Wikis are being used more and more as a means of applying the wisdom of the crowds to new domains. Here are a few that popped up in the information stream recently: Keiki, WikiInvest and WikiLeaks
The Evolution of the Biggest Wiki
Think of wiki, and most people automatically add -pedia. The popular understanding of Wikipedia is of this somewhat controversial source of information that is both deep and unreliable, where a few people do the work and everyone else benefits. Of interest recently is how age and acceptance is changing both the perception and activity around Wikipedia.
A world of wiki
This morning in Montreal, WikiSym 2007 kicked off without me. Funding, academic workload, and the bizarre coordination of American train schedules kept me from the trip north. I am most sad about missing a full day today of Open Spaces, an unconference within a conference. However, I will still get to participate in a political wiki panel with Michael Pilling and Kate Raynes-Goldie Tuesday morning, and I’m confident someone will provide updates through Twitter. In the next few posts today, I’ll talk about the biggest wiki—Wikipedia— and recent developments in the world of wiki. Specifically, I’m interested in use of wikis for politics.
Microwind generators blow my mind
In honor of the Bioneers conference—which is being broadcast as a satellite conference in Bloomington this weekend—here’s a very interesting use of the aeroelastic flutter effect. The Windbelt generator was inspired by the infamous collapse of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a standard cautionary tale for physicists and structural engineers.
Hands-Free Your Mind
A few months ago, an item floated down the news stream about Japanese researchers creating an iPod control for one’s teeth. Since then, news other non-traditional inputs have followed. Gesture-based interfaces leverage intuitive actions already in use by a person to manipulate tools of interest, and designers will be well advised to explore the user reactions to such devices.
Closing Open Tabs
The downside to incorporating Google Reader and many, many RSS feeds into my life is that I have developed a habit of keeping too many tabs open in Firefox. I used to have to clear them out or leave my computer on in order to make use of them, prompting me to do some regular file keeping, but with a nifty browser extension that allows me to save my tab state, I don’t even do that with regularity. Here are some of the links I thought were interesting enough to pop open into a new link but not quite enough to add to my 135-deep draft queue for my blog.
Tao of Twitter
Ed Dale, a marketer with a training website called The Thirty Day Challenge, published a great mini-talk on the virtues of Twitter from a marketing perspective. Two great observations come out of this: There are many ways to interact with Twitter, and Twitter is side-by-side communication.