Technologizer

Can You Trust Wikipedia?

Monday, August 31, 2009

Wired has an interesting story about Wikitrust, a new technology that will color-code material in Wikipedia in an attempt to indicate how trustworthy its author is. It’s an intriguing solution to a real problem, although like all articles on Wikipedia accuracy, Wired’s piece makes a reflexive-but-misguided reference to Encyclopaedia Britannica being the paragon of reference-work [...]

5Words for May 8th, 2009

Friday, May 8, 2009

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Saw Star Trek, expected Tribbles… An EeePC that’s a tablet. Nokia preps giant app store. How to research: copy Wikipedia! Blu-Ray sales up 72 percent. I’ve pointed cameras at TVs. Big Sony e-reader in works? Stardates for your Google Calendar. SugarSync adds a free version. Hulu tiptoes towards international expansion. Hey, my HDTV’s a Vizio.

Microsoft Encarta: A Casualty of the Web

Monday, March 30, 2009

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Once the bedrock of Microsoft’s home product offerings, the Encarta encyclopedia has been buried by the Web. The company cites changes in how people seek and consume information online as the impetus behind its decision to pull the plug on the venerable research work, which it launched in CD-ROM form back in 1993. Microsoft announced today [...]

Google Search for Barack Obama Reveals Racial Epithets

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

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A reader tipped us off to the appearance of racial epithets in searches for Barack Obama on Google. When performing a search for our current president, on the first screenful you’ll be greeted with the N-word. Yep, that one. Apparently someone went into the Wikipedia entry for President Obama at about 11:44pm ET last night, deleting [...]

Google’s Knol: So Far, Not So Good

Monday, September 1, 2008

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You could argue that it’s unfair–or at least unrealistic–to review Google’s Knol in its current form. After all, the Wikipedia-like service just went public a little over a month ago. It takes time to build a build a repository of the world’s knowledge, even if it’s less than comprehensive: Wikipedia surely wasn’t really ready for [...]

Knol’s Well: Google’s Encyclopedia Looks Cool

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

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Back in December, Google said it was working on a platform for knowledge sharing called Knol–and I wrote what seems in retrospect an unusually cranky post about it. I admitted that it could be neat, but I said I was tired of Google hopping on bandwagons, and that Knol sounded like a me-too project. I [...]