Wikipedia News & Articles

Today, parts of the Internet have gone dark in protest of proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation. From 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., many sites are showing their solidarity by blacking out their sites and redirecting users to sign online petitions or encouraging them to contact their congressperson to voice their concerns.

While it seems likely that the Stop Online Piracy Act has died in the House of Representatives a week before Congress was set to vote on it, the Internet is still not breathing a sigh of relief. The fate of the Protect-IP legislation is still in the hands of the Senate. To help Congress and other Americans who may not realize what’s at stake should these acts pass, many sites are going dark on Wednesday, January 18.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Have You Friended Your Boss On Facebook?
• Wikipedia Rolling Out Article Rating System
• Couples In Relationships Like to Snoop On Each Other
• Facebook Ad Rates Rise 22%

Spring brings baseball, television sweeps and website redesigns. Recently, three prominent social media websites are undergoing site redesigns and refreshes.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Wikipedia Gets Its 3 Millionth Article
• If Twitter Was a Village
• FCC Starts on Twitter and Blogging
• Marketers Start to See Benefits of Social Media

With more education opportunities online, one of the world's largest educational facilities has been slow to embrace the evolving nature of the web. Just as the rest of us embark on web 3.0, the Smithsonian Institution has proudly announced that they are now entering Smithsonian 2.0. 

Yahoo! turned on support for deep links and images from Wikipedia and a select few other modules. This lurch toward enhanced search results is part of Yahoo!’s effort to lead the search market and allow structured data from third parties using the SearchMonkey platform. What will this mean for your site? More work.

Social Media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here's the week's top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Searchmonkey and the Future of Wikipedia
• Unwrapp-- Follow Web App Updates
• Retweetist = Digg for Twitter
• Networks Get Social Media-Savvy for Obama's Big Day
• Twitter Updates, Adds Suggestions

Searchmonkey and the Future of Wikipedia

Wikipedia celebrated its 8th birthday last week, and ReadWriteWeb took the opportunity to look at what new technologies are being brought to bear to keep the online encyclopedia top of the pile.

Perhaps the biggest deal of the lot is one which comes not from Wikipedia itself, but from Yahoo!. It's SearchMonkey Wikipedia application went live last week, and integrates Wikipedia articles with Yahoo! search results. SearchMonkey is a development platform built by Yahoo! which allows open access to search data, and enables developers to roll their own search applications (check out our previous coverage). You should see the results of this monster mashup in action right away in your Yahoo! SERPs : it's turned on as default for users of Yahoo! search.

Apart from the new Yahoo! integration, Wikipedia plans to vastly increase media storage space, and to build in-site integration with 3rd party media sites like Flickr. This new focus on multimedia archiving makes eminent sense for the organization. If it succeeds in becoming the, er, Wikipedia for video and other media apart from plain text, there's no telling what kind of traffic volume it can expect in the medium term. Expect the next donations drive to be aiming for a multiple of those of the past to pay for all the new servers needed.

 

When we first wrote about Knol, Google’s online knowledge management service, there didn’t seem to be much interest in it. After all, Google’s forte is search, is it not? Now that Knol has been released to the general masses, popular opinion is everywhere about the service — good and controversial.

Social Media moves so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Have a look at the big stories over the past week (…and a bit), in scan-friendly format.

Hey, here’s something neat. Xoops, an open source web CMS of which we are peripherally fond but don’t much cover, has announced the launch of JigJak in beta.

This service mashes up blogging, social bookmarking and syndication on a community-based portal.

More news from Le Web 3 today in Paris. This time is was Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia, announcing that they’d (1) purchased super active social media site ArmChairGM.com, and (2) have released the foundational software that ArmChairGM runs on as a free Wiki and Social Media platform. The free service is being offered through a dedicated Wikia site called www.openserving.com. In his talk today Gil didn’t claim to have a business plan, but rather to be operating under the assumption that if they (the jabbering and photo snapping masses) share, one will come.