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The news that New Yorker music writer Sasha Frere-Jones has joined the crowdsourced annotation site Genius has highlighted the ambitions of the service, which wants to help experts edit the entire internet
Google announced Tuesday that the company is shutting down Freebase, the crowdsourced knowledge base it acquired in 2010 when it bought Metaweb.…
Quora’s head of business believes it’s the safest place on the Internet for writers. But he admits the company has faced it fair share of challenges making it so.
There are millions of articles on Wikipedia, but less than 6000 contain a video. That’s despite long-running efforts to get more video onto Wikipedia.
Websites like Etsy are placing a spinning wheel on their websites for a day to warn what will happen if the FCC permits so-called “fast lanes” on the internet. But many of the sites that were at the center of an “internet black out day” in 2012 are not taking part.
Wikipedia released slick new apps for iOS and Android last week with features that will end up being very useful for first-time smartphone owners in developing nations.
For better and for worse, welcome to the world without net neutrality. More people will get online, but unless they have the money to pay their way into the free web, they’ll effectively be in a walled garden.
Grasswire’s founder says he launched the crowdsourced breaking-news service because he believes the power of the crowd to generate and curate news is a much stronger force for good than many people — including professional journalists — give it credit for
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has gone into the mobile carrier business, buying a stake in and becoming co-chair of The People’s Operator.…
Wikipedia has traditionally only accepted open media formats. But now it’s considering a change in tune to finally get more video contributions.
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/ It’s no secret that the community behind Wikipedia is insular, methodical and bureaucratic. But the high barriers of entry that Wikipedians…
http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/wikipedia-sockpuppet-investigation-largest-network-history-wiki-pr/ Creating a reliable and well-cited knowledge source on the backs of an open and anonymous entry system is a challenge, but…
If you could fit Wikipedia into a library, how big would it be? Actually, pretty big.
Quora has been busy building a question-and-answer community, but co-founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo says he wants to make it much more than just that — and plans to expand the company’s mission into new areas. But can Quora really go head-to-head with Wikipedia and Google?
A researcher who specializes in analysing the way that information flows through Wikipedia during a breaking news event compared the way seven mass shootings — including the recent incident at an elementary school in Connecticut — were reported on the crowdsourced encyclopedia and found some interesting patterns.
Wikipedia is getting a new HTML5-based video player that will make it easier to add video clips to the millions of articles on the site. Of course, Wikipedia has been working on incorporating video since 2008. So why has it been taking so long?
When you mix a researcher, a massive online encyclopedia and a supercomputer, the result is a collection of insights and visualizations into what Wikipedia looks like mapped across time and space. It looks a lot like how our history books might look merged and graphed.
Planning a trip to Wales anytime soon? If so, put the town of Monmouth on your itinerary and be sure to bring your phone. On May 19, Monmouth officially becomes the world’s first Wikipedia Town and you’ll need your handset with you for the full tour.
The $50-million funding round that Quora recently closed has raised some eyebrows. Is this just another example of a bubble-style atmosphere in Silicon Valley’s venture capital community, or is the crowdsourced question-and-answer site really onto something that could be a multibillion-dollar idea?
When they think about competition, many traditional outlets still seem to look mostly at media players such as the Huffington Post or Buzzfeed. But the reality is that much of what is competing with journalism in the digital world are things we barely recognize as journalism.
It’s tempting to get nostalgic about the disappearance of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition after two centuries, but as we have found with journalism, knowledge building of all kinds gets better when there are more people involved. It may be chaotic, but the result is superior.
After years of employing an ad-hoc community-driven approach to mobile, one of the world’s biggest Web sites is going mobile in a much more…
Few websites have changed the way we access knowledge as much as Wikipedia. Now, however, it looks like the online encyclopedia is hitting s…
Apture, the San Francisco-based startup, has made a very useful addition to its “contextual exploration engine” technology with a new feature called “HotSpots” that automatically creates new visible hyperlinks within online content based on what readers are likely to want to know more about.
Wikipedia, which turns 10 this weekend, has taken a lot of heat over the years. But it has become a crucial aspect of our lives, and in many ways it has shown us what all information online is becoming: social, distributed, interactive and (at times) chaotic.
The Open Video Alliance is trying to jump-start the contribution of video to Wikipedia by getting educators and cultural institutions involved. The organization just published a white paper abut Wikipedia that, amongst other things, explains how exactly you get your video clips included in Wikipedia articles.
The Wikipedia’s Wikimedia foundation doesn’t want to be a slave to high video bandwidth costs. Instead, it is using BitTorrent-based P2P technology to distribute the growing amount of video on Wikipedia.org. Users can simply install a Firefox plug-in to help with the distribution of Wikipedia videos.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says despite reports to the contrary, he is not stepping down or reducing his role with the user-generated encyclopedia. However, he has given up some editing privileges after a disagreement over the removal of images that Wikipedia critics say depict child pornography.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says that he believes the benefits of taking an open approach to content outweigh the disadvantages, and says that something as large and influential as Wikipedia has become could never have been built unless the process was open to anyone to contribute.
Ever since we broke the news earlier this week that Google is going to open source its VP8 video codec at its…
Cuil, a widely panned search engine that debuted in 2008, has launched an automated encyclopedia called Cpedia that produces articles on topics by generating them from pages found in its index. But the only thing Cpedia manages to do is make Wikipedia look really, really good.
Not sure on what basis the Wikipedia founder pontificates about the future of news media, but every disruptor deserves his say, so Jimmy Wal…
A new website aptly named Videoonwikipedia.org aims to get more users to contribute video clips to Wikipedia by demystifying some of the…
Hunch, a New York-based startup whose founders include by Chris Dixon and Caterina Fake, has flown under the radar since it launched six months ago, which is strange considering its potential as a disruptor. Today, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joined Hunch’s board.
The evolution of *Google* News (and its impact on the news industry overall) continues. The company is experimenting with attaching Wikipedi…
One of Europe
If ever a conflicting topic needed a clearinghouse for all of the different rants, raves and theories, it would be the issue…
It has been a long time coming, but Powerset, a San Francisco-based contextual-semantic search engine has finally launched. I urge you to…
Every once in a while, I come across a site that just rocks my world. This week, I found two – Addictomatic.com,…
The Wikimedia Foundation has picked up $3 million in grants from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The philanthropy will parcel out its grant in $…
Robert and I must have some blog telepathy going on. He checked the performance of Vista both pre- and post-SP1 and I…
Acquisitions, new product launches and tussling with telcos to taking on Microsoft – Google was the epicenter of technology in 2007. And as 2008 looms large, the search engine giant is slowly showing its claws.
Google’s foray into social content, aka Knols, is a dangerous development for the likes of Wikipedia and Mahalo. It is also a sign that Google is finally beginning to show its monopolist claws. Google’s mysterious Page Rank system is what Internet Explorer was to Microsoft in the late 1990s: a way to control the destiny of others.
Wow, time does fly. We are on our 19th episode. In this week’s show we chat with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia…
George Lucas has just begun work on his upcoming live action Star Wars TV show and his CG animated Clone Wars television…
Want to know what having a new Toshiba Portege M200 is like? Check out PigPog’s post where he describes how he’s using…
Intel reported its earnings yesterday, and while most of the media reported that it was not such a bad quarter, I don’t…
