Google Answers has been closed while Yahoo! Answers goes from strength to strength. The key difference between the two is that Google’s service paid vetted ‘experts’ to produce results, while Yahoo allows anyone to pitch in. The whole thing leaves a lot of questions.
I’m not sure whether the stats prove an uncomplicated victory for social search and crowdsourced problem-solving, for …read the rest of this article

Going to any conferences soon? I am sharpening my pencils for a trip to Online Information 2006 tomorrow followed by a bit of Word of Mouth Communications on Friday, perhaps seguing into Robert Scoble’s “pissed as newts” session.
In case I find no-one to talk to, I am grateful to the estimable Ed Lee for devising a 2.0 update to an …read the rest of this article

Update:
Toulmin was apparently quoted out of context in the original story and the BBC has changed their story to show a more balanced opinion.
The Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin thinks blogs should be covered by a voluntary code of practice like that for UK newspapers. The BBC reports that he made the remarks during a session on free speech …read the rest of this article

The online academic journal Reconstruction has a special issue devoted to blogs and blogging. It includes a paper from one of my favourite Aca/Fans, Danah Boyd, entitled ‘A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium’.
What follows is a summary/simplification with a tiny pinch of comment.
She’s talking about the difficulties involved in defining the medium, not simply because there are …read the rest of this article

Ewan McIntosh has been good enough to provide his notes for a talk giving an introduction to blogging he gave at an LTS event. Archly titled ‘Just because you can blog in one click doesn’t mean you should…‘, his talk covers seven main themes:

Authenticity: Don’t make your people take the 5th Amendment
Blogs are conversations – so converse!
Learn to react: but …read the rest of this article

Eyal Oren of DERI, an Irish research insititute, talks about the Semantic Web, and a current project, the semantic desktop. Don’t be frightened: he’s really clear and concise compared to most such explanations.

Assuming you’re now hooked, check out this interview on the subject from DERI’s site.
Oops – both found on Ina’s blog where there’s a load more semantic web stuff.

Some (mild) outrage about the Jackie Danicki post about her tube attacker here and here and here. There’s talk of lynchin’s in them there blogs. I find that quite bizarre.
Jackie – who I don’t know – was verbally and physically attacked during a tube journey and posted about it, together with a picture of her attacker, on her blog. She …read the rest of this article

Hate the way the BBC gives you only half the news when you subscribe to their news feeds? I do. So does Duncan Barnes. And he has made a script to mend it. The script will provide full feeds from the front page or any of the subsections.
Brilliant work, Duncan. Next stop The Guardian… (hint)
Also, while Duncan’s script works beautifully, …read the rest of this article