After a bit less than a month, but enough traffic to give me an idea what to expect, I decided to remove Google ads. I earned a dollar. Well, almost anyway.

My decision to end it was made easier when I discovered this, where ads were supposed to be:

Wtf?

I tried to follow Google’s advice. I picked the most successful formats (but also experimented with others), put them at premium places and choose colors that blend in. Result was a buck and a revelation that on my site even old-fashion banners would be more profitable.

I have no real explanation for disappointing results. Since I’m not fond of ads either, I stayed with number of ad boxes I felt most comfortable with (usually just one) and used only text ads. It’s possible that I’d have more luck with image ads, but it doesn’t really matter, since I dislike them enough that they wouldn’t be acceptable anyway.

It’s also possible and even probable, that the problem was with content of pages. I’ve certainly noticed what often seemed at best a poor match between displayed content and ads.

Sadly there weren’t enough clicks to merit a more involved analysis. Maybe some other time, when I have a new idea worth exploring and get better results.

What has been your experience with AdSense?

Ever since I created my first blog, comment spam was an ever present evil. I can imagine it must be really annoying on very popular blogs with lots of comments, but the variety I have is more puzzling than anything else.

What’s the purpose of producing spam comments that can’t pass even a simple filter included in default installation of WordPress?

I find it highly incredible that someone would be competent enough to write a spamming software and incompetent enough to avoid the only trap WordPress presents. Or is there a benefit to blog spam no one else but me sees?

There are other problems with it that make it easy to recognize and handle it. I’m grateful, because I don’t have to annoy anyone with captchas or other comment preventing mechanisms.

A few years ago, before terrorism became an important and everyday topic, I was visiting a good friend of mine at Cambridge, who was doing his PhD there. He got a scholarship from a fund with Prince of Wales as a patron or something of the sort. I can’t remember the details anymore. Anyhow, he (and lots of other postgraduate students) got an invitation to a dinner with Prince Charles.

I was staying at his place and he didn’t feel like going, so he came up with a marvelous idea. I should go pretending to be him. It’s not like he knew anyone, who’d be there. Since I didn’t have a suit with me, I borrowed a wool jumper, aiming for a sort of modest, academic look, which is the sort of idiotic notion you get by watching too many movies. It was also the only preparation we did.

I ended in a room (5 x 5 meters) filled with people in suits, whose idea of mingling is talking about their thesis and mentors. Two pieces of easily obtainable information that I didn’t have. So I’ve spent the most adrenaline filled 4 hours of my life waiting for dinner and trying to hide my wool jumper covered ass from police and anyone who could uncover me (a lot of people as I’ve found out). I had no idea it would be so difficult to avoid talking to anybody.

It’s amazing what you can get away with if no one expects you to be that daft. At the end I didn’t have to find out if police would believe my story and I discovered that, if I may be immodest for a moment, a sum of two highly intelligent people can be a cretin.

So, what does this little story tell us about group intelligence?

Absolutely nothing. I was just dying for an opportunity to share it.

On the other hand, folksonomies, wikis and most of what is these days disgustingly known as Web 2.0 do. Even though I think open formats and uninhibited access to own data should be a basic right and largely form Marela’s raison d’être, I believe in the long run it’s social part of “new” web that will prove to be really revolutionary.

Nothing exemplifies this more than Wikipedia and its sister sites. It’s exploding popularity is shocking on many levels and although most articles seem to focus on its growth and statistical data, it is relation to facts and truth that most interest me.

Critics of Wikipedia often point out sample articles of dubious quality; premise being you can’t actually know which articles to trust and which not. But it’s really the supporters , who I think are even more misguided.

Critics are not wrong. It simply doesn’t matter they are right, because we don’t care about veracity all that much. Authority is very much dead.

Web hasn’t made us critical thinkers. We don’t actually question information we find, unless we disagree with it. If anything, then first ten years of web made us more sloppy, more willing to believe unchecked statements.

Paradoxically I think it’s this naïvety that was and probably still is needed for Wikipedia’s development. It simply wouldn’t grow to its current size without satisfied readers, who are in effect a form of payment for voluntary work. Without users I doubt it would ever gather critical mass to evolve perception that you can contribute even if your knowledge might be lacking.

For all its faults, Wikipedia still is a huge body of knowledge that greatly exceeds what was available to most of us not so long ago. It’s an amazing achievement and web is markedly different place now.

After a good year of using different services I’m amazed how well simple things, which at first seemed like interesting toys, work to capture group intelligence. Tags proved to be simple, flexible way for organizing and finding things and I believe tag clouds will in future be used even more for capturing zeitgeist. I’m sure we’ll get more tools and learn to use better those we already have.

They are not perfect but as with Wikipedia, it doesn’t really matter, because they don’t have to be. They don’t have to give perfect answers as long as they avoid giving really bad ones. Rare are occasions in life where we’d prefer a perfect, but long coming answer over a good enough, yet a quick one.

Of course there are exceptions, where group intelligence fails and we need an authoritative answer. New tools won’t replace old ones and neither will groups be only source of wisdom. But they won’t go away and I’d advise against ignoring them.

George Dyson spoke about how artificial intelligence would look like and would we recognize it. Maybe it’s already here and it’s us.