Well, Encylopedia Britannica has gone wiki.

Not a bad move, but will they be able to be able to build a strong contributor base? One one hand there is some cachet to having your contribution approved by EB, on the other hand, it’s perceived as closed, old-school, stuffy and exclusive–which might put potential contributors off.

I do like the “open for contributions but expert moderated” model. I think it’s the best model for online travel content site and it’s the kind of model I see for travelguide.com’s future.

Barcamp Chiang Mai is underway. We have 104 people who are attending.

Group Shot. That’s a lot of Barcampers!

Preetam Rai just gave a very interesting presentation on Interesting Web 2.0 Companies in Asia. Draper Fischer Jurvetson just set up an office in Vietnam. Preetam suggested that if companies in Thailand wanted to create a great international site, they focus on their countries innate strengths and pointed to tourism as an excellent existing industry to build great websites around. He also suggested that a sight that was tightly focused ONLY on travel in Thailand that offered good content and community input was badly needed and would probably be quite successful.

2:00 pm I led a discussion on “What’s the Best CMS: Joomla, Drupal, WordPress or Typo3?” Which basically came to the conclusion that there is no one “best” CMS, just many good tools that are better suited for different audiences.

3:00pm Getting ready to do a presentation “Twitter Rules, sudo Sugree.” @Sugree will be co-presenting with me and @molecularck via Twitter!

4:00 Coffee break, distributed T-shirts. The crowd starts to dwindle.

4:30pm My final presentation was “Online Tourism in Thailand: Issues and Opportunities” with Dr. Ken Cosh, the head pf the Payap IT Faculty.

6:00 Supposed to finish, but realize we scheduled one too many session. Great! Enjoying a great discussion on social networks in Thailand.

6:30pm Off to Dayli for an after party!

Photos on Flickr tagged with BarcampChiangMai.

What’s not to love about this font?

AW Siam is a free font for Mac and PC that give you English characters with REAL Thai flair.

It even uses a few actual Thai characters. (For example, “a” is “lor ling”, “T” is “sara o” and “n” is “tor ta-haan.”)

The funny thing is, when I showed it to some of my Thai friends that read English, they had a hard time reading it–the “Thainess” of the characters threw them!

I have had a flurry of thoughts since posted my blog “My New Distributed Brain.”

The result of that epiphany is this: that Twitter has the potential to be a better search engine than Google.

“But,” you say, “Twitter is a microblog? How can it beat Google at search?”

Are you on Twitter?

Try this out: the next time you have a question, post it to Twitter instead of doing a search on Google.

Did you get an answer? Was it The Right Answer?

This doesn’t work everytime–at least not yet. But it works often enough that I use this approach to answer a lot of questions on a daily basis.

It works well enough that I notice a lot of other people that I follow are using it to ask questions–and get answers. (Twitter founder Biz Stone, Jason Calacanis and Chris Pirillo come to mind.)

It works often enough that Google and the other search engines would be well advised to take notice.

Querying Twitter does not always work right now but Twitter is growing fast.

With it’s open and flexible APIs, people are finding more and more ways to use the Twitter platform in new and innovative manners.

Twitter is a great platform to tap the collective intelligence and channel it into enhancing–even transcending the search engine as we know it. It’s not AI, it’s all “I” (real human Intelligence).

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft–watch out!

Why Twitter?

Why Twitter?

Could another messaging / microblogging platform beat Twitter at this game?

Possibly–but Twitter has several advantages at this point:

• Large user base. Twitter has 1 million users and it’s growing 800% annually.
• It seems to have a user base that skews towards openness and community. Good, good.
• Following is open by default; following does not require consensus by both parties; one person can choose to follow another in an non-symmetrical relationship; this makes it easy for people to build a list of people they want to hear from, easy for people to build a following.
• The “Track” feature allows you to track words of interest to you: this is critical.
• SMS integration. Can send and receive tweets via SMS. Perfect for mobile search.

Would people really have time to answer all these questions? Don’t worry, as Clay Shirkey points out: We Have the Time! (Part 2)

Scenario: A Major Search Engine Acquires Twitter

Once this meme catches on, I see a very high potential for this scenario to unravel:

• One of the major search engines moves rapidly to acquire Twitter.
• The search engine uses the Twitter API to post some queries as tweets.
• People start to answer the search engine tweets; they do it for many reasons: ego, community, interest in the topic, self promotion–the reasons are many.
• The search engine uses Ajax to put twitter responses on the results page in real time, augmenting their algorithmic search results. (Thanks for pointing this out, Arthur!)
• The search engine becomes the #1 search engine AND the biggest social network on the planet, dwarfing the Google of today.

There is a whole lot more the Search Engine could do to optimize the process; this is an idea in it’s infancy. Options to increase performance include: caching results of previous similar tweets, using the tweets as another source of signals for standard search results, build and integrate a reputation system so that tweeters are ranked by their accrued trust and accurate ratings (this would help to prevent spam from cropping up in tweet results). And more. A lot more.

I have done a search (on Google) and I have not found a similar system proposed. Hmmm.

I did however, get an answer on a similar system when I tweeted about this idea. (See! See what I mean!)

@tewson pointed out that ChaCha is a search engine that can take queries from users via the web, voice and SMS and a real person compiles an SMS response, but this is no where near as powerful as querying the masses.

Sergei, Larry, if you guys are reading this, follow me on Twitter: @jfxberns. We should talk.

2008.06.18 Update:

@celerachan pointed out this blog on SheGeeks by Alana Taylor that, basically, reaches the same conclusion: She Geeks In Tech - Stop Using Search Engines, Start Twittering

I have become smarter recently. It is due to my new Distributed Brain.

I have recently begun to distribute my thinking across the globe with Twitter. When a question pops into my head, I first check the local cache (my memory), then I query the global memory (Tweet the thought or question on Twitter) to see if an answer or comment bounces back–and often it does. (And if that fails, there is the fall-back of Googling for an answer.)

What’s so special about Twitter for getting answers? It’s the amount of people that can have access to the data. Currently, there are over one million active tweeters–and it’s growing fast. Anybody who tweets can follow you on Twitter (unless of course, you make your tweets private–but the default is public which is nice.)

Of course not everybody does follow me, after all I have never been that popular, however, I do have a fair amount of like-minded individuals that follow me. But the big difference with Twitter is that people can track words. So if I tweet about Drupal, or Ubuntu or Thailand, anybody tracking those words can capture my tweet.

This Is Your Brain on Twitter

Here is an example:

While writing this blog, I was wondering if there were any stats on the number of twitter users. I did not know the answer, but I figured somebody using Twitter would. So I tweeted the question.

I got the Twitter usage stats I wanted for supporting facts in this article. It took a few seconds but it was EXACTLY the info I needed. My distributed brain is quite smart. Smarter than my local brain by itself.

I see this happening all the time on Twitter. People asking about restaurants in Bangalore, how to fix a code problem, where to buy size 13 shoes in Bangkok–queries that Google would choke on.

Why Is This Different?

Internet users have been using forums, search engines, chat programs and other apps for querying and sharing information for a long time. So, why is this different?

It has a potentially wider reach than regular chat/IRC programs.

If you know where to ask the question on IRC or a specialized chatroom, you can probably get the answer just as easily–but finding that place? That might not be so easy. On twitter, everybody who tracks the terms you use in your tweet can see it–a potentially larger audience.

It’s faster than a forum / mailing list.

With forums, like chat rooms, you need to know where to find the people that know the answer and then you have to wait–usually a few hours or even days–to get your answer. With Twitter, the answer often comes back in seconds.

It’s almost always more accurate than a search engine.

When you Google for an answer, an algorithm determines the response. Google does not (yet) have the technology to understand the question–but it has an algorithm that does a very good–but not perfect job–of figuring out what is relevant to your query.

If you use a human-powered search engine like Mahalo, you don’t get an answer to your question–you get a pre-built set of results based on the fact that your question is like another question their human editors have asked and compiled a result for. Again, it’s not THE answer to YOUR question–but AN answer to a question that is like your question.

Any Venture Capitalists Listening?

Here, potentially, lies the seeds for the Holy Grail of search engine technology: a real-time, human powered search engine. If you can build a user base willing to answer real-time questions (possibly leveraging an existing social network), find a way to at least reasonably filter / channel questions to the people with the answers, and a reputation system to prevent spam answer–then you could have a spectacular product.

But why would people answer other people’s questions for free?

Why do they do it now? It’s a great way to connect with other people with similar interests.

And it does not have to be free. Integrate something that leverages PPC ads and there is the potential for revenue sharing–on the order of billions of dollars of revenue per year. Oh yeah!

The new paradigm is the query becomes the social network.

I must ponder this more…. I feel a larger blog coming on.

Until then, follow me on Twitter: @jfxberns.

I needed to sort through a library of 150,000 digital photos that was taking up 150GB of disk space. I knew most were duplicates. (Poor file management practices!)

I needed a tool that would help me find the duplicates so I could delete them.

The problem was, the file were frequently renamed–so two files that were identical often had different file names. I needed a tool that would be able to recognize duplicate digital photos even if the names were different.

I found an awesome Windows program called DoubleKiller that can do just that.

DoubleKiller allows you to find duplicate files by many methods. The method that DoubleKiller offered that worked to solve my problem (duplicate digital photos with differing filenames) was to search the folders I stored my photos in and flag all files that had the same file size AND the same CRC32 signature.

(A CRC32 signature is like a unique serial number that can be calculated from a file. It’s not really unique, but the odds of two files of the same size having the same CRC32 is about 1 in 16,000,000 so it’s a pretty good indicator that the files are identical.)

One you set up the search parameters, tell DoubleKiller what folders to search in and start to run the program, it lists all the duplicate files it finds.

You can then select and delete the duplicates you want to remove.

One suggestion: DoubleKiller has a one-click feature that allows you to select all the duplicates but the first one or all the duplicates but the last one. The result set is ordered in the same order as the folders are entered in the Folders selection section of the Options tab. So when you add folders to search in the Options tab, put the folders where you want to keep files in the order of the priority that you want to keep the files. (Wow. That does not even sound clear to me–but I hope it makes sense once you play with DoubleKiller.)

It took a long time to process 150,000 files (several hours) but I did not have to waste days–or even weeks–doing it by hand and I can be sure I did not accidentally delete every copy destroying valuable work.

And now I have an extra 150GB of disk space. Awesome!

Hurray for DoubleKiller! I wish I have found this gem a long time ago!

Now to tidy up my MP3 collection…

Oh–one more thing, there is also a Pro version of DoubleKiller that runs US$ 19.95. It’s faster and offers more automation options. I think I might have to pick up a copy!

Here’s the tale:

I bought a Trek Vapor 3 helmet last year. After using it for a few months, I went to wash the helmet liners because they had accumulated a lot of sweat and grime–as will any piece of cloth that is on athletic gear that comes into contact with skin. The helmet liners fell apart–they must have been held together by water soluble glue–rendering the helmet useless. I complained to Trek customer service and, instead of fixing the problem, they just made me mad.

The Disintegrating Trek Vapor 3 Helmet Liners–After One Wash

My original email to Trek customer service:

I have to say that I am very disappointed in the Vapor 3 helmet I purchased from Trek.

After several months of use, I took out the removable pads inside the helmet to wash the grime and oil out of them. They detach by velcro, so I assumed they were made to be removable and cleanable.

To my surprise, when I washed the pads, the cloth on either side of the foam fell off.

How was the cloth attached to the foam? With water-soluble glue? However you attached it–you made the wrong choice. A helmet liner gets sweaty and needs to be cleaned. Any part of helmet that gets sweaty, should be washable without it falling apart.

This is a complete and utter disappointment. The helmet is now useless without the helmet liner. It was a total waste of money.

I am requesting you send me a new set of helmet pads/ liner to replace the defective ones you shipped with the helmet.

On second thought, better send about 10 sets in case the new ones dissolve when I get them sweaty.

My mailing address is:

John Berns
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Din Daeng, Bangkok 10400
Thailand

Trek Vapor 3 Helmet - With Disolving Helmet Liners

To which they replied:

Thanks for writing and riding Trek bikes. Trek warrants each helmet for a period of one year from the date of purchase against manufacturer’s defects in materials and craftsmanship. We also offer a one year crash replacement policy. To exchange your helmet, please send it along with your original sales receipt to:

Trek Bicycle Corporation
Attn: Helmet Crash Replacement
801 W. Madison Street
Waterloo, WI 53594

You can also take your helmet, along with your original sales receipt, to your local Trek dealer and exchange it there.

Well, I think they could have done more. After all, the product should never have been put on the shelves. Why should I have to PROVE that there is a problem with a product they must know has a serious problem?

Here is my rather long and angry response:

That’s a rather ridiculous offer and it angers and offends me that you even suggested that.

To start with, let me tell you why you should care that I am upset.

To begin with, the Vapor 3 is a defective product by design. You should already know that fact and be willing to take a customer at his or her word and fix the problem–a customer that is sold a defective product should not have to make a concerted effort to convince the company that made the product to make right.

Furthermore I am a long-term Trek customer. I have owned 4 Trek bicycles and currently own two bikes; a road bike and hardtail mt. bike. I have a Trek Vapor 3 helmet (that is now unusable), Trek gloves and other assorted Trek gear. I am a customer that spends money buying Trek products. That’s a probably the best reason a company can have to care.

Here’s the problem:

You guys made a seriously flawed product. Athletic headgear that is made to be in contact with a sweaty part of the body and that falls apart when you wash it is just plain flawed. Somebody in product design or manufacturing really screwed up on this product. It never should have been shipped. Period.

Now, you are telling me I should jump through hoops and send you the helmet so you can see the problem for yourself before you fix the problem? That’s not just wrong, it’s stupid.

Why your request is impractical to the point of being ridiculous:

I live in Thailand; you should already know that if you ready my complaint, I put my address in there. Do you know where Thailand is? It’s half-way around the world from the address you gave me to return the products to. Now, I could send you the helmet by air courier–that would cost more than the price of the helmet. I could send you the helmet by surface mail, but that’s still probably half the price of the helmet and it would take months. My head is too valuable to go unprotected in Bangkok traffic for months. And why should I shoulder the costs of fixing a product that was flawed to begin with? I am already pissed that I got a crap product–why insult me more and tell me I should waste more time and money proving to you that the product is flawed? I mean–you guys must know this is a problem already, don’t you? Shipping you the helmet requires a great deal of effort on my part, requiring time and effort to package the helmet and take to a shipper. More of my time than the helmet is worth, I am afraid. Hell, the time I spent writing the original email was time wasted that I should not have had to waste. This email is even more time wasted.

Take to the bike shop I bought it from? It’s impractical, it’s rather far and the time and expense to get there is more than the helmet is worth.

Besides–I have no clue where the receipt is.

What do you think this is? A shady ploy to bilk you out of a set of helmet pad / liners? Sorry, I have more important things to do than to try and swindle Trek out of $0.59 worth of helmet liners.

But if you are still convinced this is a shady scam, see the attached photo: the liners are really falling apart. There, now that I wasted 5 minutes snapping a photo will you believe I am not trying to scam you out of fifty nine cents worth of helmet liners?

My suggestion, that you just ship me a few of the helmet pad / liners was a pretty simple solution to the problem. They weigh about 5 grams and it would have taken somebody 5 minutes to put it in an envelope and email it to my address. Problem solved. Customer happy. And it would have required less effort or expense then you receiving a damaged helmet from me and re-shipping it back.

It would require a little initiative on your behalf and a company that supports service reps that are willing to take some initiative to satisfy an unhappy customer. Well, obviously this is not the case.

Now you have a customer (me) that has a useless product (the helmet) and a very, very poor image of Trek Bikes.

With a little effort this situation could have been avoided. Instead, either through wrong-minded corporate policy or general laziness, you squandered an opportunity to build lasting good will and a give a good customer had one more reason to stay loyal to your brand.

Oh–and you would not have had a customer telling as many other people that he can that he thinks your products and customer service are sub-par.

http://www.johnberns.com/2008/04/16/trek-vapor-3-helmet-liners/

– A Former Trek Customer

That’s this blog post.

I don’t understand most company’s policies on making good on customer problems. They often force the customer to go to great lengths to achieve recourse which, at least in my case, further aggravates me. Not only did I get a crap product, I get a run-around to remedy the situation. Now I have a crap product and a company that I feel is jerking me around. Pffft. Why bother? That’s the last time I will buy their product.

Bye Bye Trek! It’s Been Nice Buyin’ Your Products–Until Now!

Now, it a company hears my complaint and takes immediate action (and I even told Trek what they could do and the cost of it is mere pennies by my estimate), they could have made me very happy with almost zero effort on their part.

But alas, they just alienated me.

Analyzing the data embedded in social networks is always a blast.

The Facebook Lexicon allows you to graph the relative occurrence of words posted to The Wall by date. Even more fun, you can graph more then one term at a time.

So, what happens when you graph the occurrences of “party tonight” and “hangover?”

It’s not often that a graph makes me laugh.

Image by guppiecat

“Stuff your eyes with wonder … live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that … shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass!”

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451

A bit of a media storm is brewing over insider revelations by ex-Lonely Planet travel writer Thomas Kohnstamm.

Kohnstamm’s soon-to-be-published book “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?” claims to blow the cover off the travel guide book industry. He claims that much of the content he wrote was plagiarized or fraudulent because the low pay and short deadlines made it simply impossible to do the work ethically.

Lonely Planet has posted a rebuttal on their website.

In Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree travel forums, there is quite an outrage brewing. The outrage is partially over the content of Kohnstamm’s article, partially over a perception that LP and their parent company (The BBC) has quashed some of the postings on the topic in the South America forum.

Several blogs have written damning criticism of Kohnstamm including “5 reasons to be outraged by the Lonely Planet fraud” at Gadling and one article by Eva Holland predicting that hell will be the destination for Kohnstamm at Brave New Traveler.

But some travel writers, like David Stanley, stand alongside Kohnstamm in saying that the wages to guidebook writers can’t possibly fund the hands-on research that the guidebooks say they provide.

“To save money and maintain full control, Lonely Planet often assigns inexperienced office clerks and interns to update their guides. Little wonder that some of these underpaid novices resort to plagiarism. My books have been copied by Lonely Planet writers time and again … Today Lonely Planet updaters get no royalties and must sign away all rights, even moral rights. Thus it’s no surprise that the quality of Lonely Planet guides is so uneven.”

Here are my thoughts.

Kohnstamm has written or contributed to 12 books. After one or two he would have known that, if, as he claims, the work was impossible to do for the budget allocated, then he could have walked away. He chose to stay and write more–nobody forced him to do it.

He freely admits that he has passed off work that contains fabrications in the past–so any claims he makes now–especially ones that line his pocket (by promoting his tell-all book) should be taken with a great deal of skepticism.

I know several guidebook writers. The ones I know personally are solid people and their work is outstanding. I travel in the places they write about and I have used their books. I have never been disappointed or mislead.

I have never had a really bad experience with LP guidebooks–other than some prices and info being out of date–but that’s a dead-tree publishing issue, not just guidebooks or Lonely Planet.

(By dead-tree publishing issue, I mean that, by the time you print something on a dead tree and distribute it, the information printed on the paper is no longer current. Say you buy a guidebook the day it hits the shelves of your local bookstore; the information contained in it is 6-24 months old (that’s how long it took the writer to compile his notes, the editor to edit it, the printer to print it, the shipper to ship it, etc.); if the book has a 2 year shelf life–the information is quite dated.)

On the flip side, I do know that, in spite of LP’s claim that “we lead the industry in the fees we pay, and are committed to a yearly review of author fees,” the fees to guidebook writers in general have been going down–and the cost of living and traveling has been going up. Lower wages mean that some of the best people will walk away from the work.

I know the time it takes to do the field research (I have done it myself) and I know the volume of research required and the ballpark of the fees paid and Kohnstamm’s assertion that it’s not enough to do thorough research rings quite true.

One thing is for sure: Kohnstamm’s claims will have reverberations in the industry. Guidebooks will have to scrutinize who they hire and how their material is compiled. It will also make travelers think a bit more critically about the books they read.

Having had travel guides on the brain for the better part of 10 years now, I see there are some real problems with the travel content industry in general. The volume of information that must be researched, sifted and sorted is gargantuan. It takes a small army to do that kind of work. Communities can form that sort of small army–but then you run into the problems of credibility and reputation as well. (Without authorship that is credible and reputable you can nver achieve authority–ad guidebooks are nothing without some measure of authority-that’s why this scandal has so much potential to damage Lonely Planet.)

My burning question is: how do you utilize community and still be able to surmount the issues of credibility and reputability of the contributors so you retain a level of quality and authority?