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.
modeling the 3D wikipedia puzzle ball
Hello blenderers! I am attempting to learn blender, and picked a project of modeling the puzzle ball logo for Wikipedia:
The Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Wikipedia) by the Jewish-Czech scholar Julius Pokorny was published in 1959. The work is now slightly outdated, especially as it was conservative even at the time Pokorny wrote it, ignoring the laryngeal theory, and hardly including any Tocharian or Anatolian material. But there exists no more modern and updated etymological dictionary of the Indo-European languages, so it is still of interest to scholars.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association filed a complaint this month with the FTC 'alleging that professional sports leagues, Hollywood studios, and book publishers were all using copyright notices that misrepresented the law'. That is, they were aggressively pursuing 'right' that they were not entitled to. Now a group, backed by companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sun, and Red Hat, has launched a web site called Defend Fair Use that shows they are serious about making the complaint stick. From the article: 'In contrast to copyright notices that take no account of fair use and claim control over "all accounts and descriptions" of a game, the CCIA offers a different
Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Kisa designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity
A shortlist of six films is made by the UK's leading critics, film-school heads and festival directors from the foreign language films released in that year in the UK. The winner is selected by a panel of judges whose decision making process is screened as part of the award ceremony, screened live on BBC Four.
The George Junior Republic formed a miniature state whose economic, civic and social conditions, as nearly as possible, reproduce those of the United States, and whose citizenship is vested in young people, especially those who were neglected or wayward.
I have started to use moodle and I am very pleased by its forum module. Because - there is a nice threading - your receive a notification, if somebody answers a post of you.
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.
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.
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.