Technology Nirvana

Here’s a question for you. How many Q&A sites does the Web really need? Already, there is Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, Mahalo Answers, Linkedin Answers, ChaCha and dozens beyond. But Wikia (and Wikipedia) co-founder Jimmy Wales thinks there is room for one more.

We learned from a tip that he has quietly launched Wikianswers, a Question & Answer site that attempts to create one true, consensus answer for each question, wiki-style. If this sounds familiar it is because Wiki Answers, which is part of Answers.com, does the exact same thing and had 26.7 million unique visitors worldwide in December (comScore). (Yahoo Answers had 144.7 million worldwide uniques in December).

And then there is the little problem of the name. It is supposed to be Wikia Answers! (see second screenshot below), but in the current logo the last “a” of Wikia shares the first “a” of Answers, making it Wikianswers. The already established WikiAnswers might have a problem with that. (The URLs are different: http://answers.wikia.com and http://wiki.answers.com/, respectively)

Update: Wikia Gil Penchina responds in comments:

Wikianswers started at Wikia in November, 2004. The other site with the same name was called FAQFarm back then and changed their name without getting our permission.

Wikianswers is built on the same wiki platform offered by Wikia, and it is already being promoted from Wikia Search. Building up a searchable Q&A repository is a natural add-on for a search engine or any online information database. (See our post on Mahalo Answers).

But, really, How is Wikianswers different than any other Answers site? Unless Wales can satisfy that question, people will ask look for answers to their own questions elsewhere.

Update: Wikia CEO Penchina’s explains below in comments:

Wikia’s Q+A service is in keeping with the wiki-way and that’s what makes it different
- The content is freely licensed under GFDL unlike other answers sites allowing it to be re-used and re-purposed by others for free
- Anyone can contribute (other answers sites require you to register)

We believe that a more open, freely licensed community will always do better than a corporate site that takes customers contributions and copyrights them in order to take rights away from the contributor.

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The Colorsonic MP3 player concept displays colors around its ring-shaped body, which can be matched up with a certain mood of music, like an old-school mood ring. Read on to see what it's all about.

This MP3 player is designed to match user-created playlists with mood-appropriate colors. Users would then choose music by selecting the color closest to their mood at the time, rather than by so-called "normal" and "intuitive" methods like Artist or Album. Exactly how this works, I don't know; but according to Yanko, "it’s got special software." Hmm, ok. [Yanko via Wired]

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MC Hammer is many things. Spoken-word poet. Interpretive dancer. Trendsetter. And now, at long last, Internet Empresario.

How does such a critical darling make the nigh-impossible transition from world-class entertainer to maverick visionary iPhone app maker? Let's run over the list of what this world-shaking app can do:

1. Watch the music video for "Pumps and a Bump."
2. Follow Hammer's latest exploits on Twitter, like: "My Wife better be ready when Daddy get home !!! Too Sexy Fo My.."
3. Read Hammer's blog, which in a feat of synergy is pretty much just his Twitter but with videos.

The HammerTime app is available for free from the iTunes store. [Thanks, Joel!]

That Motorola Inferno is looking more real than ever for a couple reasons: first, we've been able to confirm it with a trusted source of ours, and two, Boy Genius Report has it on good authority that it's about to start field trials this coming week. In keeping with the pyrotechnic theme pioneered by the Krave ZN4's "Blaze" codename, it seems the production device may now be called "Torch" -- and, somewhere along the course of its R&D evolution, may have lost the translucent cover. Ironically, we really liked the cover on the ZN4 -- the touch sensitivity is one of the more trick features we've seen on a handset in recent memory -- but, you know, we wouldn't want to question Moto's infinite wisdom.

Filed under: Cellphones

Motorola Krave ZN4's successor named Inferno, now moving to field trials? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows 7 has proven to be an excellent scaler, as it seems to run excellently not just on top-end hardware but on hardware so outdated as to be laughable. This U560 UMPC, which I’m sure is an excellent little machine for playing King’s Quest IV on, actually worked quite well with 7 despite only sporting a 600MHz Atom A100 processor. I’m beginning if I’ll be able to run 7 on my GP2X or Pandora!

[via SlashGear]

Earlier this morning, every single one of Google's search results came with a warning that the site "may harm your computer," including their own properties like Gmail and Google Maps. They've since explained what happened:

Google works with the non-profit StopBadware.org to create a list of potentially dangerous sites, which is updated periodically. One such update happened this morning, but somebody typed in "/" by mistake. That simple keystroke expands to every single URL, which is why Google was universally borked. Google engineers fixed the problem in about half an hour, and it's back to normal now.

Please don't play with our heads again, Google. We trust you. If you tell us the entire internet might infect our computers, we'll probably believe you. [Google]

Last year I blogged about the YouTube corner at the World Economic Forum event in Davos, Switzerland. They had prime real estate between the main conference area and private meeting rooms, and heads of state, business executives, Nobel Laureates and rock stars strolled by and stopped to leave a video.

YouTube was back this year with an even better setup. In addition to computers where people could create YouTube videos answering various questions (Kofi Annan is pictured to left), the Google team brought in a touch screen version of Google Earth, complete with World Economic Forum data layered on top. Google earth was projected onto a wall, and people could zoom around the earth and view interesting data like historic and projected climate changes.

Ed Sanders (YouTube Marketing Manager) and Amit Sood (Google International Product Marketing Manager) walked me through both the YouTube and Google Earth products. Video is below:

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That took surprisingly long! I would have expected a game like this (tasteless certainly, but not necessarily distasteful) to have occurred only days after the crash. If you can believe it, it took almost a week for a developer to put together a couple sprites, a smoke effect, and the gameplay from Top Gun on NES.

The original site, Tasty Play, is down at the time of this writing (out of CPU, interestingly, not bandwidth), but Addicting Games has mirrored it and you can enjoy it there in all its mediocrity.

I’m not sure how I feel about these sort of games (being poorly made for the most part, and occasionally offensive), but the phenomenon is interesting. I remember some efforts to put out episodal content based on current events — it was too early then, but the attention these timely games are getting suggests that maybe it’s time for Throw a shoe at Bush to become a full-fledged, Unreal-Engine-powered retail product.

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism unveiled a new index yesterday that traces blogs and social networking sites. To be honest, it doesn’t say a whole lot that we don’t already know.

The New Media Index’s first report states “From the preparations to the swearing-in to the music, President Barack Obama’s inauguration was by far and away the dominant subject debated and dissected by bloggers, user news sites and other social media last week.” The index reported that close to 63 percent of links embedded in social media sites related to the inauguration. Big surprise. The report also said that commentary was very passionate and ran the “ideological gamut.” Also, not earth-shattering news and confirms what everyone already knows-people tend to be more politically feisty on blogs and social media sites.

What is interesting is that main stream media dropped its focus on the inauguration after Tuesday and concentrated on news surrounding President Obama’s policy agenda and cabinet appointees. Does this suggest that inauguration coverage provided by blogs was generally more insightful and attentive than the main stream media’s coverage? Or simply that blogs tend to chew their stories longer than the traditional press? Pew’s index doesn’t really give any indication one way or the other.

PEJ has been searching tirelessly to find a way to monitor the blogosphere, like it does for main stream media. Their solution uses Technorati and IceRocket to track and index more than 100 million blogs and social media sites. PEJ then captures the top daily linked-to stories and analyzes their content. The Project also tracks the most popular news videos on YouTube each week. In another astonishing twist, C-SPAN’s broadcast of the inauguration topped the list.

Judging from the content of this week’s index and other indexes Pew has released, I would not expect a whole lot of surprises from the New Media Index.

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