Will Wikipedia End Britannica?

Here is an interesting post I found a year and a half ago via Phil Bradley's weblog about an email conversation published in Wall Street Journal between the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales and Dale Hoiberg - editor-in-chief of Britannica Encyclopedia.

I don’t quite agree with Mr. Hoiberg statements in the last passage, but you can read it for yourself and make your opinion.

The article in WSJ also features a poll. Not surprisingly the results are in favor of Wikipedia. 1942 votes (57%) of the readers think that Wikipedia is going to end the traditional encyclopedia.

Maybe the executives at Brittanica need to examine closer the opinion of the users, who after all are the ones who will decide the fate of any information product.

For full text access click here.

Try PB Wiki

I have created a wiki for a group project ( I used PBWiki) and can tell you from my own experience how easy it is to set up a wiki page. In no time everyone in our project learned how to use the wiki site, make posts and link documents. Some users were better than others and were even able to customize the wiki and used all the advanced features.

The most widely used wiki software programs are MediaWiki (www.mediawiki.org), TWiki. (http://twiki.org) and PB Wiki (http://pbwiki.com ).

Tecnorati Revamps Interface

Tecnorati recently decided to revamp their interface. The new re-design focuses on blogs and mainstream media. Blogosphere news are located on the left side of the screen and mainstream media, is on the right.




Tecnorati selects the best blogs with a program called Technorati Percolator, which ranks the authority of the source for the blog post, the authority of the referring blogs and the density of recent links from other blogs.

The primary goal of Percolator is to "highlight the significant things grabbing the blogosphere's attention regardless of the blogger's "A-list" or "Z-list" status", explains Ian Kallen from Tecnorati.

If you are tracking 112.8 million blogs, it only makes sense to find an algorithm to point to the best ones to your readers.

For more info go to the Read/Write Web blog

Web 2.0: Information Explosion

This video was created by Michael Welsch from Kansas State University and is one of my favorite visual descriptions of what is happening with Library 2.0 and Web 2.0. In the past we may have created libraries according to what the thick library text books have said, but in the future libraries will be created exclusively around the needs of the user.

Shop Online On My Customized Search Engine

Shop Online On My Customized Search Engine

Customized search engines are a lot of fun. I just created my own search engine for shopping with Rollyo. Here is the link.

http://rollyo.com/stan23/shop_online/

Personalized search engines will become more and more popular and they are very useful for research. I bet, sooner or later we will see a site that will try to organize custom search engines to make the information more accessible for users.

Other search engines with personalized search features are Google Coop , Opsdo, A9, Yahoo Search Builder and Eurekster.com

The Librarian's E-Library is an example of a customized search engine created via Google Co-Op, which searches over 125 key library professional development web sites. I searched for digital libraries and found a lot of interesting information. You can also register with Google and volunteer to contribute to this resource.

LibraryThing Rocks

I never had a chance to try Library Thing and I am really surprised how easy it is to catalog books. Maybe that is the reason why Library Thing is so popular. The other feature that was a new to me is the fact that Library Thing allows you to grab and catalog your books from 185 sources around the world, including national libraries, universities and institutions.

Here is a link to my cataloged books:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/LibraryThingStan23

Newsgator Is My Favorite RSS Reader

I chose Newsgator as an RSS reader, because it works within the browser and is available anywhere in the world, with an Internet connection. There is no software to download.

The other reason, why I prefer it over Bloglines and Google Reader is because of the simple and clear interface ( I still continue using the old classic interface, instead of the new beta version). If you have time, give it a try.

We also use Newsgator for our " Introduction to Emerging Technologies" class at the Cyber Center and so far customers were able to learn how to find, subscribe and delete RSS feeds for blogs and websites with ease. Below is a link to Newsgator's free account offer.

https://www.newsgator.com/ngs/order1.aspx