Both sides of the Wikipedia debate (is it good or bad, value or trash?) are well developed by this point. But that doesn’t preclude high levels of discourse on the subject, and a wonderful conversation is happening now, with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog as the focal point. Anderson argues that Wikipedia (and Google too, by the way) has greater probablistic value than Britannica, because even though some individual entries fall below standard, the average level of quality combined with the enormous size (ten times as many entries as Britannica) makes it more likely to have a good research experience in Wikipedia than in a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. This probabilistic viewpoint goes against our brains, he asserts, but is nonetheless a key to a new world order of information presentation.

Keying off this argument, Clifford Stoll concedes that Chris’s probabilistic theories are (probably) correct, but that doesn’t mean Wikipedia and Google are good for us. By rewarding the optimization of large-scale social intelligence, are we removing incentive to create high-quality microscopic content?

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, started a blog! That alone would be the news. His first and only (so far, one presumes) entry was posted a week ago, and has attracted 431 worshipful comments. In it, Tim asserts that the first Web browser was a wiki-like client whose purpose was not only to read online pages, but to edit and repost them. The WWW, in other words, was originally (in 1989) conceived as a collaborative medium. Tim was surprised that the Web developed into a publishing medium that was edited offline. The recent poppularity of wikis and blogs makes Tim “feel I wasn’t crazy to think people needed a creative space.”

Yahoo! has agreed to provide Movable Type as the default blogging solution in its extensive small-business suite of services. The other hand will get washed as parent company Six Apart directs small-business traffic to Yahoo! for a complete ISP/merchant/blogging package. There's nothing new about Web-hosting accounts with Movable Type pre-installed; the Movable Type site has a recommendation page for such services, to which Yahoo! has not been added.

When I first glanced at the e-mail press release about this announcement, I expected to read that Yahoo! had acquired Six Apart—that would be an appropriate complement to Google's ownership of Blogger.com. Of course, Yahoo! provides a newbie-friendly blogging experience with Yahoo! 360, which could possibly be interpreted as competition to the much more established (and feature-rich) Blogger. But Six Apart's three platform levels (Movable Type, TypePad, and Live Journal) cover all the bases and could vault Yahoo! into a whole new position in the blogging wars.

Ajaxy personal pages with newsreaders are gaining traction and usability. Protopage is a free service that is astonishing easy to use and doesn't even require registration. (If you create a page and wish to make it persist at an easy-to-remember URL, you must register. But it's still free.) Floating information panels can be dragged around the screen, and there are three basic types: RSS reader; sticky note; and link panel. As far as I can tell there is no way to add a photo to a page, which is a shame. Protopage also provides a default search panel with keyword boxes for Google, Yahoo!, Dictionary.com, and Wikipedia.

Overall a simple product, but the RSS panel does allow OPML uploads, and you can fashion more than one panel for extra sorting power. All colors and backgrounds are customizable with sliders and drop-down menus. You can add pages to your Protopage space, and make those pages public or private individually. A mechanism for inviting friends is furnished, but there's no integrated social action here. You share you page by giving someone the URL, and, of course, friends can build link panels with each other's addresses.

Perhaps the funnest application of Protopage would be to share a password, and get a group together to build a space. Protopage would be an entertaining environment in which to assemble news, links, and notes. Conversations could transpire on the sticky notes. More widgets are needed to bring this thing to life, though. Give it a calendar and photo uploading, and Protopage would start to rock.

I got a promotional email for Yahoo! 360 today. It's called "Top 3 blogging myths put to rest by Yahoo! 360." (Bizarrely and inexplicably, a photo shows an individual in a bunny suit reading a newspaper, but that mystery is not my point.) The promo is meant to encourage Yahoo! 360 member to update their blogs, and reassures its recipients that blogging needn't be time-consuming, publicly viewable (360 users can determine who sees their stuff), or profound. The promo offers topic suggestions, and one of them is, "My boss from Hades."

Yoww. Gigantic mistake. As everybody knows, people have gotten fired for blogging about their workplace. Yahoo! 360 is private? Only if you make the correct privacy settings, and there are two important ones: Preventing the page from being addressed with a URL that includes the user's screen name, and selecting a circle of friends who can see the blog within 360. It is all too possible for a 360 user to make a mistake in this department—especially with the promo's glib assurance that "Only you decide who sees what's on your Yahoo! 360 page." This is a newbie-friendly service! Nobody should be expected to have fluency with the privacy settings. And, in any circumstance, NOBODY (on any service) should be encouraged to blog about their "boss from Hades."

The damage is done in this instance; the promo cannot be unsent. But man, somebody at Yahoo! has some answering to do.

I have to sympathize with school principals faced with disruptive behavior. They must live in a state of constant vigilance, the threat of a cafeteria massacre always looming. The problem is, the disruptive behavior in question takes place outside of school, away from the offline world entirely. This WSJ piece (no reg) describes how schools are monitoring MySpace and other networks, printing out reams of blog posts asnd comments, and suspending students for crossing lines of social behavior traditionally limited to the school campus. The difference between mean comments on the phone or in email, and harrassing behavior in MySpace, is the public nature of social networks.

Where should the line be drawn? Do schools have a right—even a responsibility—to protect students from other students on a public Web site?

Two fraud lawsuits—one aimed at Match.com and another at Yahoo! Personals—have rocked a lucrative industry back on its heels. IN the first instance, the litigant claims to have been courted by a Match.com employee. Match.com produced a sworn affidavit to the contrary. In the second instance, a user of Yahoo! Personals claims to have uncovered a scam whereby the photo of a person matching geographical and personality requirements was emailed to customers in different, far-flung cities. No reported comment from Yahoo!.

Perhaps the important reality being uncovered here is that online matching and dating, despite all the benefits it brings to the traditional personal-ad experience, is no silver bullet for loneliness. These lawsuits are certainly fueled by, if nothing else, disappointment.

To say that AOL's new AIM program is an instant messenger is to diminish it unacceptably. AIM Triton, as the program is now called, is an online communicator that bundles IM, email, voice chat, video chat, browsing, bookmarking, and RSS aggregation into a two-window interface. This whopping upgrade to previous AIM configurations adds welcome features, but also—disappointingly for a program now out of beta—still houses a couple of bugs…

We got word that Yahoo! 360 had completed a round of feature upgrades, which can be summarized as follows:

• Favorites: Users can (supposedly) bookmark other users and follow their content changes, without adding them as 360 Friends. This is a good idea, because 360 Friendship is a rather intimate affair in which content is pushed onto one another's screens. You mishgt prefer to visit select individuals when the whim strikes without receiving every new item they post.

• Highlighted blog entries: On the entry edit screen, clicking a Highlight box puts that message title in the right-hand sidebar of the user's blog. It is a discrete display.

• Calendar: An archive calendar has been added.

• New themes: Pet and outdoorsy themes have been added. Personally, I think the abstract themes create the best effect, but Rain Forest is a beautiful design, I must admit.

Now—about those Favorites. Something is wrong. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to add a person as a Favorite from that person's page. Yahoo! automatically adds Yahoo! Messenger contacts as Favorites, if they are not already Friends. That's a little pushy, but I'm OK with it. And if you invite somebody to be a Friend, that person appears as a Favorite until the invitation is accepted. But the purpose of Favorites, as described in an emailed press release, is to function as a "live bookmarking tool." Either it doesn't function that way at all, or its use is implemented way too obscurely. Or I'm being stupid—a possibility I don't discount.

UPDATE: I was being fairly stupid. Thanks to the comment below for setting me straight. I thought I looked in that Add feature, but I didn't look hard enough.