I find Wikipedia fascinating.  Anyone can edit — how could that possibly work?

Of course, there’s been a lot of discussion and debate about the accuracy of Wikipedia articles.  I think Wikipedia is pretty accurate, if you look a sort of content average over the long term.  Inaccuracies in any given article will get corrected by the crowd over time (but with new inaccuracies added).  In other words, any given article has “inaccuracy noise” over time, around a mean (or accurate) “value”.

I think democracies work like Wikipedia articles.  At any given instant, something’s “inaccurate” (e.g. broken, dysfunctional, etc.), but the system works pretty well if you consider the average results over time.  It’s the wisdom of crowds at work.

So the question is:  how much of a content cleanup will the 2008 elections be?  (And that’s as political as I’m going to get in this blog).    

(Photo geek alert)

Adobe Lightroom’s export function lets you choose any post-processing application to run on the exported photos. You can automatically drop your exports into PhotoShop, upload them to Flicker, process them with a custom script, etc.

Here are my notes on writing a custom script to upload photos to my printing service.

My digital photo library recently hit the 30,000 mark, and as it has grown, I’ve been on a continuous quest to find a tool that can handle the volume.

I started with home-grown tools, then switched to the Organizer tool in PhotoShop Elements. As my library grew, Elements got flaky (hangs, frequent resets of the thumbnail cache).

Then, I tried Adobe Lightroom (30-day free trial, for Mac and Windows).  It’s not cheap ($300), but it’s awesome.

It’s designed for the professional workflow:  sorting through a large batch of photos, marking candidates, doing basic fixup, then burn/print/publish.   The editing functions are not as powerful as PhotoShop’s, but they’re more intuitively presented and cover 95% of my cases.   You can correct exposures, crop, straighten, and fix spots/blemishes/redeye.

The UI is a bit non-standard, and I’d strongly recommend watching the tutorial videos.  Keyboard shortcuts are the key.