A new study by ForeSee Results and the American Customer Satisfaction Index finds that U.S. consumers regard social media sites Facebook and Myspace as lowly as they regard cable providers, airlines and the I.R.S.
The Annual E-Business Report for the A.C.S.I. study encompassed thirty online media brands in the categories of: portals and search engines, news and information sites and for the first time in July 2010, social media sites… → Read More
What’s the best site on the Web these days? Wikipedia, correct. Haters will hate, of course, pointing to this or that error, or highlighting high-profile compilations, but the spirit of the site endures: free and open information for all. Now a study has been published that says, you know what, on the whole, the information on Wikipedia isn’t any less accurate than you’ll find elsewhere. Does this mean, when writing a paper for you 12th grade history class, that you should ever have the site in your bibliography? No. No it does not. But to use the site as a stepping stone for further research? Absolutely, yes. → Read More
Contrary to several reports, Wikipedia’s Founder Jimmy Wales is not relinquishing his editorial control of Wikipedia and its related projects. On Friday, Fox News reported that “a shakeup is underway at the top levels of Wikipedia…Wales is no longer able to delete files, remove administrators, assign projects or edit any content, sources say. Essentially, they say, he has gone from having free reign over the content and people involved in the websites to having the same capabilities of a low-level administrator.”
The report was picked up by other news outlets, like Venturebeat and CNET.
An interesting story— except it’s not true according to Jimmy Wales in an e-mail on Sunday. Wales says the Fox News reporter hasn’t even tried to contact him to discuss the alleged “shakeup.” → Read More
Wikipedia is easily one of the most visited sites in the world, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. This morning, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a number of changes it has made to make the experience for visitors and contributors better.
Most apparent is the new look and feel, which includes a refreshed puzzle globe logo, which was originally created in 2003. The Foundation goes into more detail about the logo update in a separate post, if you’re interested in its history and all that. → Read More
We can observe some 170 billion galaxies in the known universe, and I’m thoroughly convinced that this planet, in this solar system, in this galaxy, is the dumbest one of them all. Quite an accomplishment! Wikipedia has come under fire, from complete dunderheads, for hosting “pornographic” content. What type of pornographic content? You know, things like the photo of a NAKED MAN AND WOMAN in the article about humans. That’s pornography to these people. Again, I hope the sun explodes, that way I won’t have to deal with these dumb stories. → Read More
The Wikipedia site doesn’t often go down, but yesterday it did. It’s also unusual for YouTube to suffer downtime, but since approximately 7:05 AM Eastern time visitors to the homepage have been greeted with an error message that simply reads “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” or a 500 Internal Server Error message.
Seriously, what is the world coming to?
Fortunately, videos still play on sites where they are embedded, and when you head directly to dedicated video URLs you should be able to watch them without a hitch (example). → Read More
Google has Google Trends, Twitter has trending topics, and now so does Wikipedia. Pete Skomoroch, a Senior Research Scientist at LinkedIn and blogger at Data Wrangling, built a trending topics page for Wikipedia. The homepage ranks the top-25 Wikipedia articles with the most pageviews over the past 30 days, as well as the fastest rising articles in the past 24 hours.
Some of the most popular Wikipedia articles in the past month include ones on the Perseids meteor shower, Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, director John Hughes, and G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra. These are quite different than the types of search trends you would find on Google trends or realtime trending topics on Twitter. → Read More
Moments after Craigslist founder Craig Newmark joins the Wikimedia/Wikipedia advisory board things start to go crazy.
Way back in 2006 Jason Calacanis, then an executive at AOL, was trying to convince Wikipedia to puts ads on the site. It would generate $100 million a year in revenue, he said, which could fund the project and other charities:
I sat next to Jimbo at a Wikipedia dinner over the summer. I begged him to put a leaderboard on Wikipedia and told him I would get AOL to sell it and host Wikipedia–for free. He declined saying there will never be ads on Wikipedia. I then explained to him in detail how that one leaderboard could make over $100M per year. I told him that they should take the $100M and give it to charity. They could help fund MediaWiki, the EFF, Firefox, and dozens of other open source projects.
Agree with them or not, Wikipedia has held firm to their no-ads philosophy, struggling through with donations instead. But today Rex Hammock noticed something on Wikipedia – a banner ad.
These aren’t “real” ads promoting third party sites, products, etc. They’re just in house ads reiterating the policy that Wikipedia will never have ads.
“Knowledge Forever, Ad-Free Forever, Wikipedia Forever,” say the ads. They link to this page asking for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. → Read More
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark will join the advisory board of Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Foundation advisory board was created in January 2007. The main job of advisory board members is to attend a once a year meeting at the annual Wikimania conference. They also contribute in their specific areas of expertise. I guess that means customer service for Newmark (his Craigslist title is Customer Service Rep), as well as patting Wikipedia on the back for also creating a massively massive website based at least party on sparsity of design (something he has direct experience doing himself).
Newmark has called Wikipedia “first draft of history.” Current advisory board members include: → Read More
Nicholas here, fresh off freaking out over Shogun Rua’s loss last night. (I hate to use the word “robbed,” but Mr. Rua was 100 percent robbed last night. Later today: watching Dream 12!) I just wanted to draw your attention to a New York Times essay I just stumbled upon. It’s about the Internet, and our increased dependence upon it. It’s pretty short, so it won’t kill you to read the whole thing. → Read More
The new WikiReader is a $99 portable device from the Openmoko group that stuffs every Wikipedia article into a pocket-friendly traveling companion. While those of us entrenched in technology day in and day out may scoff at the idea of having Wikipedia at the ready (we all have smartphones, remember?), this is something that might be able to make some waves with baby boomers and/or the technically petrified. → Read More
The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below). Facebook itself only officially acknowledges 250 million active registered users (but you don’t have to be a registered user to visit some Facebook pages).
In the past year, it has grown 157 percent, gaining 208 million visitors. It long ago passed its rival MySpace on a global basis, way back in April, 2008. Since then, it has passing even bigger sites on its way up. In the chart above, the blue line is Facebook. It passed Amazon back in August, 2008. eBay fell by the wayside in January, 2009. It surged past AOL sometime in February, 2009, and just last month it finally passed the Wikimedia Foundation sites (which includes Wikipedia). → Read More
Just got this email. It’s a bit presumptuous considering the common expectation is that you don’t author your own Wikipedia entry.
Basically Jimmy is asking me to become a fan of his Facebook page but does Jimmy really need fans? And does he have to launch such a personal appeal? He’s a heck of a guy, I’m sure, but what’s in it for me? → Read More
Earlier last week, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from a Taliban prison. He had been a Taliban hostage for the last seven months, but the general public had absolutely no clue. In a joint effort by The New York Times and Wikipedia, the story was kept quiet until his daring escape.
In November 2008, Rohde was captured and held hostage by the Taliban, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal. But until he managed to escape, most of the general public had absolutely no clue. To prevent Rohde’s value in the eyes of his captors from rising, the New York Times kept more than 35 major news organizations from reporting on the story. They believed that the publicity from reporting his capture would inflate the value of Rohde’s life, increasing the difficulty of negotiating for Rohde’s release. Keeping 35 news organizations quiet was actually not the hard part – but staving off Wikipedia users from publishing the news? That was a bit trickier. → Read More
It’s ‘official’; big shot CEOs are social media slackers. The hot news comes straight from ÜBERCEO, who says it conducted research on the topic for the past few weeks and has found that there’s little chance you’ll ever get to exchange pokes and tweets with Fortune 100 CEOs for the time being. Here’s the ‘miserable level of engagement’ ÜBERCEO has uncovered:
(after the jump) → Read More
Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia has a wealth of textual information but no videos and hardly any pictures? Take the Wikipedia article for Sony’s Rolly, for example, where the device is depicted as “an egg-shaped digital robotic music player.” If you have never seen a Rolly before, this cryptic description won’t help much. After reading about it in Wikipedia, you’ll then need to look it up on YouTube or Google Image Search to see what it actually looks like.
This is where a new service called Navify comes in. Launched in public beta today, Navify intends to enrich Wikipedia by adding pictures, videos and user comments to each article. And it actually works pretty well. Look up “Sony Rolly” using Navify and you not only get the original Wikipedia text but also hundreds of related pictures and videos (pulled in from Flickr and YouTube) by clicking on the tabs Navify puts on top of each article. Look up “Pulp Fiction” and the service retrieves the Wikipedia article itself plus screenshots, covers, posters and trailers from the movie. You get the picture. → Read More
France Telecom’s Orange, one of the biggest mobile phone operators in Europe, has partnered with Wikimedia to provide Wikipedia content through co-branded channels on Orange’s mobile phones and web sites. Through a revenue-sharing arrangement, the non-profit Wikimedia foundation will get a cut of some of the advertising dollars (or Euros) generated by its content.
Orange will create specific Wikipedia content channels on Orange’s web and mobile portals. Orange will also develop widgets to help customers access Wikipedia content directly from Orange’s portals. Initially, the Wikipedia content and widgets will only be provided to customers in France, Spain, the UK, and Poland but will be rolled out to the rest of Orange’s European footprint at a later point. → Read More
Would you pay $10 for an entire offline copy of Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia of information that you can get on the Web for free? WikiPock, a Paris-based startup, has compressed the entire English language version of Wikipedia to under 4 gigabytes (not including images), and is selling it for mobile phones. The other language versions are smaller (it also comes in German, French, Polish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish).
The application lets you search and read Wikipedia articles on your mobile phone without an Internet connection. It can be downloaded directly, or on its own microSD card. For $15, you can download updates, but only for a year. The first 30 people to send an email to tc[at]wikipock[dot]com will get a free copy. It is available for Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones right now, and will soon be available for the iPhone, Android, and Symbian phones. → Read More
Did you know that you can assemble your own wiki pages from Wikipedia and print them out in book form? You can, for a while now, thanks to a partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and a German startup called PediaPress. Last week, the wiki-to-print feature was activated for six more languages besides German but as of yesterday the functionality is also being tested on the regular English Wikipedia (restricted to logged-on users only for now).
You can check it out here, but you might want to visit the help pages first.
The books can be created with a table of contents or category lists and can be downloaded as free PDF files but also ordered as a printed book from PediaPress. → Read More
Medpedia Project, an initiative we wrote about during its private beta launch, has unveiled a public version of its trustworthy, fully transparent technology platform for the worldwide health community. Combining social networking with Web 2.0 health information, Medpedia’s website offers consumers a Wikipedia for health information, a LinkedIn network for health professionals, and a Facebook-like platform where consumers and experts can have a medical dialogue about treatment and conditions.
Medpedia has developed partnerships with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School and other health organizations to help bring content and medical networks to the site. Many of the health institutions are offering the content free of copyright restrictions. Already, 25 medical and government institutions in both the U.S. and the U.K. have signed on to Medpedia to use its professional network. → Read More
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