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 [...]
Tag Archives: wikipedia
Seeking Answers
November 30, 2006 – 8:54 am
Wisdom and Intelligence
November 27, 2006 – 2:52 pm
One of the cornerstones of most definitions of Web 2.0 is the idea of the Wisdom of Crowds. In Tim O’Reilly’s seminal essay on the subject, he talks about the blogosphere being an example of this:
If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind [...]
From Big Cats to Barthes
November 21, 2006 – 4:37 pm
I’ve just been checking out Wikibooks, a project of the Wikimedia foundation that aims to create free books. Like Wikipedia, anybody can contribute to the books either by adding new material or editing existing books. Those books that are complete or voted ‘good enough’ are also available as PDF documents and even print editions created [...]
A Win for Wikis
November 15, 2006 – 3:19 pm
A new report says Wikis are more important than social networks when it comes to business technology buyers. The report, from Knowledge Storm and Universal McCann, is available here - registration required. It’s also a cut-and-paste protected PDF, the devil’s own file format.
But basically, it says that, of 5300 participants:
77% of these buyers have little [...]
Conspiracy of One
October 20, 2006 – 2:16 pm
Dr. Sam Vaknin has been monitoring the results given by Google for 154 keywords since 1999. He’s allegedly discovered that changes in the way Google works since April 2006 have produced what he calls ‘unsettling’ results. He says incoming links from the MySpace social network appear valued very highly by Google’s search algorithm. The end [...]
Three Cheers for Twonks
September 27, 2006 – 11:11 am
The Inquirer, curmudgeon central at the best of times, isn’t entirely pleased about the arrival of the read/write web, social media or the whole ‘letting ordinary people onto the internet’ thing. Yesterday’s article - ‘Web 2.0 is for complete twonks’ - is a masterpiece of spite and elitism, which left me chuckling even as it [...]
The Truth About Truthiness
September 19, 2006 – 1:45 am
The new reality? I was in a brief email exchange yesterday with the managing editor of NowPublic, Mark Schneider. NowPublic publishes blog posts in a new-sy manner, similarly to Newsvine and Tailrank. It’s citizen journalism in a very naked manner. He reminded me about the idea of ‘truthiness’.
Comedian Stephen Colbert coined the phrase in [...]
Wikipedia Forked-up?
September 17, 2006 – 3:22 am
Larry Sanger, the first editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, and allegedly the originator of the plan to make it a wiki, has announced that he plans to fork the project. The new branch will have no anonymous changes and expert editors. The project will be called the ‘Citizendium’. (Hang on, I know there are some PRs among [...]
How to Make a Wise Crowd
September 13, 2006 – 2:25 pm
USA Today takes a pop at internet techies citing the Wisdom of Crowds, suggesting that the recent digg and wikipedia controversies may show the idea is fallacious. David Freedman takes another swipe in ‘What’s Next: The Idiocy of Crowds‘ published at Inc.com, saying that on the internet, “the scum tends to rise to the top”.
As [...]
Encyclopaedic Knowledge
September 7, 2006 – 1:03 pm
Aaron Swartz contributes some fascinating analysis to the study of who writes Wikipedia. Founder Jimmy Wales has often stated that a small number of people make the largest number of contributions. He told Stanford University that “the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits,” for example.
Swartz decided to [...]
