The $50-million funding round that Quora recently closed has raised some eyebrows. Is this just another example of a bubble-style atmosphere in Silicon Valley’s venture capital community, or is the crowdsourced question-and-answer site really onto something that could be a multibillion-dollar idea? Read More »
Tech
When they think about competition, many traditional outlets still seem to look mostly at media players such as the Huffington Post or Buzzfeed. But the reality is that much of what is competing with journalism in the digital world are things we barely recognize as journalism. Read More »
It’s tempting to get nostalgic about the disappearance of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition after two centuries, but as we have found with journalism, knowledge building of all kinds gets better when there are more people involved. It may be chaotic, but the result is superior. Read More »
Numerous sites went black Wednesday to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills. Participants included Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist, Greenpeace, Reddit, 4Chan and others, and many didn’t just stop at adding a black background. Check out our website gallery to take a look at some of the sites. Read More »
Critics of Wikipedia’s decision to shut the encyclopedia down as a protest against U.S. anti-piracy legislation say the site shouldn’t be taking an advocacy position on such an issue, but if anything, that decision is a great illustration of how Wikipedia functions and why it’s important. Read More »
The anti-SOPA and PIPA demonstrations don’t stop with site-wide blackouts planned for Wednesday by a number of web giants. People also have plans to meet up in real life and take the protest to the streets in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Read More »
Two days after Aaron Swartz was indicted for allegedly trying to copy thousands of documents from a scientific archive, a torrent with close to 19,000 documents has found its way to the Pirate Bay. The leak is accompanied by a scathing critique of scientific publishing. Read More »
Apture, the San Francisco-based startup, has made a very useful addition to its “contextual exploration engine” technology with a new feature called “HotSpots” that automatically creates new visible hyperlinks within online content based on what readers are likely to want to know more about. Read More »
Wikipedia, which turns 10 this weekend, has taken a lot of heat over the years. But it has become a crucial aspect of our lives, and in many ways it has shown us what all information online is becoming: social, distributed, interactive and (at times) chaotic. Read More »
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales says despite reports to the contrary, he is not stepping down or reducing his role with the user-generated encyclopedia. However, he has given up some editing privileges after a disagreement over the removal of images that Wikipedia critics say depict child pornography. Read More »
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says that he believes the benefits of taking an open approach to content outweigh the disadvantages, and says that something as large and influential as Wikipedia has become could never have been built unless the process was open to anyone to contribute. Read More »
Cuil, a widely panned search engine that debuted in 2008, has launched an automated encyclopedia called Cpedia that produces articles on topics by generating them from pages found in its index. But the only thing Cpedia manages to do is make Wikipedia look really, really good. Read More »
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