Difference between revisions of "Weblog/CurrentPosts"

Inventor Asks for Your Contribution to Wikipedia

04 January 2008

AboutUs CTO, Ward Cunningham, authored several posts for the Wikipedia fundraising blog. This is one that didn't run, but is still good advice.

We buy a computer and we expect it to change the way we live. Sometimes we know exactly how that change will happen. But more often we make the purchase with only a vague notion that life will be better with the new machine. We expect something good and the machine delivers.

The computer industry exists because computers, the network, and the people who use them have delivered on a promise that we only vaguely understood as we paid the bills. Did we know there would be a Wikipedia? Probably not. Still, there it is. Enjoy.

Enjoy, but understand that we are not done paying. I ask you to give to Wikimedia because this investment is necessary and will be even more positively leveraged than your hardware purchase. Your machine sits before you ready to transform your contribution into good in ways that neither you nor I can fully predict. I say this with all the confidence I had when I chose to devote my life to computing. I remain excited by our possibilities. I hope you are too.

Ward Cunningham invented the Wiki style of collaboration in 1995. He has been a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board since its founding. Ward's previous request, Contribute in honor of teachers. This post is a personal opinion, and does not represent an official statement from the Wikimedia Foundation or AboutUs, Inc.

Don't Role Your Eyes

21 December 2007

MarkDilley: Look Ted, this 1 million deaths per day on Duels.com looks interesting.

TedErnst: What the heck is that?

MD: It sounds pretty cool, like a lot of people are using Duels.com.

swishes hand around in air

TE: Let's look at the AboutUs WikiPage.

argh

TE: It's just a basic starter page.

MD: That doesn't matter. What are it's categories?

TE: They're all redlinks

telepaths to you, the reader, the page doesn't yet exist

MD: That doesn't matter.

clicks out all the categories to see if there's anything in them. click, click, click

MD: Ted, Category:Role-playing Games has 74 pages in it, Duels - 17, Dualist has 23, Duelling - 9, Dueling - 9 and Duals - has 14.

TE: Cool. Let's look at the RPG one and see if there's something interesting there.

MD: That's cool because I like Role Playing Games. And, look at Category:Role Playing Games. 296 pages!

TE: Sounds confusing.

MD: It's a folksonomy! It shows the inherent quality of AboutUs as the folksomony of the web.

TE: Rockin!

magically creates the page by typing text and saving

MD: Sweet!

checks the specific recent changes for those categories

MD: Cool, 4 people other than myself have edited pages in this category. Well, that's not quite the 1 million deaths per day Duels.com is getting, but we can aspire.

TE: Mark, let's build one of those cool new news boxes you've been showing me.

MD: And it's more than that. Once we get it put together, it's a whole new Role Playing Games wiki!

TE: What do you mean?

MD: Let me show you.

creates the news box and adds it to the two categories

TE: Great, what's next?

MD: You'll see!

writes three news items

TE: Wow, a whole new wiki!

MD: Yea, let's go duel

next turn

contributors: MarkDilley and TedErnst 20 December 2007

Apple & Rumors: Yin & Yang

Rumor has it that Apple is going to release a bunch of fixes to Leopard next week. This is fabulous, because most of the AboutUs office uses Mac. Thinking about writing this post, we went to the the AboutUs WikiPage for AppleInsider.com, and saw it wasn't that good. We then went to Google and found out AppleInsider was part of CNET's Blog 100, so we added that to the page and reformatted some and it looks a little better. Then we thought, "what other rumor blogs are out there?", and added Category:Apple Rumor Blogs to the page. Turns out, that category didn't exist, but we added it to a few other pages and now it does exist. The category isn't much yet, but since AboutUs is a wiki, others that know more about the subject can make the category better.

Good thing we started the category because today a legal battle that has raged on for a few years between Apple and the ThinkSecret.com settled. ThinkSecret is shutting down, and even though they say it was amicable, the chilling effect is troubling.

AboutUs acquires 1-800-AboutUs

For the next few months, the 1-800-AboutUs number will be shared with the former owner of 800-226-8887, BasketAndFloral.com, as they transition to a new number. BasketAndFloral.com is a Florida-based floral and gift shop providing a variety of services and deliveries to the greater Orlando area. Their new 800 number is 888-855-0003.

Community News

26 November 2007

Alex rocked out on his site and the WikiPage ActiveFind.net. This is the kind of beginning collaboration we like to see. He has learned a lot of basic wiki tools in the process and has helped himself in search engines. Now he will be able to work with the site if his community shows up!

Nathan made an interesting technical edit by moving the logged in people to the top right of the page. Vartan also helped in the technical arena by helping us focus on a long standing task of making images linkable - as an example our Values image.