't an issue for us.
Nor is capacity... Common's growth over this year looks mostly linear, with an average growth rate of 27960 bytes per second.
If we assume best price per meg storage for read mostly access (whitebox 3u systems with 16*750 GB disks in RAID6) the equipment cost of disk space is roughly US$0.0000000005137 per byte, or US$0.000014363/second in terms of commons current upload rate. Add whatever random factors you want for operating costs and additional redundancy (write every image twice, OK), even assume a doubling of the growth.. As long as it doesn't go exponential it's not scary at all.
I currently mirror commons (and all WMF images) at home. At the current rates have space for a couple of years. Perhaps we'll have a nice growth spike? that would be good: I'd rather outgrow my storage before it starts failing on it.
Video should only up the rate by a constant factor. .. none of this is hard. To make it hard we need the increasing returns that can only come from increased adoption. Commons storage isn't hard but the mission of the commoners should be to make it hard.
Possibly by some of us (e.g. you) pushing Commons to those people the way others of us have been hitting the publicists. I wonder if we're at a stage to go to the governments who fund the European Space Agency and ask them to ask the ESA to use a free license, rather than just complain that we use NASA images by preference; if their funding sources ask for it, that should make it more politically viable for them to do so.
Oy. Do I have stories to tell you...