Service: Wikipedia Created: January 15, 2001 Summary: Wikipedia has been around for over 5 years, is the largest wiki (by far) and serves over 400 million page views per month (to compare, USA Today has about 300 million). Wikipedia is a free, online, user-written encyclopedia in wiki format that was created in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. It has grown at an astonishing rate and now includes 1.6 million articles. More than 600,000 of these are in English, more than 250,000 in German, and more than 100,000 each in Japanese and French (wikipedia has editions in 205 languages, 92 of which are active). Many people don’t realize how easy it is for anyone to add content to wikipedia (I’ve done it several times). Each month, thousands of individuals add content to the project. We are writing about it today because it became the most comprehensive and most reliable center of knowledge as information became available about the London bombings on July 7. We posted about the attacks here, and noted in last weeks Web 2.0 wrapup that while the BBC and other news sites couldn’t keep up, wikipedia marched along without a hiccup and kept the world informed. Clay Shirky spoke about it, and Jim Phelps picked it up here: “Whenever there is a really major disaster but no immediate news, the people on cable are often vamping because they have to keep repeating the basic story on the chance that someone has just tuned in even in the absence of any new information. Wikipedia solves that problem while, at the same time, having a symbiotic relationship with those news outlets because it points people to the written form of stories” See also David Weinberger’s post on this here. For many of us, we started to fully understand the tremendous power of wikipedia as a cultural/knowledge aggregator on July 7, 2005. What are Wikis? A Wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content. The first wiki was the Portland Pattern Repository, created on March 25, 1995 by Ward Cunningham. A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Wikis generally practice the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult → Read More
Service: Planet Web 2.0 Launched: about two weeks ago What is it? Planet Web 2.0 is a website (and more importantly an RSS feed) that aggregates content from web 2.0 publishers around the web. It’s a must add feed for anyone tracking web 2.0. The sources of the content are linked on the sidebar, and include TechCrunch. We first discovered the site while reading Richard MacManus’ excellent and much discussed post “On Bots and Content Creation / Aggregation” last week. We have lots of thoughts on Richard’s post (and generally, entirely agree with him). Our feeling is Planet Web 2.0, which goes out of its way to attribute content, is going about this inevitable evolution in the right way, and we support them. The debate on the issue of re-publishing content goes back as far as the web itself. RSS makes it even easier, of course. In fact, the entire purpose of RSS is the republishing of content. The debate centers on whether it should be republished only in RSS readers, or if it can be republished anywhere. In reality, though, what is the difference between an online RSS reader and a website? Not much, particuarly when you think about how bloglines and other readers allow sharing of feeds… Editor’s Note: To track the “old” debate on RSS and copyright, see Jason Calcanis, Robert Scoble, and Makeyougohmm to start. So here’s TechCrunch’s position: We like Planet Web 2.0 and think what is doing is a responsible way to promote content, while giving proper attribution to those who wrote it. In forming our position, we noted Ian Davis’s (the creator of Planet Web 2.0) comments on Richard’s post: “I think you’re uncovering some essential quality of content remixing that perhaps hasn’t been appreciated before. Aggregating and remixing content needs to be done with respect. We should respect the original author’s intent and also the time and effort they put into creating the content. Repurposing, passing off, non-attribution – these are all disrespectful ways to treat content and people. Hopefully I’m treating the writers with respect on Planet Web 2.0 (and other similar sites I host). Perhaps a little bit more traffic will flow to them or perhaps it’ll help people discover related writers to those they already know. Either way I appreciate the work that goes into the writing and only wish I could write half as well as those I → Read More
Company: Digg Previous Profile: June 18, 2005 Digg 2.0 Launched: 5 hours ago (July 10, 2005) What is it? See our previous profile on Digg for a description of its functionality. Its a very useful news site that leverages user submissions and “diggs” of stories to promote content higher in various categories and the home page. Digg released version 2.0 a few hours ago. New look and feel and expanded functionality. In their own words, “Tons of new features, and a few bugs too Please submit any bugs you find by clicking on “report a website bug” in the lower right hand corner. We will do our best to get them fixed as soon as possible. Thanks and enjoy! (note: minimalist design coming in v2.1)�” Link One nice feature we’ve noticed is the ability to add Digg stories to your own homepage – cool widget. Link Links: Digg Welcome to Digg 2.0 Xtremdav45′s Blog Grevs Dev Blog Jaredm Krenken.com Eric’s blog Phoenixrealm Jake Jarvis (great post) (note Jake’s bio) Tags: digg, digg2.0, slashdot, web2.0, news, tags, tagging, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
Company: Deli.cio.us (new feature) Previous Profile: June 16, 2005 What’s new? Josh Schachter (the creator of del.icio.us) announced new “tags for two” functionality yesterday. It allows direct bookmarket notification to a person, to suggest they see specific content. We first noticed a trend towards people using del.icio.us as a recommendation engine about a month ago. Fred Wilson, in addition to being THE web2.0 venture capitalist, loves music and posts regularly on music he is listening to. On June 4, 2005 he posted a request to his readers to recommend new music to him via del.icio.us: “If you find an mp3 file with its own URL, like my MP3 of the Week, simply tag it in delicious with a tag that is clearly your own. For example, I use “fred’spodcast” as my tag. Feel free to tag mp3s with that tag if you want me to listen to them. Then you take the RSS feed for that delicious tag, in my case http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/fred’spodcast, and burn that as a Feedburner feed.” We noticed it, and sort of put it in the back of our mind filed under “another cool del.icio.us tool”. Fred also set up a del.icio.us tag for his wife, Joanne. Whenever he wants her to see something on the web, he tags it “for:gothamgal”. Brad Feld noticed this, and liked it, and posted here that he set up something similar for himself – “If you run across something on the web you want me to see, just tag it.” All of this got Josh Schachter’s attention and so he created a more structured, and private, way of doing this: “tags for two We’ve just begun rolling out support for tagging items for others. To do so, use “for:username” where username is the name of the user you want to send the item to. You can see items tagged for you at http://del.icio.us/for/ (it’ll redirect to your own page, which other users will not be able to see.)” Link Brad Feld then posted an update to his original request here. So, bottom line, any delicious user can now have a private recommendation tag. To recommend stuff to me, tag it “for:marrington” and I will be able to view it at ” http://del.icio.us/for/marrington” (although this will not be public). It’s a nice feature, although I would like an option to make it public. I think it would be interesting to share these → Read More
Company: Google (Reviews) What is it? There’s not much on the web about this yet, but Google is apparently looking at the reviews space and has put a very light experiment up on their site. I say “light” because the only product reviews they have up as of today are for Star Wars III. It looks like the first post on Google Reviews was by Photo Matt in a post dated May 9, 2005. Marc Canter spoke up today on the subject here. Reviews are a very interesting space. People use their blogs often to review books, movies, music, restaurants, and just about everything else out there that we interact with. It’s an obvious area to aggregate and network. Bob Wyman (see also structuredblogging) (the CTO of PubSub), has created a structured blogging plugin for WordPress for reviews (and also events) that is excellent and that I use at my personal blog. And there is also the hReviews initiative. Finally, there is a rudimentary blog review aggregator at blogcritics.org. Anyway, it is what it is and the space is worth watching. A lot of Google’s moves seem to be placing it squarely in the middle of web 2.0. Screen Shot: Relevant Links: RDF Reviews Post hReviews → Read More
San Francisco, CA
