Just hours before McCain declared Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice president nominee, her Wikipedia page was very active with users adding details about her approval rating and husband’s employment. Apparently the some of the same users editing her page were also simultaneously updating McCain’s Wiki entry, adding information dealing with accuracy, sources and footnotes to each.
“We noticed the same pattern when we looked at changes in Wiki pages for [Democratic Vice Presidential candidate] Sen. Joseph Biden and [Virginia] Governor Tim Kaine and some of the other potential Democratic candidates. More»

Labels: wikipedia

When Tim Russert died on June 13, NBC held off reporting the news for almost two hours and asked other TV networks to hold off reporting it so that his family vacationing in Italy could be notified first. However, long before Mr. Russert’s death was reported on air, it was on the Web, Twitter, and Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia entry on Mr. Russert’s page was updated at 3:01 p.m., forty minutes before NBC made the announcement on air. His biography had the date of this death and it was rewritten in the past More»

Labels: Blogs, Twitter, wikipedia

Wikipedia has become one of the most authoritative sources of information online or offline. Part of Wikipedia’s enormous success has been thanks to the prominent placement Wikipedia has enjoyed at Google, often in the top few listings for common, highly competitive terms.
Today, Google announced a new project that may become even more popular as a source of authoritative information, currently nicknamed the knol project.
Knol is a unique information experiement in that it will create an authoritative article about any topic and then allow feedback and comments from the community. I’m not clear how initial authority More»

Labels: Social Networking, wikipedia

Google has launched a new non-Google branded site called SearchMash which is designed to serve as an experimental testing ground for user interface ideas without the Google brand skewing the objectivity of the results.
Here are 14 observations on SearchMash:1. The character count on the SearchMash homepage is even less than the Google.com classic homepage.2. With SearchMash, there is no search button but there are instructions to ‘hit enter to get results’ but those directions disappear on the search results page. I always hit ‘enter’ myself versus clicking the “Google Search” More»

Labels: Blogs, google, internet, measurement, Search Engine Strategies, Search Tools, SearchMash, websites, wikipedia

That’s what Intel wants you to do with the launch of their new website called CoolSW. They are using collective intelligence to help sift through the millions of software companies to find the best one. They’ve created a social ranking system that allows them to find what’s “Cool.” I have to admit the software that currently has the most votes in the ‘digital home’ category is pretty cool. It’s a web service that allows people to draw More»

Labels: cisco, collective intelligence, coolsw, innocentive, intel, web 2.0, wikipedia