Only yesterday, one of the regulars in a search engines discussion group (nntp://alt.internet.search-engines) raised the following question/complaint:

Everytime I search for something on google Wikipedia appears in the top 100 results! Is it taking over the Internet?

Last night, IT guru Joel Spolsky asked for advice on Wiki for his site’s translations. He could no longer resist the productivity of a Wiki, which allows visitors to manage content while vandalistic changes can be quickly rollbacked (reversed). The matter of fact is that Wikis have become extremely ubiquitous and they are conquering the Net, much like blogs. They simplify the composition of Web pages, particularly when composition is handled and managed by a group.

Schestowitz.com has two Wikis — a private one and a public one. At some stage I found that Wikis can conveniently be used for correspondence or for collaboration in academia, e.g. when writing or revising a paper jointly.

The Public Wiki section on this domain

There are all sort of reasons for using the Wiki’s simplified mark-up and not WYSIWYG interfaces (as clean as they may be) or plain HTML.

• Firstly, there is the issue of security such as off-site linking. You need to provide a subset of features. Having said that, this can be prevented by imposing restrictions on whichever composition language/method you choose.
• Secondly, one has to worry about the issue of consistency. I have a friend who manages the content of a site and I cannot recall how many times he did something invalid that broke the integrity of the entire site, which I then had to fix urgently. “More restrictive” means “less things to go wrong”. After a few weeks I completely gave up on making his pages valid XHTML/CSS. He had too much freedom and too little experience.

Finally, on the issue of software recommendation, I cannot comment on the popular MediaWiki, which is used to power Wikipedia. I have never used MediaWiki myself, but PHPWiki has been fairly stable ever since I set it up 6 months ago and had it updated many times a day. If you are looking for ease-of-use and trivial embedment of media, I suggest you go with more mainstream packages such as the admirable MediaWiki, which I am familiar with as a user, but not as an administrator.

Computers to be driven purely off the iPod/Handheld device

magine yourself the following scenario: To start up your computer you connect an iPod (or any other large-storage mobile device) to your (x86-based) work computer, which then launches the operating system (currently Knoppix Linux) from the iPod. It uses the processor and memory of the local machine rather than the iPod’s, which is merely used as a hard-drive. Then, once work is finished, you take your iPod home and repeat that exact same procudure, plugging in the iPod to a different computer. Not only can you resume your work, but your hard-drive (which contains everything that is personalised) gives you an identical environment, i.e. you have all your recent files, browser cookies, desktop settings, etc.

That vision is now real as IBM exploit the iPod for this purpose. The device could, in principle, be a Palm LifeDrive, which makes the exception among modern PDA‘s since it exploits very high data capacity. The large-sized hard-drive and high bandwidth (USB/FireWire) make it possible to use your machine merely as a host (computation, display, and peripherals), while your data (operating system, files and applications) always remain in your pocket. From an article just published in CNET:

The virtual computer user environment setup is called SoulPad, and consumers install it from a x86-based home or office PC. SoulPad uses a USB (universal serial bus) or FireWire connection to access the network cards for connecting to the Internet, the computer’s display, the keyboard, the main processor and the memory, but not the hard disk.

Also worth mentioning is the prospect for running your favourite operating system and programs to access your data on any computer. You could even use a workstation at your local library cluster. Plug in your mobile device and use the computer as if it was yours. This considerable step can give a major boost to devices such as the iPod and the LifeDrive. Perhaps Jeff Hawkins, Palm co-founder and R&D chief, had substance in his vision of the “Life Manager”. Could this be what Palm had in mind when switching to Linux?

On a less enthusiastic note, the entire idea of protable high-volume storage is not brand new. For quite some time it has been possible to install hard-drive housing units in one computer and slide in different hard-drives that suit different users of the same computer. This essentially meant that computers came without a hard-drive; hard-drives were provided by the users. However, with a handhelds like the LifeDrive, several major advantages spring to mind:

• Size, which is a major pro
• The ability to view and edit data on the go, unlike just carrying a ‘black box’
• Internet connectivity
• Infra-red communication

Cited by: PalmAddict

venturous article from Softpedia makes speculations with regards to a Google homebred operating system that is based on GNU/Linux. Google’s Open Source affinity is out of the bag now, so looking 5 years ahead, will there be a tighter integration between Google’s on-line services and a Google-controlled Linux distrubution?

Google is non-conformist enough, and it has sufficient money and knowledge to be able to venture in this domain. The recipe? You take a Linux distribution (Google’s appetite for Open Source and Linux is no longer a secret), you mix it with Google’s knowledge on Internet searching, e-mail, security, programming and document indexing, you give it a name that includes Google and OS, and there you have it.

• Related items: Google and Linux, Towards On-Line Operating Systems
• Related article: A Google OS by 2010?

BEGIN LOOP

END

Back to beginning of loop

Inspired by the children’s book “Zoom”

Content spam grows worryingly fast. This new type of spam shows its face in a form which is different from spam that we very well know as uninvited E-mail. Such spam is placed on the Web and later infiltrates search engine results pages (SERP’s). If you recently came across a page full of links and ads that did not provide useful information, you would probably understand what content spam is.

Spam content pages are often generated automatically (robot-made). Such robots would run a search, pick up HTML code from the results page, and finally add some advertisement. This generates a large volume of pages, which warrant presence in many SERP‘s. One very large site that I recently came across got tempted and uses this technique to woo visitors and offer them subscription. If you come across such sites, be sure to report them as its our only chance of banning illicit sites and preventing content spam (and referrer spam, i.e. organic and fake links/referrals to sites) from expanding. Google provide an on-line form for this very particular purpose.

When a general audience observes Windows being used everywhere, it is natural to assume it is the best operating system. In reality, very few people have seen alternatives to Windows. Even fewer people had a prolonged hands-on experience with another platform. Microsoft are exploiting the placebo effect, giving unnecessary and unproductive software, which you truly think helps you, but only helps lock your data to one particular vendor. Often the vendor destroys the very same community that it pretends to cherish. One day in the future, people come to realise that better software is out there and that influence of the group has shifted its balance. But is it too late once data has been locked to a vendor and habits become less reversible?

Windows used to be a great operating system. I cannot deny it. Yet, I am thinking about 1992-1995 or thereabouts when Windows spread like fire owing to its nice tools (and piracy). It has been static in terms of productivity ever since and it is now lagging behind the competition. It has lost its edge rather quickly — something that even “the” Microsoft evangelist admitted to.

Lock-ins, proprietary and narrow-mindedness allow Windows to live longer than it truly deserves. A large number of people in newsgroups I get involved in ask about data conversions that will redeem them from Microsoft proprietary and allow them to reclaim their data. It is only then, several years later, that ex-Windows users understand that this placebo was in fact poison.

Businesses are said to always be in a state of growth or diminish. Experience shows that they can never remain static. Encouraging is that fact that Windows loses more users to other operating system than it manages to attract at the moment. Balance has shifted.

ack when I was in school, some friends of mine were addicted to on-line role-playing games (RPG) such as Ultima (interview with its creator just Slashdotted). One of them would spend his entire life (not literally as he was in school too) playing D&D-themed games, attending his friends’ on-line weddings and grabbing screenshots. The Diablo extravaganza was heated up too at the time, but it goes back to the age of 14 or 15.

I have just stumbled upon an entertaining essay by one such addict. It gives an idea of the scale and growth of this phenomenon. I will not be surprised if in the next decade we see people who are entirely disconnected from reality, constantly ‘plugged-into’ their computer screen, spending their life (physical) in a virtual world, provided they can financially afford it. Computers allow many to enter a virtual world where gaps between reality and imagination simply collapse. Let us not forget that computers stride on quickly while the rest of the world does not. In a few decades, the two might intersect at some level.

You may have heard about a guy who recently was convicted of murdering a man during a dispute over a rare, valuable sword. That sword that was not made of metal or anything solid, but rather of 1′s and 0′s inside a computer hundreds of miles away. It was a sword he had won in the MMORPG Legend of Mir 3.

Related films: The Lawnmower Man (1992), The Matrix (1999)
(note: mentioning of these films does not imply that I like them)