EBlogger

CRN columnist/blogger Ed Moltzen writes that “Britannica gets it”, with respect to Web 2.0, although he’s seen very little yet.

In a recent post to a Wikipedia mailing list, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales described Nick Carr’s post on “The amorality of Web 2.0″ (which I, along with much of the blogosphere previously linked to) as “a valid criticism” and agreed that “the two examples [Carr] puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarassment” and “nearly unreadable crap”.

This sparked several uncharacteristicly self-critical responses from Wikipedians:

Although the raw numbers [of editors] are large, the number of articles is even larger, and so there are not enough editors to go around. […] Where are all the subject-matter experts?

We’d like to think that it’s inevitable we’ll asymptotically approach high quality, as Tony defended with [[Eventualism]]. But I think it’s too simplistc.

In my view, wikipedia has to undergo a paradigm change if it really wants to succeed in creating a good encyclopedia. […] We shouldn’t give up the principle of open editing but we should make clear now from the beginning that we seek good writers and knowledgeable people, not anyone. Yes, anyone can edit an article. But not anyone should edit any article.

If Robert Henry [sic] is right (and judging by a number of fine articles now laying in ruins I suspect he is), then WP, should it desire to get finer control on article quality, needs to modify its “completely open” model a little bit.

[Via Andrew Orlowski at the Register]

With all the talk lately about the new net revolution, Web 2.0, and all of that (e.g., point and counter-point), it is interesting to throw some actual research into the mix. Lowell Monke’s recent article in Orion Magazine does just that.

[R]ecent research, including a University of Munich study of 174,000 students in thirty-one countries, indicates that students who frequently use computers perform worse academically than those who use them rarely or not at all.

As the Arts & Letters Daily post put it, “and it gets worse” from there.

[via Arts & Letters Daily]

I’ve noticed that Britannica supports Amazon’s A9 OpenSearch protocol, by which you can obtain Britannica’s search results via RSS. For example, results for “Arunachal Pradesh” can be found at:

http://www.britannica.com/opensearch?ct=eb&start=0&count=20&query=arunachal+pradesh

See opensearch.a9.com for more information about the OpenSearch protocol. I don’t yet see an OpenSearch Description Document for Britannica.com, but it’s not difficult to see how to modify the query to get the results you are looking for.

Over at Joho the Blog, there’s an interesting little post on taxonomy, folksonomy and the organization of knowledge, including some insightful discussion.

Over at the Gordon’s Tech blog, John has posted something of a left-handed compliment for Britannica:

Next thing you know the freight trains will sprout rocket engines. Britannica gets sexy (in a geekish sort of way) with widgets and firefox search plugins. I guess I’ll have to reenable Dashboard on my iMac.

The amazing thing, however, is that their new RSS feed has over 150 bloglines subscribers. Wow.

I’d mostly forgotten I pay Britannica each month for their service. It’s kind of been a charitable act. Maybe they’re actually thinking about how they could be useful. Or maybe Google has agreed to buy them …

See Encyclopædia Britannica Online Tools for the “sexy” tools to which he refers.

del.icio.us tags linked to http://www.britannica.com/:

academic dictionary econsultant education en_anglais enciclopædia general learning lexicons_general lexika narang ref reference references.encyclopedia research resources sanjeev search subscription tools web writing