Sure, Wikipedia may be one of the best places on the internet to find information on just about anything in a hurry, but what about when you're stuck in an elevator during a blackout and you can't remember who wrote The Republic? Relax! Pocket Wikipedia provides quick access to important articles offline - and on just about any kind of device.
The download includes about 24,000 images and over 14 million words covering about 5,000 articles. Each one has been carefully hand-picked from Wikipedia's massive repository of community-assembled knowledge to avoid some of the more important omissions from Wikipedia's own Cd-Rom version Pocket Wikipedia is currently available for Windows, Linux, and PocketPC only.
Want it? Keep in mind the old adage "All good things come to those who wait." None of the mirrors we found were all that fast, but it's too good a download to ignore.
Ever wonder how many clicks it takes to get from the Wikipedia page for Bill Gates to the page for Mark Shuttleworth? The answer is three. How about from "ice cream" to "cone?" Surprisingly, the answer is four. We know this not because we've been wasting hours clicking on every possible Wikipedia link and tabulating the results, but because somebody's done all the hard work for us by creating a Six Degrees of Wikipedia page.
Just type in any two items, and the web service will dig through a database of Wikipedia articles and figure out how long it would take to get from one to the other. The Wikipedia page for "2007" is apparently the closest to the "center" of Wikipedia, meaning that you can get to any other page from 2007 with an average of 3.45 clicks. When you take out Wikipedia pages for dates or long lists of items, the page for "United Kingdom," is the closest to the center, since it's an average of 3.67 clicks away from any other page.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has relaunched Wikia Search. And this time, the site actually might be worth using.
When Wales announced that he was working on a human powered search engine to compliment his human powered encyclopedia, we were skeptical but curious. When the public alpha launched earlier this year, we were disappointed. Up until this week, Wikia Search was basically just like any other search engine. A computer scanned the web for pages and decided which were the closest match to your search query. The only thing setting Wikia Search apart was the ability to create user profiles.
Now Wikia Search has added a slew of editing tools that could actually help improve (or utterly screw up) search results. Here's how it works. Wikia Search has a computer-created index of about 30 million sites. But you can edit any page. For example, when we searched for "download squad" this site came up as the second listing. We gave it a five star rating which moved it to the top of the page. And then for good measure, we hit the edit button and wrote a new site description. You can do this for any site. you can also add comments, annotations, or "spotlights," which highlights the entire entry so that it looks a bit like a sponsored result you would get from Google.
Powerset has launched a public beta of their new natural language search engine. What exactly do we mean by natural language search? First of all, you can enter keywords like you would with any other search engine. But Powerset can also handle phrases and questions. But Powerset's semantic tools go far beyond that. For example, if you search for "paintings by Dali," the search engine will understand that you are looking for paintings, and if it can find some images, it will put them at the the top of the page.
Right now Powerset searches exactly one site. But since that site is Wikipedia, you can still find a ton of useful information. But you're going to have more luck with queries like "who shot Lincoln?" than "when will the 3G iPhone be released."
When you click through to read a Wikipedia article, Powerset will bring up a sidebar tool that lets you view either an outline of the article or "Factz," which are typically some of the key points in an article. If you click on a fact, you'll be taken immediately to the relevant part of the Wikipedia article.
It's not clear whether Powerset is a Google killer, since the search engine currently doesn't index the web, just one site right now. So it's not clear how well it would be able to prioritize data from millions of pages. But it works quite well as an advanced search tool for a single site like Wikipedia.
Want to see how that newfangled WebSlices in Internet Explorer 8 work? Just fire up IE8 beta and surf on over to Wikipedia, where you can find a WebSlice in an article on the Acid3 internet standards test. Blogger Long Zheng brought the new feature to our attention.
Here's how it works. When you visit a page with an embedded WebSlice, like the Acid3 Wikipedia page, a little purple symbol will pop up when you scroll your mouse over a portion of the page which is available as a WebSlice. Click the icon and a pop up menu will ask if you want to save the content to your favorites bar. Once you do, you'll be able to see that content by clicking the bookmark in your favorites bar, without clicking through to the actual web page.
What makes this different from a regular bookmark is that you'll only see a portion of the page. In this example, a chart showing how well different web browsers perform on the Acid3 test. As the Wikipedia article is updated, you'll always see the latest version in your browser without having to constantly revisit the Wikipedia page.
Now honestly, we're not convinced this is the best use of WebSlices. There's only so much room in the favorites bar, and do you really want to clutter it up with a chart showing Acid3 compliance results? But until more blogs and news sites that are updated more frequently start adopting WebSlices, we figured we'd point you toward Wikipedia just so you can see the technology in action.
Wikimedia is partnering with the collaborative video service Kaltura to start rolling out video to Wikimedia sites. Right now, the feature is available on the WikiEducator demo site, which is not affiliated with Wikimedia. But eventually we'll start to see collaborative video hitting Wikipedia as well.
Kaltura videos can be created and edited by anyone, much like Wikipedia pages. You can also see previous versions of a video and a list of people who have worked on it. Users can also upload audio, slideshows, and other rich media. If you want to get your feet wet editing a video, check out the collaborative video sandbox.
Kaltura is making its code open source to support the goals of Wikimedia, and all audio and video will be encoded in the open source OGG Vorbis and OGG Theora formats.
At the University of Brighton, Professor Tara Brabazon has taken it upon herself to purge the classroom of the likes of Wikipedia and Google, saying that, "Too many students don't use their own brains enough. We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis." Apparently, the work of students has been "banal" as a result of search engines - which caused her to ban them altogether in her classes.
Her reasoning is probably grounded in what may be a real problem: that sites like Google and Wikipedia do make it easier to throw things together, and that indeed, the convenience these sites provide may cause students to not put in as much effort into researching projects as they would if they did not have these resources.
Call us old fashioned if you will, but banning things generally doesn't really solve problems. If she really needs higher quality work, as Robert Scoble pointed out, she should raise the standard for her grading criteria. It's highly unlikely that students will be more motivated to work harder just because they are denied using Google and Wikipedia in their coursework.
Then again, she might just be saying these things to get a rise out of people and some nice PR for her speaking gig, "Google Is White Bread For The Mind." Yes, and banning access to resources in an attempt to get students to produce better work is, like what, whole wheat?
For those waiting with baited breath for Jimmy Wales to launch the distance cousin of Wikipedia, the wait is over. For everyone else, umm... Search Wikia Alpha is live today. What was originally billed as a human-powered search engine much the same way Wikipedia is a human-powered encyclopedia is right now just a second-rate computer-powered web search site that lets you create user profiles.
Theoretically Search Wikia will get better with time as more users create profiles. That's because you can add keywords for things you're interested in to your profile. When users search for those terms, your picture will show up on the right side of the screen. You'll be able to edit search results matching those keywords, and presumably other users will be able to click on your profile to find relevant links and articles.
But right now, Search Wikia is pretty much machine powered and far less likely to give you what you're looking for than Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, or any of the other competitors. But as founder Jimmy Wales points out at TechCrunch, it's not really fair to compare Search Wikia to sites that have been around for a decade or more. Not only has Search Wikia just launched (in alpha, no less), but in order for the site to thrive, it needs to build a dedicated user base to edit search reults. And how could anyone expect that to have happened by day one?
You have probably noticed this yourself: when you do a search on Google there tends to be a lot of unfilled, unused, or otherwise blank area to the right of the search results that could be used for better things. Things besides ads that might relate to your search. Such as Wikipedia summaries for your search term, or related images and videos, and dictionary definitions. That would be nice, wouldn't it?
Well, If you've ever had such dreams of grandeur, that wish has been fulfilled.
It's called Google Extra, a Greasemonkey script that adds just that extra functionality you've been looking for in your Google searches. Let's say you search for the term "monkeys." Not only are you served your usual search results about "monkeys" on the left, but results from an image search, video search, a Wikipedia entry on "monkeys," and the dictionary definition of what monkeys are on the right.
The nice thing is, you can organize the stack of result boxes in any way you want. So, if for convenience's sake, you preferred a dictionary definition at the very top before your image results, you can do that. The script remembers your preferences, locking in every last ounce of goodness from your searches. That, and the extra results load after your primary ones, which keeps the experience quick and snappy without a noticeable increase in page load times.
We've never been particularly impressed with text to speech applications. Sure, the underlying technology is pretty cool, and if you're visually impaired, these applications are probably extraordinarily useful. But seriously, It's almost 2008. You'd think that someone could come up with a text to speech application that doesn't sound like a drunken robot with a 1st grade education.
Still, some text to speech engines seem to be better than others. A few days ago we told you about SpokenText, a service that converts HTML, TXT, DOC, and other files to MP3s. The service gives you a choice of several voices, all of which sound at times like rough approximations of a person. We wish we could say the same about the computerized translator at Pediaphon, because we love the idea of this site.
Pediaphon lets you listen to Wikipedia pages. All you have to do is enter a search term, and Pediaphon will find the corresponding Wikipedia page and start reading you a bedtime story in a voice that sounds a bit like nails on a chalk board. Not literally, but it gives us sort of the same feeling. You can either listen to your article online or download it as an MP3.
Pediaphon comes in English, German, and French flavors.
Exactly one year after Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales first announced plans to create a human powered search engine, Wikia Search has launched in private beta. There aren't a ton of details to report right now, but Wales sent a letter to the Wikia Search email list on Sunday evening announcing the private beta, as well as plans for a January 7th public launch.
Last month Wales delivered a speech in South Africa where he showed off a few images of the new search engine. Those pictures looked suspiciously like a social networking web site, but it's possible we were just looking at the personal profile pages for Wikia Search contributors.
The social search field has been heating up quite a bit recently. Mahalo, the human powered search engine created by Weblogs Inc co-founder Jason Calacanis has been up and running for a while now, and now both Wikia and Google are getting into the game. Either the competition will lead to greater innovation and the most useful search engines the world has ever seen, or potential contributors will be overwhelmed with choices that they'll decide it's easier not to bother submitting links to any social search site at all when they can just turn to good old Lycos and AltaVista for their search needs. No, seriously, both of those search engines still exist.
If we were Jimmy Wales, we'd have bought a bullet proof vest long ago. Google has just set Jimmy up the bomb; Announcing 'Knol', a human powered index of knowledge which seeks to rival Wikipedia in accountability, and thus accuracy.
Knol will focus on credit for authors who "own" pages within the system. Write a bad page, lose your reputation. Write a better page than one which currently exists, and knock it out of the top spot. It's free market dynamics and modern credit reporting all rolled into one and applied to encyclopedia style information. Google, for it's part, seemingly intends to be hands off in the management of Knol, foregoing any oversight structure similar to that in place at Wikipedia or Mahalo.
While we find this all super interesting, we're going to stop short of prognosticating about the death of Wikipedia. Other industry pundits are calling it "a game changer" and "huge"; We've decided to wait until Monday to predict Wikipedia's imminent death. It's called journalism, look it up.
Oddly enough, there is no current Wikipedia entry for "Knol". Maybe we should pitch in and create one?
We've been hearing bits and pieces of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' big plans for a search engine for a while now. But it's never been entirely clear how this human-powered search engine would look. Would it be more like Google or Mahalo?
South African blogger Matthew Buckland raises a third option that we hadn't considered. It could look a lot like Facebook.
Last night Wales showed a few screenshots of his new search project to a South African audience. Buckland was in attendance, and he says some of the screenshots looked exactly like Facebook profile pages. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that your search results are going to take you to social networking style pages. Honestly, that doesn't even make much sense. If you're searching for information on Abraham Lincoln, you probably don't expect to find his MySpace page.
So these screenshots could just be showing the user profiles of Wikiasari editors. But considering how many people read and edit Wikipedia every day, we could easily see any sort of social networking component growing pretty big and fast. And without Facebook-style advertising.
Yahoo! has added content from Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia into mobile search platform, oneSearch. When searching for information on mobile devices, users don't have time to fool around. This new mobile step will add a lot more functionality to oneSearch, delivering additional relevant answers and information that searchers are trying to grab quickly.
Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia is available to oneSearch users in 18 countries including all of North America, Latin America, the UK as well as other European and Asian countries. Also available at oneSearch now, some handy information when traveling, flight statuses. Search your flight information and you get a quick look at flight status, gates and time.
Sure, Wikipedia may be one of the best places on the internet to find information on just about anything in a hurry, but what about when you're stuck in an elevator during a blackout and you can't remember who wrote The Republic? Relax! Pocket Wikipedia provides quick access to important articles offline - and on just about any kind of device.
