AFP - Wikimedia Foundation has announced that it won an 890,000-dollar grant to create ways to make it easier for people to add their knowledge to its widely-used Wikipedia online encyclopedia....
In the previous installment we learned how checking the needs of our users and potential users and seeing to them can help establish us as the authority, the hub and community of our own brand. This in turn makes us the source of reference instead of our detractors or competitors. Working our way up from the bottom, the most obscure questions and concerns, to the top, the money terms and traffic generators for our products and services, we build a mushrooming clouds of content that in turn receives an ever-growing network of incoming links from people giving answers and suggestions...
Google is letting you get personal with your search results. The Internet company plans to introduce today a new feature, called SearchWiki, that allows users to change their results from Google searches. You can move items up and down in the rankings, remove them entirely, leave notes about whether you found a particular site useful and add sites that either don't show up in the search results or are buried. Then it remembers those changes the next time you log in. And that is a catch, with privacy implications: You must be logged in to use the service so Google...
Ever the fashion pundits, the French have extended their obsession for what is très chic by asking design legend and man behind the house of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, to design the 2009 issue of "Le Petit Larousse Illustrè." Translated in English as "Larousse Small Illustrated Dictionary," besides lending his artistic talents, Lagerfeld himself is included in the book's encyclopedia of proper names along with the likes of Brad Pitt and acclaimed French actress Marion Cotillard.A realistic sketch of Lagerfeld graces the limited-edition box cover, next to the phrase habillé par Karl Lagerfeld (or "dressed by Karl Lagerfeld") and on the...
Some details on Meade's ETX-LS telescope have snuck out ahead of its early 2009 launch, and it looks like an amateur telescope for the digital age. That's because it'll drive itself to locate the stars you've chosen to look at automatically, using its database, in-built GPS and electronic level-detector system. And then there's a sensor package built-in there too, with a CCD sensor so you can save photos to SD card or even stream video out. Plus there's a speaker so it'll tell you data from its internal "Astronomer-Inside" encyclopedia. Sure it's no Keck, but it's good if you like...
Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art came across this Flickr gallery of old Scholastic book covers. I loved these books when I was growing up, and recognized many of them in the gallery. Shown here are four of my favorites: 100 Pounds of Popcorn, Encyclopedia Brown Strikes Again, Beyond Belief, and Spooky Magic (the art is terrific on this one!). Nostalgia for the Scholastic Book Club...
What's that on the top of every page on Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales's nonprofit encyclopedia? Why, it's an ad! Wales had long promised that Wikipedia would not carry advertising, but he makes an exception for the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's nonprofit parent. What Wales doesn't mention: Wikipedia will soon have many new ways of making money available to it, thanks to a...
Filed under: Misc, Displays, Other hardware, Others, SonyAnd to think, just over a year ago we all thought 1080p surgery was the future. Recently, Steven F. Palter, MD of Gold Coast IVF in Syosset, NY teamed with RED and Sony in order to "film and project a surgery and microscopic images in 4K, which represents its first uses in medicine and biology." During the digital cinema presentation, the 1,600+ surgeons in attendance were able to view the procedure in nauseating detail, giving the crowd the ability to almost be right there inside the operating room from afar. Additionally, the session...
Wondering who's making those seemingly random changes to your company's Wikipedia page, or just curious to see what happens to celebrity pages when scandal breaks? WikiDashboard pulls out information on user actions from the mass-edited encyclopedia and lays them out on a time-scaled chart. Enter a Wikipedia page, click on any of the edit graph notches, and you'll see what change was made. It makes better sense of the often dense and cryptic edit listings, and lets you better gauge if someone's got a specific axe to grind, and find out when they're grinding it. WikiDashboard [PARC via Open...]...
Umm, wow. Flickr user lunger girl reminds us why ApartmentTherapy would have sucked if it was 1971, with her photo scans from the book set The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement. The page is a must-see, but do yourself a favor and don't eat beforehand. Those of you who actually want to buy the book set can do so design public(more...)...
If you have an iPod Touch, then you know the benefit of finding apps that work offline. But some iPhone owners, too, need offline access from time-to-time. Maybe you spend your commute in an underground subway or perhaps your office building has shoddy cell coverage, or maybe you just want to use your iPhone on a plane...whatever the reason, offline access to apps is still a necessary evil these days. Sponsor Not to worry, though, lack of a signal doesn't mean you have to put your iPhone (or iPod) away - there are plenty of apps today that work...
Wikipedia school edition is an offline DVD version of Wikipedia by SOS Children's Villages (a charity for orphans) filled with "checked content" from the user-edited online encyclopedia. The 2.9GB download is available only via BitTorrent, and to top it off, here's a quote you don't hear every day: "It helps our charity if you keep µTorrent running after your download is finished."...
