SocialProfile Extension For MediaWiki From Wikia.

Wikis have always been social gathering places on the net for as long as I can remember, eons in Internet time. Wikipedia has over come many nay sayers and pundits that tried to paint it with gloom and doom to become one of the best databases for information in the world. I regularly work on it related to subjects I love (Physics), not I like.
We also have come to love the the open source MediaWiki to create our own little wikipedias. Although wikis are a places that people gather, there has been limitations in user interactions due to lack of resources. Now comes the SocialProfile package from Wikia, the commercial venture by Wikipedia creators. Now we really can get social at wikis.
This package of extensions will incorporate a social profile, user board, and basic profile information into MediaWiki, specifically Avatars, Friending, Foeing, User Board, Board Blast, and basic Profile Information. The package also notifies users via email when other users request them as a friend or foe and/or sends them a message. The package was developed by Wikia, Inc.
I found this information while lurking around at ReadWriteWeb and the ever resourceful Marshall Kirkpatrick takes you through other information that he (and me too) wish were open sourced by Wikia. If you ever wondered what Wikia is u to, it is great article to start with.

tag: SocialProfile package, Social Profile, open source, social networking, wikia, wikis, Avatars, Friending, Foeing, User Board, Board Blast, MediaWiki,

Jimmy Wales and Wikia on to a new venture, Open Source Distributed Web Crawler Tool

LookSmart provides search technology assets to enable distributed web crawling (formally know as GRUB), others join growing list of organizations looking to make open source search a reality.
I still have the original grub code before looksmart decide to hide it! as I was working on a search engine idea. Those days we crawl the web and send the data back to the Server!
Here is the news release about the new life for Grub;
Portland, Oregon, July 27, 2007 - Wikia, Inc. (www.wikia.com) the leading provider of community resources for building and organizing free content on every topic, today unveiled major next steps in its work to build a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). In a morning keynote address, Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales discussed business models and his vision for building the LAMP stack for search, which can be done by assembling open-source technologies.

Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart (NASDAQ: LOOK) and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available today for download and testing at: http://www.grub.org.

“We’ve had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space,” said Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman, Wikia, Inc. “The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses. Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”

Grub, now open source, is designed with modularity so that developers can quickly and easily extend and add functionality, improving the quality and performance of the entire system. By combining Grub, which is building a massive, distributed user-contributed processing network, with the power of a wiki to form social consensus, the open source Search Wikia project has taken the next major step towards a future where search is open and transparent.

“In looking at the overarching industry, it has become clear that open is the business model of the future,” said Michael Grubb, Senior Vice President, Technology, and Chief Technology Officer, LookSmart. “We are pleased to collaborate with Wikia and believe that Grub will thrive under an open source license. We are happy to be able to assist in the movement to make search a more open proposition and look forward to seeing things progress from here.”

To keep up with the latest developments around open source search or to volunteer, please visit the community wiki at: http://search.wikia.com.

About Wikia, Inc.
Since Wikia’s launch in November 2004, more than 750,000 articles on 2,700 topics have been created and edited by over 200,000 registered users in 70 languages. In addition to working on open-source search, Wikia is currently home to several computer programming-related wikis such as, WikiaPerl at http://perl.wikia.com , the Visual Basic Wiki at http://vb.wikia.com , and the PHP Wiki at http://php.wikia.com .

Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia -- the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales.

Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights and allow others to freely reuse their content under a variety of GNU and Creative Commons Licenses, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.

Tags: Grub, social search, wikia, wikipedia, LookSmart

Wikipedia banned from college?

According to a post on IPDemocracy, Middlebury college's History Dept. Says No More Wikipedia.
The college might as well say no iPod, no fast food and may be romance. The fault is not in referencing an encyclopedia, it is not knowing how to refer. Straight out copying is not referencing and and if you do refer, verifying your references might help.
But I am sure wikipedia will not die just yet or may be it is time to start stupedia.
Read more at IPDEMOCRACY

Tags: wikipedia, wikipedia ban, stupedia

Social networking goes corporate.

Cogmap another web 2.0 application put to good use has come out with a organization chart of organizations, so that sales people could make better sales decisions. It was a brain child of a salesman, Brent Halliburton, who got tired of doing sale in a wrong or uncertain way.
But the idea of Brent seems to be solid. Most of the company and personnel information is public nowadays and yet it is hard to find the right person to make a contact or a presentation.
So what really is Cogmap? according to Cogmap help page;

"CogMap is a tool for sales people, entrepreneurs, and recruiters to understand organizations and keep information up to date. If you are like us, you had some of these things happen to you:

• Worked at a company without a published organization chart and had no idea who worked for anyone else
• Tried to figure out who to call at a company and come up empty
• Bought a list of people to call and had all the information be wrong
• Met people that all had different titles and been unable to tell who was the decision-maker in the room!"

So go and find out more or put your organization on a Ajax map or add companies that you know of. It is a sharing site so that you may benefit from the others entries as well as you finding information that you need about a company.
Basically, Cogmap is a organization chart wiki. It is a graphical Wikipedia for sales people where everyone shares their knowledge of organizations to make it easier to understand them.

Links;
Cogmap

Tags: Social networking, wikipedia, ajax, web 2.0, cogmap, organization chart wiki