Software Free

Some or many of you have probably heard about Randy’s Pauch’s “Last Lecture.” Randy is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He gave a stirring and inspirational talk on September 18, 2007, titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” I was emailed a link to a condensed version of this talk and I loved it, getting a bit choked up about somebody so enthusiastic and full of life and with a wife and young children, having to be “done too soon.”

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is trying out the technique that succeeded in putting together an online encyclopedia—opening it up so that anyone can edit it—to improving search results. ...

Windows/Mac/Linux (OpenOffice): The Sun Wiki Publisher, a free extension for the OpenOffice.org office suite, lets you edit and contribute to any MediaWiki-based page on the web, assuming it accepts...

Previously mentioned service DailyLit, which breaks down classic books into small chunks and emails them to you one piece at a time, has started distributing Wikipedia tours. Get DailyLit email...

Google Maps has integrated Wikipedia articles and geotagged photos so you can see points of interest and images of any geotagged photo on a Google Map. The data, accessible through a new More...

Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors.

Instead of putting the onus on you to choose the best keyword, just-launched semantic search engine Powerset can find the answers you seek on the Wikipedia using natural language. Type things like...

"The new freedom movement , in software, knowledge, publishing and commerce, will change the way we think, do things and interact..."

There's something utterly perverse about the way new drugs are developed. Pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of millions - sometimes billions - of Euros investigating vast numbers of new compounds in the hope that they might treat a particular disease. If they find one that works, they then have to test it extensively for side-effects and the rest. Moreover, most of the negative knowledge they acquire - what doesn't work - is wilfully thrown away, since it represents "competitive" information.

But how about turning things on their head? Instead of trying millions of new substances for one disease, how about experimenting with the tens of thousands of known, safe medicines in the public domain on thousands of diseases? Like this:

Lots of good quality discussion on the question of the Future (or Futures) of the Internet. There’s the upcoming conference to celebrate the 10th year of the founding of the Berkman Center, which is titled “The Future of the Internet.”

Seems so:

I was looking to see what search sites might have a particular bug that I (ahem) came across and was trying the search for the number 0 in various places. There is a pretty good Wikipedia page about zero. Zero has a rich and interesting history and there are many other potentially reasonable results.

But I was surprised to see MSN search had demoted their good results below some crappy ones from MSDN

As I've written elsewhere, I am a big fan of inclusionism when it comes to Wikipedia - the idea that there is no good reason why it shouldn't include entries on anything. After all, nobody forces you to read the stuff, and it's not as if it's sitting on your bookshelves. Includipedia feels the same:

The main difference between Includipedia and Wikipedia is that Includipedia will have an Inclusionst policy.

When people's work is trashed by deletionists, they become discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia. If many good Wikipedia editors get disgruntled with Wikipedia's deletionists, the important work of creating a repository of all information is harmed.

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Source: open...

"Wikipedia is without a doubt, one of World Wide Web’s wonders. I myself used Wikipedia to search information on many things, from education to entertainment. There are many cool things that you can learn from the vast amount of information inside Wikipedia. Thus in this post, I have listed down 20 little known ways and tools to use Wikipedia..."

"Lessig, known for his decade-long role in trying to loosen the
entertainment industry's vice-like grip on popular culture by shaping
copyright law, is betting that the energy and dissatisfaction exhibited
by voters against the status-quo in Washington DC, and the emergence of
collaborative software that enables vast numbers of
geographically-dispersed citizens to become politically active on their
own schedule, will enable a new kind of transparency and accountability
in political campaigns."

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Wikipedia is said to have over 2 million articles, a wealth of information supported by a huge community of volunteers. DBpedia extracts and structures this information so that it can be queried on the Semantic Web. There are limited RDF data online at this point. Advancing this valuable Wikipedia resource provides not only provides proof of concept but also makes available an excellent resource for demonstrating ability and value in producing Linked Data.

This is an excellent tutorial entitled How to Publish Linked Data on the Web where basic principles are explained, including how to model RDF data, selecting your Vocabularies, serving Linked Data as RDF files and relational databases, and then discovering Linked Data on the Web.