Library Blog Buzz

Almost two years ago I wrote a post about the competition between Britannica and Wikipedia, "asking" the executives at the oldest encyclopedia in the world, to leave the "expert" way of thinking about their product and move more closely to the needs of the users and today I am happy to discover that this is already happening.

Few days ago, Britannica announced that users will participate in the creation of the encyclopedia and that "readers and users will also be invited into an online community where they can work and publish at Britannica’s site under their own names."

The articles written by users will be fact-checked by experts and if they’re found to have merit will be published and properly credited to original authors.

It will be interesting for me how Britannica plans to balance the conflict of interests that sometimes arises from different expert views on particular subjects.

For more details, go to the announcement on Britannica's WebShare blog.

The long promised open source search engine, developed by the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, is out in alpha release with the name Wikia Search, in case you missed all the buzz. Most of the experts are disappointed at Wikia for its poor performance and search results.

I think that Jimmy Wales is misunderstood. With Wikia Search he is not competing with Google, he is trying to create a search engine, with pages written by customers not by programmers.

" Wikia Search will start to change search from being proprietary, top-down, and closed. Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way".

Users can also link their profiles on Wikia to certain keywords and when searches are run, their profiles show up on the screen.

For now the search results are limited, and the success of this new venture, pretty much depends on the popularity of Wikia and level of participation by customers. For me it will be interesting to see where this experiment is going.

The indispensable Search Engine Land posted about two new interesting changes.

The first one is about Netscape and its decision to revert to the old "news" type of website and abandon the social site it transformed into in June of last year. The change was forced by Netscape fans who were unhappy that the site has lost much of its valuable news services and has turned into a Digg copycat.

In August we posted about WikiScanner, which showed who is behind anonymous edits in Wikipedia and now there is another application called Wikirage that "lets you see what topics are hot by quickly identifying the 100 most edited articles for the last hour, day, week, or month" . Obviously with the growing popularity of Wikipedia we will see more and more programs mixing all kind of wiki data.

Wikipedia got its search engine called WikiSeek. Only websites refered in Wekepedia are searchable through the WikiSeek. Wikipedia probably hosts a lot of information rich websites, but to think that all of the good sites are there or will be there is limiting. WikiSeek is good only for searching Wikipedia, if you want more precise Internet information move to a better search engine.

At the same time two graduates from Columbia University created MetaGlossary, a search service which defines more than 2 million terms, phrases, acronyms, and all kinds of difficult words. Google also offers similar feature. If you type " define: " followed by the word you want to be explained, you will automatically get a definition, if one is available on the Internet.

After a couple of experiments between Google's "define" feature and MetaGlossary I have to say that usually Google lists more results and offers translation of defined terms in other languages, but I still like MetaGlossary for their simple short and well explained results. After all who has the time to read 28 definition of "APR" on Google.

Via: Search Engine Land
http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/76061035/070116-074812.php