Difference between revisions of "DailyBuzz"

Saturday, 22 December 2007

• US Senator Joe Lieberman calls for government information and services to be more accessable, transparent and interactive [1] (i.e. more wiki-like), cites recent congressional testimony by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Whales [2]. -- Ward

Friday, 21 December 2007

• The Lakota Indians just withdrew from all treaties with the United States. It's not showing up on Google News front page. Important news, but something that doesn't directly impact many people. I wonder about Gnews and blogs driving news reporting…it seems to leave big holes just like old media, often in similar places. -Peteforsyth 12:17, 21 December 2007 (PST)

Thursday, 20 December 2007

• User:JohnStanton put up a new (much easier!) way to Create Subdomain today. Yay! TedErnst (talk)
• Great stuff: User:Peteforsyth#ThoughtsAboutAboutUs TedErnst (talk)
• Check out our new weblog post. ~~ MarkDilley
• Scott Fish's Blog Post on AboutUs - Ray | talk
• WexlerWantsHearings.com - Congressman Wexler launched this web site a week ago, with a petition calling for the impeachment of Vice President Cheney. His goal was "tens of thousands" of signers; a week later, there are 120,000 signatures. Not sure what benchmarks there are for online political petitions, but this seems pretty impressive to me. -Peteforsyth 20:16, 20 December 2007 (PST)

Monday, 17 December 2007

• AboutUs was bookmarked at StartAid.com ~~ MarkDilley
• An interesting use of AboutUs - publishing in a wiki - great idea from Backup-Expert.com. ~~ MarkDilley
• Another great weblog post - AboutUs! :-) from XavierMedia.com ~~ MarkDilley
• User:Diego Buendia mentions AboutUs in his weblog post. ~~ MarkDilley
• Good blog post mentioning how well they liked our skin, from the wiki folks at OpenWetWare.org - Ray | talk

Sunday, 16 December 2007

• See PageNavigationTemplates discussion to help figure out how the navigation template will look. ~~ MarkDilley
• BusinessWeek article on knols and Wikipedia -- RayKing

Saturday, 15 December 2007

• 3:30AM, Asad Rocks it out on RC and gets it to ZERO!
• Crenk.com blog post about AboutUs.org and the Crenk.com WikiPage: [3]

Thursday, 13 December 2007

• Google is soon to introduce a new tool called "the knol". Knol means "a unit of knowledge", and the whole thing is supposed to be free articles about general (read: encyclopedic) topics. The authors will be prominently featured, there will be Google ads, and authors will share in the profits. Steven | talk 22:23, 13 December 2007 (PST)

• My opinion: There has been a lot of blog buzz charting this as a possible competitor to Wikipedia. And at first it seemed quite real, and honestly, quite frightening to me. Google superseding Wikipedia and profiting from its good ideas? But if you read the post carefully, I don't think that, "For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject." and "...will include the opinions and points of view of the authors" sounds like a competition for a source of reliable information. To get reliable info, students and other people who are looking for "the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read" aren't going to want to read ten different articles to get the full range of opinion on a topic. They want one decent article, and preferably one that isn't subject to an admitted bias. Steven | talk 22:23, 13 December 2007 (PST)
  • I think people who contribute to Wikipedia do so for reasons other than $ and the ability to write a knol and earn $ will not draw too many of them away. Also, wiki folks collaborate to make the best article together, vs. competing to see who can write an article that gets the most votes. That said, I'm sure there are plenty of people in the world who will find it compelling to write an article and put ads on it. Also, I wonder how the interlinking will work between knols. - Ray | talk

Wednesday, 12 December 2007

• From FastForwardBlog.com - selection of 12 interesting online essays about Web 2.0 -- Llywrch 18:14, 13 December 2007 (PST)
• Great post from Digital Inspiration ~~ MarkDilley
• Here's a wiki (OneBuckWiki.com) selling pages to companies for SEO purposes, and touting that they show up above AboutUs in Google for one particular search. TedErnst (talk)

Tuesday, 11 December 2007

• Late notice! but please join the call and IRC at 4:30pm (PST) - instructions here: 4th Quarter 2007 Stakeholder Meeting ~~ MarkDilley

Monday, 10 December 2007

• AboutUs on the web: Arabic [4] at Swalif.net; As a Netidme-OpenID.com reference regarding Netidme.com; an AdSensei.org site for sale listing about imghost.us; and Bob Stumple's 50+ and 60+ ways to write, process, publish, promote & collaborate on texts, poems, stories, scripts & books (& maybe make money on it). Whew! ~~ MarkDilley
• We now have additional ads on pages. You will notice the non Google ads are broken into boxes. Please report and oddities to the AboutUsBugs. ~~ MarkDilley

Sunday, 09 December 2007

• The New Zealand police have opened up their governing law to input through a wiki, as reported by the New York Times today. Steven | talk 23:44, 9 December 2007 (PST)

Thursday, 06 December

• Found this blog post about the new collaboration tools for Google Maps. Could prove useful. Your thoughts? --VinhNguyen

• November2007.2 Community Staff work iteration notes: RefactorReviews:LearningTheProcess we moved forward with one of the two ways of refactoring in this work iteration (RefactorReviews:Experiment. CommunityStaffJobDescriptions are nearly finished (90%) and we had a successful Porland WikiWednesday. We came up with a few new ideas on maintaining unpatrolled recent changes, one of which was an internal training idea and one of which involves people helping that task scale what is needed to build the site. We welcomed 1000 people to our site. Half of our weblog posts goal was met, and all of our featured wiki page goal was met as well as keeping our Concerns Page up to date and Support emails. AboutUs has given the Universal Wiki Edit Button discussion to WikiOhana.net (WikiOhana:UniversalWikiEditButton) for the wiki family to carry forward. ~~ MarkDilley -- TedErnst

Wednesday, 05 December

• Invesp.com post about how businesses can manage their online reputations which links to AboutUs as a resource. TedErnst (talk) 06:36, 5 December 2007 (PST)
• Most of the Portland office is a sponsorship and leadership training seminar today. Wiki Wednesday after that - Ray | talk

Tuesday, 04 December

• A nice description was added to CansForCharity.org, an organization with a simple and powerful mission. Kasey 14:42, 4 December 2007 (PST)
• New page: OurAdHocWork. The idea is to caputure the ad-hoc work that hasn't yet made it to OurWork. -- Julia & TedErnst (talk) 10:27, 4 December 2007 (PST)

Monday, 03 December

• Discovered that my new favorite non-AboutUs wiki (for this week at least) has this cool page. TVTropes.org lists classic and new tropes (devices, conventions, expressions and metaphors) common in fiction works. Well, included is a list of WikiTropes which list some of the various types of users, contributors and various ills (and bonuses) Wikiers encounter on a daily basis. My favorites: DataVampires, DriveByUpdater, EntryPimp, SerialTweaker (guilty as charged!), and BizarreAndImprobableGiraffeHerdingTechniques. -- TakKendrick 15:05, 3 December 2007 (PST)
  • ewww, and it is a PmWiki, those are pretty! :-) ~~ MarkDilley
• Working on Special:Newimages to clean up, as per policy - cleaned up November and October 2007. ~~ MarkDilley

Saturday, 01 December 2007

• Wikipedia announces compatibility with CreativeCommons CC-BY-SA, Woo-Hoo! - Ray | talk
  • Wikimedia Board Resolution
  • on Lessig's blog
  • It seems this is a huge step in the right direction because it allows both GFDL and CC to change to be compatible with each other. And, I don't think it's saying yet that Wikipedia will become CC-BY-SA. I'm hopeful that step will also happen when it's possible. TedErnst (talk) 20:45, 1 December 2007 (PST)

• Possibility of still a problem since AboutUs is still licensed different than Wikipedia. --Simon | talk 21:27, 2 December 2007 (PST)

I think that's true, Simon, but at the same time, the reason AboutUs is dual licensed is because of the incompatibilities between GFDL and CC-BY-SA, so if those two licenses are changing to be compatible with each other, perhaps AboutUs can also change to be compatibile with Wikipedia. TedErnst (talk) 08:33, 3 December 2007 (PST)

• Wikipedia will be moving to GFDL 2.0 (which if agreed by the Wikimedia community will be changed to be crossover with CreativeCommons); but, AboutUs has to stay at GFDL 1.2 per stated in AboutUs copyrights page. AboutUs & Wikipedia will never work together with the current plan. --207.6.253.72 10:23, 3 December 2007 (PST)

for previous content, see November 2007