Random Culture

America Loves Wikipedia

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just issued a new report (PDF) on Wikipedia. According to the report, 36% of American adults consult Wikipedia. One of the more interesting aspects of the report is the amount of traffic to Wikipedia that's driven from search engines. The report cites Hitwise data that showed "over 70% of the visits to Wikipedia in the week ending March 17 came from search engines." This success must be one of the reasons that Wikipedia has announced they plan to launch a search engine.

Link via Micropersuasion.

Wikipedia On Your iPod

If you've ever wanted to have offline access to Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia software project is for you. Available through Sourceforge, Encyclopedia brings Wikipedia to your iPod. Visit the Sourceforge site to download it.

Of course, since Wikipedia is constantly being updated, how does this software compensate for that? Literally, every minute of every day, someone is modifying or adding content to Wikipedia. But it's an interesting idea.

Blooks? Hackoff.com

A Blook is, according to Hackoff.com, "a book serialized on a blog. You can read it with a browser or feed reader, subscribe to it, tag it, comment on it, and link to it."

Hackoff.com is a blook... The story is essentially a murder mystery set in the midst of the dot-com bubble. Check out the personal blog of the author, Tom Evslin, for more insight into it's creation. In addition, he's also kind of taken an alternate reality gaming approach, as there are fake websites, press releases and other materials that factor into the story.

There may be a high learning curve to really understand and get involved in what's happening, but it's an interesting idea, and feels like something different. Thanks to Jason for the link.

Wikis for Gamers

Gamerhelp.com, an IDG gaming site geared towards strategy and walkthroughs, has launched a wiki section of the site, for some of the most popular games out there. This seems like the perfect application for wikis, since you often have to wait until the most experienced, passionate players out there create strategy guides on their own. This new step, however, allows collaborative editing of the document, and I'd imagine as new games come out, you'll see the wikis for them develop as gamers play through... so everyone's working at the same pace.

Great idea for the use of a wiki.

DEMO Conference: Jotspot

I've actually been pretty disappointed with a number of the technologies I've seen coming out of the DEMO conference. Too many of them reek of ideas straight out of the bubble in the late 90s... Of course, at this DEMO conference, there were a number of companies trying to capitalize on the popularity of blogs... many of them with unoriginal ideas.

However, the DEMO conference did have a few shining stars... One of them, I thought, was Jotspot. It's an application that allows the easy creation of wikis. I can think of about a billion things to use this for, from both a personal and business perspective. They're taking Beta requests right now...