Update 12/25/06: Jimmy Wales says this isn’t a Wikiasari screen shot. So what is it? The Times reported earlier today that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is planning to launch a new search engine next year, to be called Wikiasari. He’s clearly aiming for Google. He says: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.” The new company will be the third business division of Wikia, the for profit company that Wales founded in 2005 and is now led by CEO Gil Penchina. The other two business units are the main Wikia wiki site itself, and the recently launched OpenServing product. Wikia has raised over $4 million in capital, including a recent round by Amazon. Despite the fact that the original article reported that Amazon is involved in the project, Wikia is making it clear on the site that they are not invovled in any way (other than as a shareholder of Wikia). Wikiasari A source tells us that the working name for the project was “WikiSearch” until recently. It’s clear that Wikiasari will be focused on quality first, depth second. Search results will include tag based navigation, the top three results will be wikipedia content, and the remaining results are determined by sites wikipedia considers to be “reputable” because they are external reference links from wikipedia pages. Since all search results will be tied to wikipedia, either directly by linking to wikipedia content or because the sites are linked to from Wikipedia, real people will eventually be determining all search results and rankings within Wikiasari. The search engine will be opensource, and the index will be available under a GFDL. Wikia will operate the master version of the index, but others → Read More
Governor Jeb Bush, brother of our current prez, today unveiled his official gubernatorial portrait, which happens to include his trusty Blackberry. Jeb is a power user, from what we can tell, and would often respond to emails from his constituents personally. We salute him for that, and for his acceptance of modern personal technology. While the phrase “sign of the times” is used flippantly and too often, it can be easily argued that this is one instance when it’s perfectly appropriate. Gov. Jeb Bush’s Portrait Includes Blackberry [local 6] → Read More
If you’ve been waiting for something different in gaming PCs to come along by the end of the year, you may be in luck. Dell has got a little teaser up for its new Black Ice (whatever it may be) on its newly designed XPS website, and all it says so far is: Technology like you’ve never seen. Black Ice is coming, exclusively from Dell. Gizmodo guesses that Black Ice is a liquid cooling solution that will allow Dell to overclock its computers to a whole new level. I’ll have to agree with Giz on this one. Black Ice could very well be a new liquid cooling solution (maybe it’ll hit GPUs and CPUs, something the new Alienware is lacking), and I’m excited to see what it’s all about. You can head over to the XPS site and sign up for a mailing list and Dell well send you information when it decides to give us more information about Black Ice. Until then, stay tuned. Dell’s Black Ice Coming to an XPS Near You [gizmodo] → Read More
Remember when I said it wouldn’t be a big surprise if those Burger King games for the Xbox 360 sold like crazy? Well, it happened. The games have been out for a little less than a month, but they’ve already hit the 2 million mark, meaning they’ve hit Gears of War status. Sure they’re cheap and there’s three of them, but c’mon, 2 million copies? I haven’t gotten a chance to play Pocket Bike Racer, Sneak King or Big Bumpin’, so I don’t know if the games are any good or not, but I’m seriously thinking about walking into Burger King and picking one up now. Any recommendations? Burger King Games Sell 2 Million Copies [that game blog] → Read More
Hey Fatty, Put Down The Cookie And Go To CalorieKing.com MobiBLU Announces The Cubisto Release Your Inner Rick Wakeman: Roll-up USB Keyboard Christmas Story Leg Lamp ezGear Announces ezEars SX50 → Read More
There’s a trend emerging on the Internet, and it isn’t pretty. Well, it is pretty, but it’s bad news for those of us with absolutely nothing to add to the conversation. Those of us without a sense of style. I’m the kind of guy who thinks the protagonist in The Devil Wears Prada looked better before she started dressing in the latest styles and became popular with her coworkers. But apparently there are a lot of people who disagree with me. And based on the popularity of sites like PopSugar and Glam, this trend is making its way to the Internet big time. Three new companies are testing out a new kind of social network – centered around (mostly) women’s fashion. In particular, the fashion of the users themselves is the primary content of these networks. All of these sites encourage members to take photos of themselves in new outfits and post them on the site. Social networks spring up around and between members, who comment on each other’s outfits, add people as friends, etc. The oldest startup in this space is Los Angeles-based StyleDiary, which launched in May 2005. CEO Patricia Handschiegel started the company with her co-founder William Kapke after being in the fashion industry for years. StyleDiary has lots of passionate users, and Handshiegel tells me they are rolling out new social networking features in the near future. The only problem with the site is the poor quality of the photographs – users tend to take the photos themselves, with a mirror, often using a camera phone in poor lighting. The results are often less than great. The company says they are working on ways to auto-enhance photographs to increase quality. ShareYourLook is a more recent entrant. They’ve copied most of the interesting features of StyleDiary and have added more “web 2.0″ features like photo ratings and bios. The result is a more user friendly site, although the image quality issue plagues them as well. The final site, yet to launch, Shoutfit. This is a Y Combinator company that we first mentioned in November along with a few other’s in the Y Combinator family. There isn’t much information out yet on Shoutfit, but from what we hear it will be similar to StyleDiary and ShareYourLook. → Read More
