A link is the connection between one piece of hypertext and another.
Doing some thinking about the School of Everything…
This led me to: Trampoline Systems. Who’s founder Charles Armstrong was presenting at the same CityZone event as me last year.
I also took a look at the WYSIWYG interface for MediaWiki being shown off at Wikia.
…a number of random links and clicks led me to this French site about education. Which made me laugh.
Last night was Wiki Wednesday in London.
Organised by the charming David Terrar and hosted in the Swimming Pool at Microsoft‘s Soho office (that is the part of London, not Bill Gate’s den).
The ?What If!lers Julie and Anne-Fay and her partner Darrell were there – Anne-Fay and Darrell write a blog called BigShinyThing – it is so perfectly Zeitgeisty that I realise why I don’t really read newspapers or watch much TV anymore.
But they also make me feel quite depressed about my own erratic blogging efforts. (N.B. my highlight of a funny TagCloud juxtaposition)
Was just reading the OpenGeoData blog and found this:
They have a link to an interview with Linus Torvalds (the guy who started linux) where he says:
“Me, I just don’t care about proprietary software. It’s not “evil” or “immoral,” it just doesn’t matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it’s not a crusade — it’s just a superior way of working together and generating code.”
The OGD blogger reworks Torvald’s words:
“Me, I just don’t care about the Ordnance Survey. It’s not “evil” or “immoral,” it just doesn’t matter. I think that Open Maps can do better, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Maps, but it’s not a crusade — it’s just a superior way of working together and generating maps.”
I would like to do the same:
“Me, I just don’t care about the Yellow Pages or Yell. Thet are not “evil” or “immoral,” it just doesn’t matter. I think that Yellowikis can do better, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Yellowikis, but it’s not a crusade — it’s just a superior way of working together and generating business listings.”
Hmmm… never been the most regular of bloggers. (Wikis are more much more my thing)… But spring is in the air and a young man’s thoughts turn to… well, blogging.
Talking to Tim at DLA Piper about our kids and the way the Mac vs PC conflict had been shifted by iPods… reminded me of Umberto Eco’s brilliant piece of writing on the subject… amazing that he wrote it in 1994.
A slightly random link from e-consultancy.com led me to OpenStreetMap which took me to New Popular Edition Maps and then on to GeoNames. All three are doing interesting things. I love the way GeoNames allows users to edit and improve the quality of their data. Yellowikis needs a map based interface like this to make it easier to get started.
According to ComScore‘s “Worldwide Ranking of Top Web Properties” Wikipedia is number 6.
Cathy Ma and I went to the first of this year’s BBC Innovation Labs in Brighton.
Met some interesting people and gained some insights into the way that BBC new media work. Looking forward to working with Cathy on some pitches over the next few weeks/months.
Tried to explain the motivations for particpating with Patrick Dunn‘s brilliant: “What’s in it for me” vs “What of me is in it”.
Last week in London I was talking about how I’ve started skipping Google searches and using Wikipedia instead.
I said: “If I want to know ‘anything’ about ‘anything’ I use Google. But if I want to know ‘something’ about ‘something’ I use Wikipedia” – I think that explains it.
I just Googled “Is Wikipedia the new Google” and found that I’m not the first person to think this:
Vidya Ananthanarayanan (April 2005)
Tomahawk (February 2006)
and
My Green Jar (June 2006)
Raj Kapor from the Venture Capitalist company Mayfield has written an interesting article in Business Week on-line where he mentions that Baidu (the biggest search engine in China) sell ads “door-to-door” – sounds like Yellowikis plan to recruit student editors – not to mention Dick Larkin’s new project.
Links and Anchors 