Marshall has a post up about Citizendium. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is the founder and it will be a forked version of the popular site with experts who have the final say on whether or not changes will go through.
Marshall asks whether wikipedia really needs to be “fixed” and suggests it doesn’t.
I think it does. While wikipedia appears to be open to all, I’ve seen numerous examples of changes getting immediately deleted for what appears to be political reasons rather than the pursuit of pure knowledge. And I’ve also seen people be attacked for making changes that appear to be factual and correct.
The TechCrunch listing on wikipedia has a number of errors. But there is no way in hell I’d ever think about fixing those errors. The wikipedia community has completely intimidated me to the point where making a change to that site is unthinkable.
So I do think Wikipedia needs to be fixed.
I had a good time speaking at the Future of Web Apps conference yesterday. Dan Farber’s notes on my talk are here. And last night we had a party to close out the event at my house. Scott Beale took pics as usual - his post is here, his flickr pics are here.
I just got the email below (and no I am not responding to it). It would be interesting to figure out what criteria they are using to filter LinkedIn users to receive this. With enough data points it could be triangulated. I guess I could call Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s CEO, to find out, but this might be more fun.
Dear Michael ,
ABC Television’s hit reality television show, The Bachelor, is searching for its next star. After viewing your profile on LinkedIn, the casting producer has selected you as a potential candidate.
ABC is using LinkedIn to find its next Bachelor because this time around, they’re looking for an accomplished professional. LinkedIn is about your professional life instead of your personal life, so we don’t know if your marital or relationship status qualifies you for the show. However, your professional profile fits the bill.
If you think you’d make a great “Bachelor,” please let me know by reply (xxxx@linkedin.com) and I will contact you regarding next steps. LinkedIn respects your privacy and will not release your contact information, so you must reply to the email above for us to pass you along as a candidate.
If you know anyone else that would make a great “Bachelor”, feel free to let us know about them – ABC will pay a $5,000 reward for any referral that leads to the next star.
Wishing you continued professional success,
David xxxx
Assistant to the CEO
LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com/in/xxxx
A few weeks ago, the shortest post I’ve ever written generated a bit of controversy. I spoke to Feedburner about possibly going into more detail about how they calculate RSS subscriber numbers for blogs that use them. Tonight Traci Hailpen wrote a post on the Feedburner blog giving a ton of detail on TechCrunch’s 100k RSS subscribers and how that number is calculated. If you’ve ever wondered just how Feedburner calculates subscriber numbers, check it out.
Interesting Fact: Feedburner is tracking 503 unique feed readers.
Steve Bryant launched his new blog, Reel Pop, today. And he wrote one hell of an inaugural post - a timeline of online video news going back to May 2005.
If you are interested in this space, subscribe to his feed and bookmark this post. You’ll be coming back to it.
I love Meevee, but their choice of blog masthead is just too weird…Are they suggesting that their target customer is a semi comatose, grossly overweight person? It’s also sort of phallic. I say keep it!
