There’s a lot of discussion on Techmeme right now about Wikipedia’s decision to add rel=”nofollow” (explanation at the end of this article) to all outbound links on its pages. People seem to be unhappy about the decision because they believe Wikipedia should link to the sources of the article data and provide them (the sources) with the necessary “google juice” in return.

Why wikipedia is right

In my opinion, these people are wrong and Wikipedia did the right thing. Let’s think about it for a while. Wikipedia needs to protect their data in order to remain a credible source of information. Part of that data protection initiative must encompass putting a brake on the spam they get daily - and this is the best way to do it.

By adding the nofollow attribute to their links, wikipedia is effectively telling spammers that by adding links to their pages from wikipedia, they get no “juice” (or search engine ranking boost, if you prefer) in return. Which is good because that way there’s no point in them spamming in the first place - wikipedia readers win, and the web in general wins as well, as there’s less garbage being crawled.

But what if I’m an authority on a topic?

The main reason why people are saying this is a bad move by Wikipedia, is because they get no compensation for being a valid information source for something and being linked from wikipedia. And this is right, but Wikipedia isn’t the only page on the web. If you’re a valuable source of information on a subject, you’ll get the necessary links from other people, who’ll boost your search engine position just as much.

This is a matter of balancing search engine rating greed and the understanding that wikipedia information needs to be valid, and kept that way.

Nofollow definition

Quick note for those who don’t know what nofollow is: if when defining a link to a page from one of yours, you add the rel=”nofollow” attribute, when engines like google crawl your page, they disregard those links. This is useful to make engines ignore links you can’t control - like those in comments to a blog post. In short, it makes things tidier.

Jakob Nielsen has gotten us used to his conservative style when addressing topics such as usability or portal design. Two days ago, he published a new Alertbox on the 10 best intranets of 2007, and took the opportunity to do his typical web 2.0-bash. This paragraph pretty much sums the tone:

Star ratings and user comments have long been found on public websites — from Amazon.com to weblogs — but they become much more useful on intranets, where they’re not degraded by the Bozo effect. (…) For all these reasons, ratings and comments from colleagues are likely to be much more useful than those of random blog readers.

I guess over the years I’ve grown used to Nielsen’s style of depicting situations, but reading paragraphs like that one make me wonder whether his concept of usability is blending with his own conservative ideas. Sure, he’s a brilliant guy and makes great points more often than not, but usability and design (in the broad sense) need to take factors like participation into consideration.

In this article in particular, Jakob goes on and on about intranets that use Wikis, Ajax or blogging capabilities, never without mentioning how hyped or not some of those concepts are, or should be.

Sometimes, I wish Jakob would be the smart guy he is without putting on the Web 1.0 crash helmet and writing things like “Web Trends Without the Hype”, and richard seems to agree.

Like many others, I did a post about the iPhone after the Macworld Keynote. Why? Because I was excited about the possibilities a device like the iPhone could bring, particularly when coming from a company I share so many values with, Apple. After reading through everything that’s been said and written, however, I’m not as excited as I was, the reasons being outlined below.

Provider lock-down

If you want to buy an iPhone in the US, you’ll have to deal with Cingular. I’m not saying their service is good or bad, as I have no experience with it, but this forced contract doesn’t appeal to me as a consumer. I want to have the best combination of device and operator, not the combination forced upon me by one of these parties.

There’s also no word from Apple on how the device is going to market in Europe or Asia. We’ll have to wait, but I’m assuming we’ll see similar contract lock-downs to providers, or a dramatic price increase.

Feature lock-down

One of the first things Jobs mentioned in the Keynote was that the iPhone runs OSX - I find that to be a gross exaggeration and clearly one for the eyes and ears of the press (it did get the crowd to cheer). The iPhone runs its own platform (sure, they can call it OSX as well), bearing little resemblance with Apple’s operating system.

The iPhone is a walled garden. It has what seem to be great applications and services, but Jobs himself said no third party would be allowed to develop for the phone in an interview with the NYT:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

This is a grave oversight. Jobs announced the product as a revolution but fails in not realizing that the real value of the product is as a platform to build upon. Steve, we don’t want it to be like a PC, but we do want it to be like an Apple computer.

Ironically, Nokia seems to be going in the opposite direction - that being a good thing -, with their N700 (and now N800) mobile devices which anyone can develop apps for as they’ve made all the necessary tools available, free of charge.

The bottom line on this point is that without openness in the iPhone platform, it will just be another good looking device. You can just imagine the possibilities if your favorite developers could create applications for your new phone.

In conclusion

I must start by saying it’s still a remarkable device. It innovates in several aspects, and for those who need a phone that “looks good, works well”, you’ve got it. For those of us who were looking for a device we could work on and develop for to become an extension of our businesses, well… We’ll just have to keep on looking.

All this post, written on an iMac, wrapped up in a Macbook Pro, playing music from an iPod. I’m clearly a fan - but Apple doesn’t seem to listen to fans that often.

Photos by Niall Kennedy, released under a CC non-commercial license.

Related reading

Dave Winer has a very good post on this very same issue, as does Mathew Ingram.

You’d have to be under a rock or away from a connected computer not to read or hear about how people are excited about the Apple iPhone - I know I am. The truth is, if things are as good as they seem, they’ve done it again, and I may have found what I was looking for.

Why Apple read my mind

I have been looking for the smart smartphone for a long time, and the reason why I didn’t buy one before was because all existing solutions presented me with a scary mix of bad interface and frustrating feature/pricing combinations. The iPhone seems to deal with both just fine.

Now, this doesn’t mean the iPhone is cheap (it isn’t), and it sure isn’t going to be for everyone, but for $499 (or $599, depending on your storage requirements) you get a pretty compelling solution to be connected. And you get the fantastic user experience Apple’s gotten us used to to boot. In fact, I highly recommend looking at the phone demos just to get a taste of what Interaction Design really means.

Wishes and concerns

As I said in my “ultimate connected device” post a while ago - where I hinted on the real need we have for something like this -, a phone like this can become a platform for just about anything if developers are given the right tools. From what I’ve seen in the iPhone demos, the phone will support widgets like the OSX dashboard already does.

But I’d love it if Apple took the next step of allowing people to actually build fully functional applications based on the software and hardware platform they built. Widgets are fine, but if there’s direct access to the full capabilities of the phone the possibilities become virtually endless.

All this being said, I only have one concern about the phone - the battery life. I would need to have real test data to confirm my worries, but 5 hours of active use may be a little too short for some people. Ah, we’ll see. Truth is, I’m excited as hell about this product - Apple’s designers and engineering teams need a round of applause.

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