Hot on the heels of Encyclopedia Britannica's announcement that it is moving to a more open editing system, Wikipedia too seems ready for an about face. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Wikipedia is considering moving away from its free and open editing system to a method that delays changes from appearing on the site until an authorized user has verified them.
On Thursday Jimmy Wales proposed turning on the system of "flagged revisions" in an attempt to reduce the amount of vandalism on Wikipedia, stating that recent death announcements of Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd on Wikipedia could have been "100% prevented" by this system.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we take a special look at how President Obama's inauguration was covered, analyzed and celebrated via the Internet. Also this week we began a new series on recommendation technologies, starting with the Netflix Prize; and we asked some hard questions about Twitter's API support. Check out the highlights too from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.
Microblogging service Twitter's habit of playing fast and loose with user passwords may be coming to an end, if a technical trial started today can be successfully implemented by its development team. Earlier this month, the company saw the accounts of users from Barack Obama to Fox News to Britney Spears get "hacked." More importantly, millions of Twitter users hand out their passwords to strangers every day, because there's no other way to access the fabulous ecosystem of applications built on top of the famous Twitter data platform, or API.
Today Twitter opened up trial access to a new user sign-in protocol for third party developers - until it was swamped by demand and the trial was closed just two hours later. This isn't just a geek story, though, this could impact all users of Twitter and other sites all around the web.
Cooliris is one of the best ways to flip through photos, enabling you to scroll through hundreds of photos effortlessly. Flickr is one of the best sites to search for photos. Combine the two and you've got CoolFlick, a service that lays Cooliris' thumbnail scrolling on top of Flickr - all from within the browser window.
If you imagine a mashup of a micro-blogging site with a very pretty photo and video sharing service, with good privacy controls and an innovative user interface thrown in for good measure, you might come up with something akin to thisMoment. ThisMoment, which is still in private beta, is one of the prettier sites we have reviewed in the recent past. The idea behind thisMoment is that you can upload photos and videos from special moments in your life to the site, which then displays them in a beautiful user interface. The site, however, is flexible enough to also make it a very capable all-purpose photo and video micro-blogging service.
If you want to stay current on the latest updates from U.S. government agencies, you can now find a central repository of RSS feeds with the latest breaking news from these agencies on the newly designed news.USA.gov, the U.S. government's official online portal. The site now hosts a selection of RSS feeds with updates about anything from recent product recalls to press releases about foreign policy issues from the State Department. You can also, of course, read the feeds right on the site.
Pope Benedict XVI made a big jump into the world of social networking today, making public statements about Facebook and MySpace and launching an official Vatican channel on YouTube.
The Pope celebrated the World Day of Communications on Friday with a statement calling social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace "a gift" that could speak to the "fundamental desire" we all have to connect, so long as people don't isolate themselves online, forget those marginalized by the Digital Divide or violate the "goodness and intimacy of human sexuality." To that we can only say, leave Britney alone!!
When the RSS management company Feedburner was acquired by the internet goliath Google back in May of 2007, some people were excited, others were concerned. On the one side, there was hope that putting Google's weight behind the struggling service would improve the speed with which feeds were updated. Plus, there would be the option to put AdSense in feeds, which pleased some publishers. Others, however, felt that that the move gave Google too much power over the syndication marketplace.
Our favorite URL-shortening service, Bit.ly, has just updated their already excellent Firefox plugin to include even more features than before. The latest update shows the context of a Twitter conversation when you hover over the "in reply to" links in Twitter. This way, you can see what people are talking about without having to click through to another page.
Like it or not. You're a writer. You're creating content on a daily basis, updating your Facebook status, commenting on blogs, sending tweets. Social networking requires that level of communication. But as a writer, you're also a potential victim for writer's block, a condition that plagues even the most prolific authors.
The next time you find your desire to write lacking, Plinky may be just the inspiration you need.
