I talked with Wikia CEO Gil
Penchina yesterday about the most recent re-design of the Wikia site. I wanted to know
their goals and what progress the company has made towards that vision. The site'’s
rebuild takes advantage of recent technology advances, uses a more Web 2.0 style
interface and has better navigation tools. According to Gil, these latest improvements
are geared to provide an overall better experience for Wikia users. Some of the aspects
that have been added are: simplified editing, voting functionality, a new skin, photo
tagging, YouTube video uploads, a simpler two column format and last but not least, a new
logo.
One of the strongest, but least hyped, uses of web 2.0 technologies over the past couple of years has been e-learning.
We've covered this topic extensively on
Read/WriteWeb - and so we're pleased to bring you this overview of e-learning 2.0,
including the leading web apps and sites in this niche, and predictions for its
future.
In August Steve O'Hear (now last100 editor) wrote an introduction to e-learning 2.0. He noted that teachers and students are embracing web technologies such as blogging and podcasting. Although not designed specifically for use in education, these tools are helping to make e-learning far more personal, social, and flexible.
This afternoon at Supernova thirteen companies selected by TechCrunch and Supernova, from 130 applicants, presented at the Connected Innovators Session. The companies presented to a panel of experts including Mike Arrington from TechCrunch, Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital and Julie Hanna Farris - a serial entrepreneur. The panel held all of their feedback until the end of all the presentations.
Read/WriteWeb is looking for writers to do startup and web product reviews. Currently we are being inundated with emails from startups wanting us to profile them, but it's no longer something I can keep up with due to my R/WW Network duties (this is my way of saying sorry if I haven't responded to your email lately!).
Read/WriteWeb has two startup reviewers on board already - Phil Butler and Lachlan Hardy - and we are looking for a couple more part-time writers. There will be an incentives-based payment structure for this role. Specifically I am looking for the following qualities:
Udi Manber, Google's
VP of Engineering, gave a brief 15 minute presentation at Supernova today entitled
Search is a Hard Problem. He explained that with an audience like Supernova, he
imagines we understand to some extent how difficult a problem it is, but it's probably a
harder problem then we even appreciate. He laid out three reasons why this is the
case:
I found the third point quite amazing. I would think with the number of queries that Google processes, they would have seen a much higher percentage of the queries before.
I'm at the Supernova conference in San Francisco this week. In
this post I review a panel entitled, 'Virtual Life or Virtual Hype'. The panel was
moderated by Sandra Kearney from IBM and included the following panelists:
The brief description in the program was:
"Do most people really want to immersed in 3D virtual worlds? And what are the real business benefits of these massively multiplayer environments? This session will examine which activities will migrate to virtual environments and when physical forms will continue to dominate."
Big blocks of text just aren't very interesting. That's why we usually dress up our posts with images, diagrams, or videos. It's a fairly common occurrence, both on this blog and in other web development work I do, that I need a stock photo of something specific. Searching Google Images or another general web image search just won't cut it, because the rights to use those photos is always in question.
I could search each of the hundreds of stock photo sites individually, but that would take a lot of time, and there are so many to comb through that I might miss the image I am looking for. Enter specialized stock photo search engines. The sites below provide specialized tools to search only royalty-free and rights managed images (from both free and pay stock photos websites), and often provide utilities specifically designed for more effective image search. The photo above was found via one of the search engines below (and comes from stock.xchang).
I'm attending Supernova this year and will
be covering the event for Read/WriteWeb. In addition to attending various panels, I
participated in the conference today by giving a quick presentation as part of the
challenge roundtable at the end of the first day. My topic was titled: The First
Principle of Social Web Apps and Its Implications. A number of individuals asked me
for the slides I referenced, if you're interested I have posted them here as either PowerPoint
Presentation or PDF.
The ways in which we consume and pay
attention to information are changing. The changes are not minor, they are big and
profound. Right now, it impacts us all individually - but soon the change will be visible
on a global scale. We are splitting our attention over a rapidly growing body of online
information.
To cope with that we replaced reading with skimming and learned to work in an environment with constant interrupts. We no longer have time to pause and reflect, let along think for a while.
According to recent Compete data, digg has overtaken Facebook in number of unique visitors and has grown 1400% in one year. Compete's May 2007 data states that digg had 22.6 Million unique visitors, while Facebook had 20.2 Million. Facebook still has many more page views, 11 Billion to digg's 250 Million - which says that Facebook's site is far 'stickier'. But the unique visitors stat is significant, as it suggests that more people visit digg than Facebook.
