Alex Singleton at the Adam Smith Institute has an interesting comparison of blogs and wikis by viewing them as economic systems. Their analysis is not without problems, but it’s a good thought exercise.

Blogs are decentralized and competitive. They are not a zero sum game, in the sense that for one blog to win readers, all others have to lose (though at some point, if you had a static population, the theoretical maximum of reader attention would be achieved–however absent that and with technological growth, such a condition won’t come about in a century at least). Blogs “succeed” by market acceptance–if you write interesting things and write well about topics people care about, they will discover and link to you. (Of course it’s a market failure that the entire world doesn’t wait with bated breath to find out what I put on this blog, but I digress.)

Wikis are centralized, in the sense a wiki about a given topic lives on one server. Anyone can theoretically contribute, and all contributions are considered equal, except in the sense that the last contribution determines what people see. This leads to unfortunate things like malicious deleting of content, rampant spam, and general graffiti. In short, many of the classic problems of a commons.

However, the analysis is not completely accurate. Blogs tend to have comments, and frequently those lead to the hateful, inaccurate, and unwanted commercial speech that Mr. Singleton accuses wikis of. There is not just one wiki, there are several, so wikis can compete against each other to be linked-to sources of information.

Furthermore, wikis have owners, and those owners do have a vested interest in keeping the commons neat and clean and relatively on-topic. Wikis also tend not to have an infinite audience, so “cultures” tend to form around them. Since a later post (or the administrator) can come by and undo what harm was done before, they more or less stay on track instead of instantly devolving into anarchy. The commons, once ruined, is not ruined forever.

That being said, it is pretty easy to see that the blogosphere is already treated as a more-or-less single entity, kind of like the global market. Blogs definitely have more blog-to-blog interaction than wikis have to each other. The blogosphere is more dynamic than the wikisphere, if such a thing can be said to exist…blogs rise and fall more quickly. And from personal experience, I can say that the tendency of spammers to come through and put Danish porn spam on your site about a content management framework is fairly annoying.

The beautiful thing is that both of these “economic systems” live within a broader economic system, the World Wide Web. So they will compete and evolve within a broader dynamic marketplace that rewards useful information sources. So in five years, we’ll see if either blogs or wikis are around, and more importantly, what form they’ll evolve into.

So, say you’re an idiot and you’re concerned about Google’s Gmail privacy. But I repeat myself. Say you are such an idiot and you are in the California Assembly. Well, you get the drill.

Anyway, one such Einstein is sponsoring a bill to block Google’s new E-mail service in California. Hmmm…is it because she’s merely an idiot, or is she corrupt? I would dearly love to look at a list of her contributors. I expect to see Microsoft on there, possibly Yahoo.

Two massive problems with this:

First, you are free to choose from other e-mail services that are free (though also ad-supported). So if privacy is a problem, there are ready-made solutions without the wire Mommy getting involved.

Second, Google anonymously parses ads already with its AdSense technology, and I can assure you that programmers on a deadline and with performance limitations don’t hold on to that data…and guess what–any of these free e-mail services that you use store the e-mails on…wait for it…their server, where they can search and read it to their heart’s content without you even knowing.

Yeah, that’s right. You’ve given up your privacy long before Google used a program to parse it to give you ads in its database that contain similar keywords.

Take a look on many popular blogs and you’ll see that lots of people are voluntarily putting this technology on their sites…and the results are sometimes hilarious.

Update: Thanks to Jason Lefkowitz, I am now able to correct the sex of the legislator and determine that she may be an idiot, but she’s taking money from Microsoft. Though she’s mainly the bitch of the health insurance industry, she’s doing Microsoft’s monopoly work for them.

Further Update: Boy, she’s evil. From that same document: RECORDING INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC. $1,500.00

She hasn’t met a monopoly or price-fixing cartel she doesn’t like!

Craig Newmark over at Marginal Revolution wonders whether Microsoft isn’t getting bashed for what it fails to bundle as well as what it bundles. The idea is that security software should come with Windows, but that would be bundling.

At the end of the post, Craig wonders:

I think the primary reason is that Microsoft was surprised by the extent of the problem, similar to how it was surprised in the mid 90s by how rapidly and deeply the Internet caught on.

But it sure would be hard to prove that.

Yes, it would–especially given that they’ve claimed to make Security Job 1 for the last two years, and that was after considerable bashing/warning/advising from the tech community.

The problem isn’t that MS fails to include an antivirus package and a firewall in Windows by default (though MS doesn’t prevent a PC manufacturer to do so, unlike bundling alternate Web browsers or media players). It’s that what they currently bundle is configured so insecurely.

The common thread of most of the recent worms has been a dependence on Outlook, which is bundled with Microsoft’s other monopoly, Office. Outlook will trigger an included script even when you don’t preview or open the message but merely highlight it. Windows also allows scripts and programs to make changes to the operating system without notifying you.

None of this is true on alternate operating systems or even mail clients. I could go on about the inherently insecure settings and features of Windows, but that’s been well documented elsewhere. Let’s just conclude by saying that bundling isn’t the problem, and if they’ve missed the boat on security, they haven’t displayed the kind of catchup rush that they did with the Internet.