Danny Hillis' latest venture, Metaweb, is about to unveil its first product, the aptly named freebase, tomorrow. While freebase is still VERY alpha, with much of the basic functionality barely working, the idea is HUGE. In many ways, freebase is the bridge between the bottom up vision of Web 2.0 collective intelligence and the more structured world of the semantic web.
There's been plenty of debate over the past couple of years about the merits of Wikipedia, generally focusing on how "trustworthy" the site is because of its anonymous contributors and lack of professional editorial review.
This is the Home Page of The Commentary Project: a private scholarly endeavor of The Franciscan Archive, which aims to publish a complete critical English translation of St. Bonaventure’s great Commentaria in Quattuor Libros Sententiarum in the next 5 years, along with the text of Master Peter Lombard’s work, Quattuor Libri Sententiarum.
A bright is a person whose worldview is naturalistic, that is, free of supernatural or mystical elements.* The term was coined by Mynga Futrell and Paul Geisert, a pair of brights from Sacramento, California, who thought it would be sensible to adopt a common name for atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, materialists, rationalists, secular humanists, and skeptics.* All these disparate groups share in common a naturalistic worldview.
Seems that almost every story submitted to Slashdot last night in some way involved Google's Chrome that we started talking about yesterday. Dotan Cohen noted that according to Clicky Chrome has hit 3% browser share. Since Google has decided to release Chrome only for Windows, I now share for you 3 reviews written by others: the first comes from alexy2k, the second from mildsiete, and the third from oli4uk. They all seem to feature various opinions, charts, and screenshots demonstrating various exciting points.
No, this is not an indecent proposal. It's an idea to add a little feature to Nupedia. Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the idea objectionable, but I think not.
'There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed'
The temporary logo (shown at left) that we've used for the past two months was created when the Support Alert Newsletter merged with the Windows Secrets Newsletter in July 2008. As was announced on July 9 by the editor of Support Alert, Ian "Gizmo" Richards, our long, transitional name is being shortened to simply Windows Secrets as of today.
Google began running a live test last year that lets people rank and remove search engine results and comment on them. Testers were presented with different variations of the experiment, which the company first publicly detailed about two weeks ago in an official blog posting.
Welcome back to the EOL newsletter. For the last
few months, we have been using the feedback on
the first version of EOL to prepare for a new major
release later this year. In December, we will make
EOL into a richer environment with new opportunities
for participation. We are ready to accommodate our
higher-than-anticipated user traffic and we look
forward to sharing our progress with you here.
Technologist Clay Shirky argues that information overload isn't the problem tech journalism makes it out to be: it's really a failure of information filters. At the Web 2.0 Expo last week, Shirky said that the internet has made it easier and cheaper for publishers to broadcast information—so now the onus is on the consumer to filter out the noise (much like client-side spam filters). Hit the play button below to hear Shirky's well-argued points.
Shall I compare thee to a Knol? Hmm, perhaps not. Wikipedia sounds just right. Memorable and serious but not too serious. Of course Wikipedia is now an established “brand” and it has a big headstart on any competitor. Just like Google’s own search engine. If it is going to position itself ever to rival Wikipedia perhaps they should be thinking about a more pithy name. Knol? Unfortunately, every time I see or hear it I am transported back to Deely Plaza or the Texas Book Repository. However good the product, many have been done for because of poor marketing. This is perhaps a quibble. If a product is good enough it might survive uninspired marketing.
Wikiversity is a project of the Wikimedia foundation. It is a centre for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. We host free education resources and scholarly projects. We also aim at interacting with other wikimedia projects and support their content developments. So far, English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Portuguese and Czech have developed into separate projects.