TechAddress

German Politician Blocks Local Wikipedia

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 11:30:04 +0000

This is the image that comes up when people try to access Wikipedia.de, which used to be forwarded to Wikipedia.org. It reads:

The county court of Luebeck (North Germany) has issued an order in the name of Lutz Heilmann, Member of Parliament (left party/post-communist) that the German Wikipedia (Wikimedia e.V.) must not allow linking its domain wikipedia.de to the Web site wikipedia.org, as long as the German language version of wikipedia.org makes certain statements.

According to OhMyNews, these statements include Heilmann’s past as a member of the Stasi - the former official secret police of East Germany - as well as allegations that he has threatened an ex-boyfriend.

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What’s Your Favorite Wiki?

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:33:50 +0000

Source:Mashable!

This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

Wiki software can be seen just about everywhere, from corporate intranets to human-powered search engines to the world’s biggest wiki – Wikipedia. As the popularity of wikis has grown, so too has the number of different companies providing software for them. We recently took a look at more than 30 different providers of wiki solutions, all of which offer a slightly different twist on the idea of collaborative editing. Let us know which is your favorite by making a nomination using the widget below:

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Feel free to elaborate on your nomination in the comments, or try to gain more support for your favorite service by copying the widget to your blog (click the “Grab This” link in the widget above)!

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Top 5 Tech “Killers” That Weren’t

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:30:45 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Hulu, News Corp and NBC’s “YouTube killer“, just turned one year old. And while YouTube is far from dead, Hulu’s 142 million video views in September might qualify as a paper cut. Other “killers” heralded by the technology press…rarely leave a mark.

1. The Digg Killer

Remember MySpace News, the site that we and other news outlets considered a possible Digg killer? Launched in April 2007, MySpace’s Digg challenger is down for the count.

2. The Google Killer

While we didn’t buy into the hype on this occasion, the tech press as a whole debated whether new search engine Cuil could be the next “Google Killer“. Within two months of its July 2008 launch, the initial buzz was dead and Cuil’s market share was next to nothing.

3. The (Other) YouTube Killer

In May 2007, BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay announced its intention to launch a streaming video site, which we branded a potential “YouTube Killer”. Bloggers concluded that this was to be hosted at thevideobay.org, a URL that’s currently dead. Meanwhile, excitement in September 2008 over a video streaming site called ThePirateCity.org turned out to be unfounded: this site was not developed by The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay has yet to launch a YouTube rival and will not comment on its plans.

4. The (Other) Google Killer

Wikia, the social search service launched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, suffered the unenviable fate of being branded a “Google Killer”: a title that would be virtually impossible to live up to. The company laid off around 10% of its staff in October, a move that could be attributed to the economic downturn. Meanwhile, third party traffic tools show some good traction for the service. Google killer? No. Success? To be determined.

5. The Wikipedia Killer

The initial buzz about Google Knol, a Wikipedia challenger launched by the search giant in July, subsided rapidly. In September 2008, Slate branded Google’s attempt “abysmal” in comparison to Wikipedia, and a “debates” feature launched in October was seen by some as a weak effort to regain interest. In an article last week on Knol’s new multilingual support (French, German and Italian), the AP explains that Knol has “floundered since its July launch”, but suggests that internationalization may help. Still, we can’t underestimate Google’s ability to drive truckloads of traffic to a content site - Knol currently walks the line between killing and being killed.

Did we miss any? Add your suggestions in the comments.

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Faviki Brings Wikipedia and User Notes to Social Bookmarking (The Startup Review)

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:34:11 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Company Name

Faviki

20-word Description

Faviki is a semantic bookmarking tool which allows people to organize bookmarks using Wikipedia concepts as tags.

CEO’s Pitch

Faviki is a tool that brings together social bookmarking and Wikipedia. It allows you to tag webpages with Wikipedia concepts, categorizing them automatically. This solves the problem of having different tags for the same concept and makes your tags better organized. Faviki is powered by DBpedia, which extracts structured information from Wikipedia. It also uses the Zemanta API for automatic tag suggestions, and mashes it with Google AJAX Language API to make multilingual semantic tagging possible. There are currently 5.6 million tags you can choose from - 2.7 million English and 2.9 million tags from 13 other languages.

Mashable’s Take

The main aspects of the Faviki utility have already been written out by the company’s founder, Vuk Milicic. So rather than get deep into detail about the Zemanta and Google AJAX Language APIs, let’s explore what Faviki can be to the average user as the social bookmarking tool it is designed to be.

The connection made between bookmarking and Wikipedia might be lost on some, and perhaps a bit purposeless for the diverse number of reasons people interact with websites and their individual pages. Not all subjects have ample representation within Wikipedia. But the suggestions made via the tags provided through Faviki can be helpful at times. And users can always add their own tags if need be. As with most bookmarking services, it can keep your list of bookmarks better sorted for future reference if you’re collecting items to group closely together. And the ability to share links with friends and view topics that Faviki finds applicable to one or more bookmarks is an intelligent way to manage information.

Much of its effectiveness of course depends on how extensively you use the service. The quick transfers of a bookmarklet in your browser’s standard toolbar facilitates the process considerably. Plugin installations in Firefox, for instance, can be a hurdle some don’t wish to jump past. With Faviki, you don’t have to.

Another great item in Faviki’s arsenal is the ability to present notes along with a bookmark. Tagging is a useful search feature, for sure. No question about that. But to have the option to tell friends or the entire membership at large what it is exactly you’ve bookmarked or why you’ve chosen to share it can bring a superb level of guidance into the system.

Sign-up is as easy as you’d like it to be. Enter an email address, choose an account name and password choice, plus a language specification (15 in all), and you’re set. If you’d like to make a change to your username, time zone, or determine whether or not you want to be sent a newsletter, you can do so simply by clicking the ‘edit profile’ setting in the top right section of the page.

Is Faviki a smarter engine than, say, the newly revised Delicious? I have no reservations in thinking that many won’t convert, if only for the very sensible reason that they’re already well-invested and attuned to the ways of the sector’s benchmark. Others will enjoy this beta more than the Yahoo-owned favorite, though. If you’re willing to try something different, or have never fallen under the Delicious spell, Faviki is quite good. Simple and powerful are two elements it exhibits, and the smart design can grow on the user rather quickly. Altogether, Faviki is impressive. For a social bookmarking service, that’s certainly saying a lot.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Wikia Green: A Community for Environmental Issues

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:30:06 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has unveiled a new community for sharing knowledge about environmental topics: Wikia Green. It is hosted on his for-profit wiki hosting service Wikia, and it currently has over 600 articles.

In an interview with CNET, Wales explains that the purpose of the site is not so much to bring day to day news about green topics, but rather a central knowledge hub for all things green.

“What we’re doing is actually complementary to blogs in the sense that what blogs do is update you on a day-to-day basis. Also, blogs are engaged in political or other types of analysis, whereas a wiki becomes a touchpoint for the community, a place where people meet up and work on whatever the consensus is about a certain topic,” he says.

It’s also not just a green Wikipedia. The site itself describes three ways in which it is different to the regular wikipedia: the content is written from a green point of view; it is focused on what you can actually do, and it is more accessible and relevant to an average reader (see some comparisons here).

The question “do we really need another green site?” is asked in the interview, but it doesn’t really apply here. I’m sure that Wales will be able to leverage his influence and the influence of Wikipedia’s community to turn Wikia Green into an important resource for learning about the environment.

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Ubiquity Will Not Be Ubiquitous

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:35:08 +0000

Source:Mashable!

I may lose my “early adopter badge” for saying this, but I do not see how Ubiquity really helps anyone. Given that it is a 0.1 release, I know it is far from complete. However, it seems like there is a lot of development required to really make the browser a platform, and make it easier for people to use the Internet as a service. When I say a lot, I mean a minimum of two years until early adopters can praise it like they have praised services like Twitter or FriendFeed. For the rest of the mainstream, we are looking at closer to five years given the traditional adopter cycle.

Of course, the logical question is why do I feel this way? First, look at the examples from the user tutorial. Being able to type “email to Mike” so that GMail creates an email and sends it is not a huge advancement. The search examples are much of the same thing. You can type “wikipedia babel fish” and it will search Wikipedia for you. Obviously, this barely saves any time or mouse clicks. All of the examples are this simplistic, and this adds to my “shouldn’t there be more” feeling.

I am generally underwhelmed for a few different reasons. First, why make the browser the platform? Isn’t it easier to create a website that does all of the same things? Isn’t this what sites like iGoogle or any other personalized homepage with widgets are trying to do? Does this just mean we need better websites?The big question I have with this is “What are we trying to do?” My understanding of the “browser as a platform” concept is that we are trying to treat the Internet as a service or a data source. You can do interesting things when not constrained to a specific page. I think Ubiquity is meant to change the way we work, and that is what I want. The problem is that we are not there yet, and it takes a little imagination to get there.

“Summon Ubiquity” is used throughout the documentation. Why? The services should just be active and ready from a toolbar or even parsed in the address bar. The commands also need to be very generic. If I am searching for information, let me type “find babel fish.” The built-in services can search Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo and whatever other search services that support Ubiquity. The process should be meta-everything. If I need a definition, I can type “define ubiquitous” and the service would look for definitions on various reference sites like Dictionary.com and any other engines that support definitions. Another area that could benefit greatly from integration with Ubiquity is semantics and linked data. Both would provide plenty of context and data sources for some interesting applications.

There are a few features that I really like about the service as well. They have included a concept of context or “this.” If I have selected a large section of text on a Web page, I can enter “email this to Mike” and the selected text gets emailed to my contact named Mike. Context in any activity is extremely important, and creating a quick way to get the context is fantastic. The other extremely important feature is that new commands can be created with just some lines of JavaScript. This means that there is not a huge learning curve for the API, it is just a matter of linking together the right API calls. The fact that you do not need to restart Firefox while developing is a nice bonus as well.

Overall, it is fairly obvious that Ubiquity is an interesting technology, but it is still very immature. It is something we should keep an eye on in terms of the platform development as well as what commands and applications developers create on top of the platform.

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Crowdsourced Encyclopedias: Wikipedia, Mahalo and Google Knol

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:32:13 +0000

Source:CenterNetworks

Earlier today Google announced that Google Knol is now open to the public. Danny Sullivan has an awesome overview of how Google Knol works.

I thought this would be a good time to compare three crowdsourced encyclopedias: Mahalo, Google Knol and Wikipedia. Each one takes a different angle on why you should contribute.

Do you participate in any of these crowdsourced encyclopedias? If so, what factors helped make your decision? Was it to help the "greater good" or was it a financial decision?

Here are some thoughts on each encyclopedia and why people contribute to each:

Partner Links
– Free Online Budgeting Software

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Google Knol Launches; More Like Squidoo than Wikipedia

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:05:56 +0000

Source:Mashable!

We’ve discussed some tactics to get your company better engaged with social media. Lest you think there’s a limit to how you can connect with business and customer facing audiences, we’ve assembled this list of more than 35 companies who are experimenting with social media in a host of different ways.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and it represents a wide variety of businesses, industries and social media tools. As you can see, engagement takes many forms. Some are likely to generate more discussions with the company while others might result better connections between customers. Some will fade away over the next 6-12 months while others will continue to grow and evolve.

There are no rules to what form your engagement has to take. Look at your company, identify its strengths, what types of conversations energize employees and determine how you can best grow/shape/build/join your own community.

If you have other examples of corporate social media engagement, please share them in the comments.

Blendtec is famous for its bevy of inexpensive “Will It Blend” videos posted on YouTube and shared by millions.

Adobe maintains a list of interesting company related websites and conversations on the social bookmarking site Delicious.

Best Western sponsors a blog,“On the Go with Amy,” where the author travels the country writing about her experiences.

Cadence recently relaunched its website that now prominently promotes the company’s community.

Cisco hosts 12 blogs addressing a variety of audiences for their global business.

Coca-Cola Conversations is a blog written by company historian Phil Mooney that focuses on Coke collectibles.

Dell leverages a variety of social media platforms for customer engagement, including an island in the virtual world of Second Life.

Ford publishes news releases with lots of multimedia content and employs a social media news release format to display them in their newsroom.

Fujifilm recently launched a social network to build a community of photo enthusiasts around its newest camera.

GM uses blogs to communicate directly with its customers around topics ranging from design to green tech.

H&R Block created a Facebook fan site to aggregate its social media activities, engage customers and offer tax advice/resources.

HP used Twitter to power a scavenger hunt at a recent conference.

HSBC built the HSBC Business Network to connect entrepreneurs using blogs, videos and forums.

IBM was the first large enterprise to embrace employee blogging and now boasts thousands of blogs related to every facet of its business.

Intel has also developed many social media touch points with its software communities, which includes blogs, Twitter and virtual worlds.

Intuit sponsors the Tax Almanac wiki, where anyone can find and contribute to this resource for tax information.

Jeep connects with customers via a community page with links to photos on Flickr, the company’s MySpace and Facebook pages and a list enthusiast groups.

JetBlue employs social media as part of its training for JetBlue University, as this video explains.

Johnson & Johnson uses this blog to show another side of the company, with frequent video posts and interviews.

Lenovo launched “Voices of the Olympics Games” to aggregate posts from the athletes competing in Beijing.

Marriott CEO Bill Marriott posts regular updates and stories from his travels to Marriott properties around the world to fuel the content for this entertaining blog.

McDonalds maintains a blog to highlight the company’s corporate social responsibility efforts.

National Geographic uses Google’s new virtual world, Lively, to bring people together around its new show, LA Hard Hats.

New York Times is beta testing a Firefox add-on that allows users to share and comment on stories through a decentralized social network.

Nike started a social community on Loopd to connect athletes interested in surfing, BMX bike racing and similar activities with the brand.

SAP sponsored a global survey of social media professionals to learn more about social media worldwide.

Sears partnered with MTV to create a social network around Back to School shopping.

Southwest Airlines employees share their stories and communicate directly with customers through the “Nuts About Southwest” blog.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog is the example most often cited for what the CEO blog can be.

Starbucks started MyStarbucksIdea so that customers can submit ideas for the company which are then voted on by other users, the best of which will be implemented by the company.

Toyota started its own virtual world to promote its products in Japan (site is in Japanese).

Visa launched The Visa Business Network application on Facebook to connect small business users and to help them promote their businesses to a larger community.

Wells-Fargo blogs target two audiences; one examines the company’s history and the other is for students interested in getting their finances in order.

WWE has a Facebook application, among other social networking tools and widgets, to bring fans closer to the action.

Xerox blogs address several of the company’s core B2B constituencies.

Zappos uses Twitter for employees to communicate with Zappos customers about their shared love of footwear.

[Disclosure: Aaron Uhrmacher works with several Fortune 1000 companies, some of which are included in this list.]

Aaron Uhrmacher is a social media consultant at Text 100 Public Relations. In addition to his posts for Mashable, he blogs at: www.disruptology.com.

Source:Mashable!

Google has just launched Knol to the public, dubbed by many as the search giant’s Wikipedia killer. My first reaction: not so fast. While Knol offers a way for anyone to create content about any subject, there are a few big differences.

First and foremost, each “Knol” is created by a single author, who can then choose to either accept or reject edits made by others in what Google is calling “moderated collaboration.” Beyond that, Knol authors can insert AdSense on their Knols and earn revenue based on clicks. In reality, this sound less a lot less like the community collaborating on authoritative articles (Wikipedia) and a lot more like a potential land grab to create content for lucrative keywords.

However, Google does offer some options that should keep would-be opportunists at bay. Each Knol offers the ability for anyone to review or comment on it, which in turn raises or lowers the authority of the article. Google says that they “expect that there will be multiple knolls on the same subject, and we think that is good.”

In giving a single author control over each Knol and its edits, it’s hard to imagine the service will be as authoritative as Wikipedia (which, many would argue has its own biases). It seems more like Squidoo, where knowledgeable people can create good content and be rewarded for it, with the community at-large determining how valuable it is and recognizing that there may be some bias in the article.

Meanwhile, Knol could still be a huge traffic generator for Google and steal visitors from Wikipedia if it’s integrated in search results – something Google has not been shy about doing with other properties like YouTube.

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