On 10/9/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)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...